Nymvpn, the alleged “Most Safe VPN in the World” was launched at London’s Frontline Club on March 13 ..
Alongside the famous activist and alert Chelsea Manning, the Nymvpn team presented the official version of Nymvpn to the public for the first time.
The Switzerland-based provider is entering a crowded market with the best VPNs with a clear goal: Revolutionizing what it thinks is a deficient industry in which NYM administrative director Halpin claims “digital privacy is broken”.
End-to-end encryption “is not enough”
NyMVPN aims to solve an often overlooked area with digital privacy – metadata protection.
Existing virtual private networks (VPNs) and other privacy tools mostly use end-to-end encryption to keep you privately online. This technique essentially shrinks the content of your communication to prevent access to third parties.
However, Halpin explained, even encrypted messages leave traces, such as who you are talking to and when. With advanced tech like AI, metadata surveillance becomes ever easier to do.
“And it’s pretty dangerous,” Halpin said. “Seam [Edward] Snowden’s leaks revealed, if you have enough metadata, you don’t really need the content. “
A new approach: Mixnet
The need for metadata – private life has been clear to some in the industry – determined for those who formed the nym team behind the first iteration of the mix network – for some time.
In fact, Ryptography professor and now Nym Chief Scientist Office Claudia Diaz did a Ph.D. On Mix Networks, a theory proposed by cryptographer David Chaum in the 80s, between 2000 and 2005.
In 2016, Chelsea Manning began working in a way of making Tor browser and similar privacy’s preserving tools safer while in prison for leaking US governments classified documents to Wikileaks. She said, “We acknowledged that the amount of calculation that would be available in the next decade would make it much easier for traffic analysis to decipher anonymity across the network.”
In December 2017, Manning meets Halpin as he also began to consider such a system to better protect metadata. Quick up to 2025, NyMVPN is the first VPN literation with a noise-generating mix network system that claims to protect these small-but nevertheless important-digital tracks we all leave behind.
As Ania Piotrowska, head of research at NYM, explained in more detail during the product launch, NyMVPN Mixnet includes three basic components:
- A more server route system. This ensures that your connection is redirected via five independent hops so that no single device should be able to link your IP address with your activity.
- Cover traffic. The network generates random traffic to make metadata traps more difficult. It is basically seeking to hide your communication patterns within a noisy crowd of fake internet traffic.
- Data Package Mixture. On the road, the data packages are mixed to make sure to cover the time stamp while confusing the order where the data packages move between you and the recipient.
Not to forget the old good VPN features
While NymVPN seeks to differ from competitors with its noise-generating mix network technology, a decentralized server network and a token-based anonymous payment system, the provider has not forgotten the features that VPN users expect in a secure VPN app.
Full Open Source, NyMVPN apps are available for all major platforms (Android, iOS, MacOS, Windows and Linux). They include a killing contact and leakage prevention features to ensure that if the VPN connection falls, your data will remain protected. At the time of writing, you can choose from 500+ server operators in 50+ countries.
All apps are built on Rust, a relatively new coding language that is believed to be better for security and performance-expressVPN has recently rewritten its internal Lightway protocol in rust.
Nymvpn COO Alexis Roussel confirmed that the team is also working on a shared tunneling option. This will not only allow you to customize which apps and sites redirect through the VPN tunnel, but also decide which ones are to be protected with its Wireguard-based Amneziawg two-hop mode (so-called fast mode) and those via the most private (but slower) mix net mode.
The new standard for data protection?
NyMVPN may move into a crowded VPN market, but it promises to make waves to solve what the team thinks is a deficient digital privacy industry.
However, the ultimate goal is even more ambitious – Nymvpn wants to become the new standard for data protection.
“NYM starts with a single VPN app that gives people all over the world to access and take advantage of privacy characteristics on our network,” explained Ania Piotrowska, head of research at NYM. “But the network opens the door to several integrations that can provide privacy solutions by default across different industries, from healthcare to legal services and telecommunications.” We believe that privacy is a fundamental right and we want to provide a solution that will be available to anyone in any kind of online situations. “
