Periodically I’m asked to recommend a good Virtual Private Network (VPN) provider. I admit that I don’t spend a ton of time researching VPN providers because my primary use case for VPNs is to access my local network and secure my communications when traveling so most of the time I use my own VPN server. When I want to guard my network traffic against my Internet Service Provider (ISP), I use Tor. With that said, I do try to keep at least one known decent VPN provider in my back pocket to recommend to friends.
In the past I have usually recommended Private Internet Access because it’s ubiquitous, affordable, and its claim that it doesn’t keep logs has been proven in court. However, Private Internet Access is based in the United States, which means it can be subject to National Security Letters (NSL). Moreover, Private Internet Access was recently acquired by Kape Technologies. Kape Technologies has a troubling past and you can never guarantee that a company will maintain the same policies after it has been purchased so I’ve been looking at some alternative recommendations.
Of the handful with which I experimented, I ended up liking Mullvad VPN the most. In fact I ended up really liking it (for me finding a decent VPN provider is usually an exercise in finding the least terrible option).
Mullvad is headquartered in Sweden, which means it’s not subject to NSLs or other draconian United States laws (it’s subject to Swedish laws, but I’m outside of that jurisdiction). But even if it’s subjected to some kind of surveillance law, Mullvad goes to great length to enable you to be anonymous, which greatly hinders its ability to surveil you. To start with your account is just a pseudorandomly generated number. You don’t need to provide any identifiable information, not even an e-mail address. When you want to log in to pay your account, you simple enter your number. The nice thing about this is that the number is also easily disposed of. Since you can generate a new account by simply clicking on a link, you can throw away your account whenever you want. You can even generate accounts via its onion service (this link will only work if you’re using the Tor Browser).
Mullvad’s pricing is €5 (roughly $5.50 when I last paid) per month. Paying per month allows you to change accounts every month if you want. Payments can be made using more traditional services such as credit cards and PayPal, but you can also use more anonymous payment options such as Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash (I would like to see the option of using Monero since it has anonymity built-in).
The thing that initially motivated me to test Mullvad was the fact that it uses WireGuard. WireGuard is our new VPN overlord. If you’re new to WireGuard or less technically inclined, you can download and use Mullvad’s app. If you’re familiar with WireGuard or willing to learn about it, you can use Mullvad’s configuration file generator to generate WireGuard configuration files for your system (this is how I used it). Mullvad also supports OpenVPN, but I didn’t test it because it’s 2020 and WireGuard is our new VPN overlord.
Like most decent VPN providers, Mullvad also has a page to check if your Mullvad connection is setup correctly. It performs the usual tasks of reporting if you’re connecting through a Mullvad server and if your Domain Name System (DNS) requests are leaking. It also attempts to check if your browser is leaking information through WebRTC. You can also test your torrent client in case you want to download Linux distros (because that’s the only thing anybody downloads via BitTorrent) more securely.
I didn’t come across anything egregious with Mullvad, but don’t take my recommendation too seriously (this is the caveat I give to everybody who asks me to recommend a VPN provider). My VPN use case isn’t centered around maintaining anonymity and I didn’t perform thorough testing in that regard. Instead I tested it based on my use case, which is mostly protecting my connection from local actors when traveling. As with anything, you should test the service yourself.