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Custom or Open Source VPN Clients - What should you use?

As any reader of our website will know, we are huge fans of all things open source. While far from being a magic bullet, the fact that open source code is freely available for others to inspect and audit provides the best (and only) protection available against it containing malicious code, NSA backdoors, or who knows what else. With proprietary closed-source code, on the other hand, there is absolutely no way to determine what it contains.

Therefore, it comes down to a matter of trusting the company involved. Something this post-Snowden world has demonstrated time and again is a very foolish thing to do.

Open source VPN Client

Despite stiff competition from IKEv2, OpenVPN remains the only battle-tested secure VPN protocol.

Generic open source OpenVPN clients are now available on all major platforms. Therefore, there is very little reason to consider anything else.

These open source VPN clients can use a VPN provider’s standard OpenVPN configuration files to connect via OpenVPN. Even if the provider does not explicitly support OpenVPN on that platform.

 

The ‘official’ FOSS forks of OpenVPN on the major platforms are:

The open source DD-WRT and Tomato router firmware also have OpenVPN clients built-in.

Open source OpenVPN clients require configuration files to be downloaded from the VPN provider and imported into the client. Therefore, they are slightly more complicated to set up than custom VPN clients.

Fortunately, there are plenty of detailed how-to guides available on how to do this, and minimal technical competence is required.

The more significant problem is that while these clients generally work very well, they lack additional features. Additional features, bells, and whistles that are usually available in custom VPN software.

Softether VPN

Another alternative to OpenVPN is SoftEther. SoftEther is also a free open source, cross-platform, multi-protocol VPN client and server. However, it's less widely known and has been tested less for vulnerabilities. If you wish to give it a go, then, you can use the SoftEther VPN client for free - VPNGate.

Custom VPN Client

Almost all VPN providers will happily supply instructions and the configuration files needed for setting up their service using generic ‘stock’ OpenVPN clients, but many of them also provide their own custom clients.

Usually, these are just wrappers over the stock open source OpenVPN code, although some base their clients on SoftEther code, which is similarly open source.

In addition to being easy to set up, as the necessary config files are already in the client. Many providers also add extra features, most (but not all) of which are very useful. The four most valuable features found in custom VPN clients are.

VPN Kill Switch

This ensures that your internet connection is always safe. As the name suggests, it kills your internet if your VPN connection drops. Some VPN kill switches are even more subtle and will work on a per-app basis. This is fantastic for ensuring your BitTorrent client never downloads when you aren't using a VPN.

Other kill-switch style solutions are available, but having this functionality built-in to the VPN client is very handy.

DNS Leak Protection

In theory, your VPN provider should handle all DNS requests when connected via VPN. Unfortunately, sometimes either your computer or its servers can misroute the request. Thereby your ISP will handle it - this is a DNS leak.

There are various things you can do to prevent DNS leaks, but having this functionality built into the client is a definite bonus.

Configurable Encryption

If a VPN provider offers variable levels of encryption, then configuring it using stock OpenVPN means manually editing configuration files. Having the option in the custom client is obviously easier. Although it does beg the question of why the provider is not using maximum encryption by default.

Changing encryption settings also raises your profile on the internet. Therefore, if using this option then you should pick a setting and stick with it.

Custom vs Open source VPN Clients Recap

In the case of VPN clients, our personal view goes somewhat against our usual rabid support for open source. The thing is: your VPN provider has full access to your internet traffic, anyway.

The encrypted tunnel only lasts between your computer and the VPN server. Therefore, your VPN provider can see everything that enters and leaves that tunnel at its end.

It, therefore, seems somewhat redundant to worry about the client, as you are putting full trust in your provider, anyway! This is why it's essential to use a provider that you trust not to keep any logs of your activity. Logs, which it can't hand over if it doesn't exist.

Hopefully, the OpenVPN development community will one day build features such as a kill switch and DNS leak protection into stock clients. However, until then, we feel that custom clients actually provide useful features that are worth using.

Written by: Douglas Crawford

Has worked for almost six years as senior staff writer and resident tech and VPN industry expert at ProPrivacy.com. Widely quoted on issues relating cybersecurity and digital privacy in the UK national press (The Independent & Daily Mail Online) and international technology publications such as Ars Technica.

2 Comments

PacoBell
on March 28, 2015
Isn't the answer to this dilemma then to decouple the VPN bandwidth provider from the underlying open source software? There are plenty of _VPS_ providers out there that charge similar rates as VPN companies. You can just run your OpenVPN/SoftEther instance on that and set your own policies. Some VPS even throw in international POPs as part of the deal, so you can effectively make your tunnel destination anywhere in the world. And as for the so-called kill switch and leak protection, those are just group policy configurations set in the login script and maybe a little shell script on the client side. It's not rocket science.
https://cdn.proprivacy.com/storage/images/proprivacy/02/member-dougjpg-avatar-image-default-1png-avatar-image-default-minpng-avatar_image-small_webp.webp
Douglas Crawford replied to PacoBell
on March 30, 2015
Hi PacoBell, Well, using an open source OpenVPN client effectively decouples the VPN bandwidth provider from the underlying open source software, but you don’t get the bells and whistles that come with custom clients (creating these bells and whistles, as you say, is not rocket science, but they are not included in the basic open source clients that are available. I think we should also give AirVPN credit here for being the only provider to fully open source its custom client. As for running a VPS as your own private VPN service (see here for instruction on how to do this), you should be aware that it is not as private as using a third party provider and provides no protection when P2P downloading, as the VPS IP is linked to your real IP, so data entering and exiting the VPS IP can be easily traced back you (good VPN providers are designed to protect their client’s privacy, and have policies and practices in place to help ensure this e.g. keeping no logs, using shared IP’s, etc.)

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