- Surfshark has rolled out its own custom protocol, Dausos
- It promises to be 30% faster than other VPNs
- Quantum-resistant cryptography further increases security
Surfshark has just unveiled its very own custom VPN protocol, Dausos.
Surfshark’s new breakthrough protocol promises to beat the best VPNs on the market by offering record speeds up to 30% faster than its competitors and a dedicated tunnel for each user.
Currently available for macOS users and coming soon to other platforms, the protocol – whose name means ‘paradise’ in Lithuanian – also comes packed with new post-quantum encryption designed to make your digital life even happier.
How does Dausos work?
Unlike protocols like WireGuard and OpenVPN, which route all user traffic through a single digital tunnel, Dausos’ system gives each user their own private, exclusive data channel.
By isolating each user’s data, it aims to effectively eliminate slowdowns caused by other users – especially during peak periods – to ensure a smoother experience while protecting travel data packets from external interference.
In addition, the system adapts to network and device conditions and intelligently routes users’ data packets according to their network configuration for better results.
“This ensures optimized performance tailored to the user’s specific network configuration,” explains Surfshark.
The obvious victory? Less overall processing translates into faster connections, with Surfshark claiming its system is now nearly a third faster than its competitors.
To make it even happier, Surfshark has also packed it with many innovative security features.
A built-in root certificate issuing system improves the protection and authentication of user connections by using ML-DSA signature scheme. This innovative digital signature algorithm ensures that the sender is genuine and that data shared remains unaltered, positioning itself at the forefront of the adoption of post-quantum secure certificate systems.
To further increase its next-generation capabilities, the protocol has also introduced a hybrid key exchange mechanism (X25519MLKEM768), which combines the established X25519 cryptographic system with a newer NIST-approved quantum-safe algorithm, ML-KEM, that improves the protection of user data against both current and future quantum attacks.
This follows Surfshark’s January rollout of post-quantum encryption in WireGuard across macOS, Linux and Android.
Session control: upgraded
The protocol also improves session control and specifically focuses on increasing key management security. Thanks to the implementation of post-compromise security (PCS)the system protects users’ digital areas by always generating a new key each time a new connection is established.
This ensures that, should a key be compromised, hackers cannot intercept further communications or decrypt any future messages generated by that key.
In addition, one post-randomization technique takes security to new heights by establishing varying port connections as opposed to more traditional systems that instead connect to a fixed server.
“With Dausos, each session is connected via a randomized port address to a server, like changing your gate every time you fly,” explains Karolis Kaciulis, Lead Systems Engineer at Surfshark.
The protocol was recently audited by Cure53, a Berlin-based cybersecurity consultancy. The firm examined the connection architecture and encryption features and concluded that there were no critical or serious vulnerabilities, paving the way for wider adoption.
With the latest release, it seems clear that Surfshak is in the middle of a major development phase and intends to continue improving its product in terms of overall performance, having upgraded its network with the industry’s first 100 Gbps servers to potentially handle significantly more data capacity than today’s fastest VPNs.
Newly appointed CEO Dovydas Godelis told us a month ago that VPN’s mission remained “to become the cyber security revolution”. Looking at the rollout of this new cutting-edge protocol, it looks like he wasn’t kidding. Which makes us wonder: what further surprises might the company have in store?
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