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The great thing about using PrivateVPN's VPN through Tor feature is that the VPN provider is unable to detect your home IP address when you connect to its servers.Īs a result, it becomes impossible for the VPN to track who you are and what you are doing in real-time. This setup requires your VPN client to be configured to work with Tor, and the only VPN service that we currently recommend for doing this is the Swedish provider PrivateVPN. Your computer -> encrypt with VPN -> Tor -> VPN -> internet This involves connecting first to Tor, and then through a VPN server to the internet: The Tor Browser has also been hardened against various threats in a way that your usual browser almost certainly has not been.įor maximum security when using Tor through VPN you should always use the Tor browser VPN through Tor It is possible that with transparent proxies your VPN provider could intercept traffic before it is encrypted by the Tor servers. Please be aware, however, that this is nowhere near as secure as using the Tor browser, where Tor encryption is performed end-to-end from your desktop to the Tor servers. This means that your entire internet connection benefits from Tor through VPN. Important note: Some VPN services (such as NordVPN, Privatoria and TorVPN) offer Tor through VPN via an OpenVPN configuration file (which transparently routes your data from OpenVPN to the Tor network). We should note that using a Tor bridge such as Obfsproxy can also be effective at hiding Tor use from your ISP (although a determined ISP could in theory use deep packet inspection to detect Tor traffic).(Non- HTTPS traffic entering and leaving Tor exit nodes is unencrypted and could be monitored.) No protection from malicious Tor exit nodes.Your VPN provider knows your real IP address.Allows access to Tor hidden services (.onion websites).If you use a good no-logs VPN this can provide a meaningful additional layer of security. The Tor entry node will not see your true IP address, but the IP address of the VPN server.Your ISP will not know that you are using Tor (although it can know that you are using a VPN).In this configuration you connect first to your VPN server, and then to the Tor network before accessing the internet:Īlthough some of the providers recommended in our best VPNs for Tor article offer to make such a setup easy, this is also what happens when you use the Tor Browser or Whonix (for maximum security) while connected to a VPN server, and means that your apparent IP on the internet is that of the Tor exit node.
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