Worryingly, we find that users have flawed mental models about the protection VPNs provide, and about the data collected by VPNs. Alarmingly, we find that users rely on and trust VPN review sites, but VPN providers shed light on how they are mostly motivated by money. We create novel insights by augmenting our multi-perspective results, and highlight cases where the user and provider perspectives are misaligned. and qualitative interviews of nine providers to answer several research questions regarding the motivations, needs, threat model, and mental model of users and the key challenges and insights from VPN providers. In this paper, we conduct a quantitative survey of 1,252 VPN users in the U.S. To that end, we are the first to study the VPN ecosystem from both the users' and the providers' perspectives. Moreover, studying VPN users alone is not enough because, in using a VPN, a user essentially transfers trust, say from their network provider, onto the VPN provider.
We also find that a non-trivial fraction of VPN providers transparently proxy traffic, and many misrepresent the physical location of their vantage points: 5-30% of the vantage points, associated with 10% of the providers we study, appear to be hosted on servers located in countries other than those advertised to users.Īs more users adopt VPNs for a variety of reasons, it is important to develop empirical knowledge of their needs and mental models of what a VPN offers. Our results suggest that while commercial VPN services seem, on the whole, less likely to intercept or tamper with user traffic than other, previously studied forms of traffic proxying, many VPNs do leak user traffic-perhaps inadvertently-through a variety of means. We design an active measurement system to test various infrastructural and privacy aspects of VPN services and evaluate 62 commercial providers. Due to their own lack of technical sophistication and the opaque nature of VPN clients, however, the vast majority of users have limited means to verify a given VPN service's claims along any of these dimensions. Global Internet users increasingly rely on virtual private network (VPN) services to preserve their privacy, circumvent censorship, and access geo-filtered content.
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