Building a Private VPN Service

A good VPN is useful, but there aren’t may good VPNs

What Are We Talking About?

A VPN is a Virtual Private Network that encapsulates your traffic in an encrypted tunnel between the source (usually your device) and the destination (a VPN server connected to a network, like a LAN or the internet). VPNs can be useful for online privacy to an extent; traffic between your device and the VPN server cannot be sniffed or intercepted. The problem lies with the VPN provider. All VPN providers will claim they have good security and privacy, but this is extremely hard to verify. There are also technical reasons why commercial VPNs are less secure; they share keys, their weak cryptography gives a false sense of security, and even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you could be sharing the same endpoint with someone who is, potentially putting your traffic in the scope of analysis.

What Are Our Options?

There are commercial VPNs that are better than the rest. I would personally recommend Proton VPN and Mullvad VPN. Both services have a good reputation for using more secure technologies and having good privacy policies. The best option is to build your own private VPN service. Algo VPN is a set of Ansible scripts that will allow you to build a VPN server on a wide…