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content/providers/Choosing Your VPN Provider.md

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+---
+title: "Choosing Your VPN Provider"
+date: 2022-08-18
+tags: ['Providers', 'VPN', 'privacy']
+author: Tommy
+---
+
+Commercial VPNs are an important privacy tool. They hide your actual IP address from a third-party service, mitigating IP based tracking on the internet. I have written another post regarding their use cases [here](/knowledge/commercial-vpn-use-cases/). In this post I will walk you through what to look for when choosing a VPN provider.
+
+![Ethernet](/images/ethernet-1.jpg)
+
+## Modern Protocols
+
+The first thing you should look for in a provider is that they use a modern and secure protocol for their VPN tunnels. For a detailed comparison between common VPN protocols, you should read ProtonVPN's [blog post](https://protonvpn.com/blog/whats-the-best-vpn-protocol/) on this topic.
+
+In general, OpenVPN, Wireguard, and IKEv2/IPSec would serve you well. PPTP should be avoided at all cost due to various [known vulnerabilities](https://www.schneier.com/academic/archives/1999/09/cryptanalysis_of_mic_1.html).
+
+L2PT/IPSec is an interesting case, as it is quite complex and is difficult to set up properly. [Many VPN providers](https://gist.github.com/kennwhite/1f3bc4d889b02b35d8aa) opt into using a common pre-shared key and making themselves [vulnerable to MITM attacks](https://www.ivpn.net/knowledgebase/general/is-using-l2tporipsec-with-a-public-pre-shared-key-secure/). Leaked NSA documents also suggests that the agency is capable to at least weaken it to some capacity. You are better off just not using this protocol as well.
+
+## Encryption Key Stregth
+
+Along with supporting a good VPN protocol, VPN providers should use keys with sufficient stregth on their servers. For example, most VPN providers would use a well known encryption standard like AES 256 or ChaCha20 for data transfer and RSA 4096 or at least RSA 2048 for the handshake. 
+
+While this is generally not a problem with most providers, there has been instances of VPN providers using very weak encryption, such as [ExpressVPN using RSA 1024 for their handshake](https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/rooms/) a few years ago.
+
+Before buying a VPN, you should check the provider's documentation on what type of encryption they use, or if they do not have it, ask their support directly. 
+
+## Multi-Hopping
+
+This feature is not a must, but it is very nice to have. Not all VPN providers own their hardware, datacenter, and network 
+
+## Pluggable Transport
+
+## Payment Methods
+
+## VPN Killswitch
+
+## DNS Filtering
+
+## Infrastructure
+
+## General Trustworthiness
+
+## Personal Recommendations
+
+### ProtonVPN
+
+### Mullvad
+
+### IVPN
+
+## Notes
+
+### Self-Hosted VPN
+
+### VPN Review Websites
+
+### "The Only True VPN Rating System on The Net"