Today, we’re introducing Stealth, a new protocol for Proton VPN. At Proton, we believe access to the internet is a basic human right. To fulfill our mission of building a better internet, we’ve built the Stealth protocol to help everyone access it.
Traditional protocols used by most VPN services are being increasingly recognized and blocked by regimes who seek to control the flow of information to their citizens. Stealth, our new obfuscated VPN protocol, helps you beat this censorship.
Stealth can bypass and punch through most firewalls and VPN blocking systems — an essential feature for many internet users living under restrictive governments to access the free flow of information online. Stealth relies on obfuscation to make your online activity look like normal web traffic, even though you are using VPN.
Stealth is available for both free and paid subscriptions on Android, iOS, and macOS: https://protonvpn.com/blog/stealth-vpn-protocol/. . The Windows version is in development too, and we hope to have it ready soon.
At Proton, we’re continuously investing in technology to bypass surveillance and censorship. To keep the internet accessible, we must stand together and support a better internet where privacy, freedom, and the people who use it come first.
Thank you for standing with us in our mission to build a better internet where privacy is the default!
Thank you very much for introducing stealth. it helps Iranians (and people in other countries with censored internet) very much while almost no other VPNs can work. you may notice this according to number of Iranian users. but making VPN protocol like normal HTTPS is not everything users in VPN-blocking regime need. there are some examples below.
signing in to app in iran is impossible. users in iran need another VPN connected to sign in to app for the first time. I tested android and windows app and they have the same issue. Alternative routing cannot help iranian to bypass this. Also alternative routing cannot help refreshing server list or getting app update.
Everytime I open windows app, it has difficulties to open, maybe because it wants to connect to blocked services and retries for many time (when I conneted to free internet, there is not such issue). android app doesn’t have this problem. please note that when I want to open protonVPN, I don’t have active VPN connection to bypass internet censorship.
Detecting VPN connection is not all about detecting packets. when I connect to VPN, all of my traffics is to a single IP. So the IP can be detected as VPN server. split tunneling can be a solution and users can split some government related app (like my bank app). but It would be better that I can split all IPs from Iran (I mean my country which I use Proton VPN client in it). this can make tunnel undetectable (they can detect me in other ways when I connected to Iranian services and VPN cannot hide my identity).
Do you have time plan to implement these feature to make Proton VPN more lovely in censored countries?
Hey, I’m from Iran and I just wanted to thank you guys for this feature. Now government can’t block the connection (mostly). I hope you guys add this feature to the Windows version too in the next update.
“We’re releasing split-tunneling!”, On Windows and Android.
“We’re releasing Port-Forwarding!”, On Windows.
“We’re releasing the Stealth Protocol!”, On everything except Linux.
Thankfully I’m able to achieve almost everything there without an easy GUI toggle, but c’mon… More and more people are desperate to escape Windows’ clutches and Apple’s closed eco-system. How about picking up years-old features and porting them to where they’re really needed, where privacy-focused people flock to - Linux.
Hi from Iran, wanted to thank you guys for this feature, you 'r freedom knight, waiting for windows update, thank all the protpn team, universe bless you
Yo guys! so stoked not gonna lie it was a tad slow on my Iphone with VPN Plus…but I changed to stealth setting because of the email you guys sent me and I notice it right away how fast it was just regular browsing via safari. Great job! Cant wait to get it on windows!!
