As the VPN privacy industry grows, new technologies are emerging which offer substantial security improvements over previous methods of protecting a customer’s privacy. One of these methods is called Multihop VPN and involves the chaining of more than one VPN server. In effect this technology significantly improves your privacy and ability to remain anonymous online.

When you connect to a normal VPN service, your traffic is routed through a single server. The traffic leaves your computer, is routed through the tunnel to the VPN server and then onto the Internet. With a multihop service however, there are two servers involved, each one joined in series. The traffic in a multihop configuration leaves your computer and is routed through the first VPN server and then through a second tunnel to another VPN server in another jurisdiction and then onto the Internet. The second server is often referred to as the exit server and it is critical to understand that your traffic will appear to come from this server, wherever it is located and not the VPN server that you are connecting to. The obvious advantage of this is that in order to trace your identity or location, the authorities in the country where the exit server is located would be required to obtain the data from the jurisdiction in which the entry server is located.

Another important consideration to take into account is the concept of crowding on the network interfaces of the multihop servers. If you are using a small VPN service with few subscribers, there will be less network traffic going through the network. As a result, the ability for an adversary to detect a stream of traffic using correlative techniques increases and your anonymity is at increased risk. For this reason, it is important to understand if any specific techniques are being used to crowd the interface and make these techniques much harder to use. Without any specific techniques, the VPN service would have to guarantee a minimum level of connected subscriber per server which is very difficult to do depending on the service.

The only downside to a multihop server configuration is the increased latency and reduced bandwidth. However if you choose an entry server close to your location and a Fast VPN service provider, you should see very little difference in latency. The vastly increased security that Multihop offers should easily outweigh the small performance impact. At least choose to use Multihop connections where your anonymity is very important and a single hop connection where it is less so. With so many new and cheap VPN services around, its imperative that you consider the security controls which only the largest and most sophisticated of providers are able to implement. Never assume that any of these services, especially multihop are provided as standard, always ask the VPN service before subscribing. If they cannot provide you with a clear answer or reference to more information on their website then you should probably be entrusting your private data to another more experienced VPN company.

Author Bio: Kersten Lordown is a security researcher living in Brighton, UK. She graduated from the university of Brighton with a degree in Computer science and a honors in Information security. Her interests involve both Multihop VPN and Fast VPN research.

Category: Computers and Technology
Keywords: security, privacy, anonymity