Who owns your VPN? 105 VPNs run by just 24 companies
I own mine. It runs on my own systems, provisioned by me.
It’s possible that someone compromised things at they hypervisor layer, but that’s about the extent of things.
Ivan not take this article seriously. They advertise for NordVPN and describe them privacy friendly…
Safernet is owned by WideFi.
I don’t really know shit about the specifics but doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose? I thought a VPN was there so your traffic gets routed through another country and server where other people’s traffic also passes through so an outsider doesn’t know where it originally came from. How does it work with a self hosted VPN?
That depends on your threat model.
A self-hosted VPN just means that all the traffic is yours. It also means that you get to choose what data is logged, etc.
In my case, I self-host because I don’t trust public wifi, etc.
Additionally, even if there is someone at the ISP level intercepting my traffic, it’s impossible for them to decrypt it short of breaking the encryption.
This is the use cases that businesses have. All large employers provide VPNs or similar systems (some folks use ZTNA as a functional VPN replacement) to ensure that remote staff has access to services that aren’t available on the public Internet.
Hypothetically speaking, a VPN service running in ram only, logging nothing, with only read-only media locally provided, running in a privacy friendly nation like Sweden, is fairly secure against all but state level attackers.
The goal isn’t to make sure people don’t know who I am, it’s to make sure that any request for data must go through my counsel.
If your goal is to be unknown, then you should recognize that all the public VPN providers are known and available to download as lists for threat-intel services. It’s literally a checkbox in my SOAR tool. Everyone who has a source from the anonymous proxy/vpn/etc services defaults to a silent drop.
Anonymous VPNs these days are just a subpoena away from being identified. They’re just not worth the trouble in most cases of fighting things at the international level. You are not anonymous to your VPN provider.
(Before folks lambast me, I made a ton of assumptions based on commonly observed use cases for VPNs being torrenting and streaming site access, where people are buying things like NordVPN or similar.)