They run servers with no hard drives: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/8/1/expanding-diskless-infr...
You cannot hide from advertisers if you use a smartphone with apps. App developers who put ads within their app control the apps behavior completely and hence they can fingerprint your device and track you very well without using IP addresses. And within browsers, they can fingerprint you through many javascript features of the browser. Hiding your source IP does very little for your privacy.
Almost all traffic (apps and websites) are encrypted via TLS (https, for example). So, even if you are on an insecure network, unless your OS's TLS certificate store is compromised, your communications are encrypted and protected against snooping from that insecure network.
Also, even on open wifi networks, today, it is very unlikely that the wifi is running without at least WPA2 encryption. Most modern airports run secure wifi. (But they also monitor all traffic metadata for illegal activities).
So, using a VPN as an exit node is just privacy theatre. VPN exit nodes in faraway countries are useful for bypassing content censorship in your own country, but it works only if the content streaming service cooperates with you.
Remember, all ISPs are heavily regulated by governments and can be asked to mirror specific customer's traffic for analysis. I would be very surprised if they don't proactively do it for all VPN operator nodes by default.
Maybe futile, but I'd still consider using it.
Plenty of people have and I would rather they have to spend a Tor 0day amount of cash to do it than to do it trivially.
> You cannot hide from advertisers if you use a smartphone with apps. App developers who put ads within their app control the apps behavior completely and hence they can fingerprint your device and track you very well without using IP addresses. And within browsers, they can fingerprint you through many javascript features of the browser. Hiding your source IP does very little for your privacy.
Sure, if you have sketchy apps, but Apple has both legal enforcement and approval of apps.
> So, using a VPN as an exit node is just privacy theatre. VPN exit nodes in faraway countries are useful for bypassing content censorship in your own country, but it works only if the content streaming service cooperates with you.
...? They can't trace where your requests came from....
That said, I don't know if Mullvad is good or evil, but one of the ways you can evaluate companies is to recognize when they're making sketchy, not-relevant claims to create an air of legitimacy.
This "our servers have no disks" thing is kind of thing is marketing. It is meant to imply something that it doesn't actually demonstrate. Who cares if there are local disks? It doesn't change the threat model at all, it's mostly to convince people who don't know very much about claims which are basically impossible to prove. It's the higher-tier version of "we use military grade encryption."
Lawful Intercept on the public internet does not rely on local hard drives on any node in the network and has not since the 90s, as a specific example of how meaningless this is.
They were just unprepared. There was plenty of data to seize, but it was in RAM. They just needed the right equipment to do a cold boot attack [0] [1]
"The HotPlug's patented technology keeps power flowing to the computer while transferring the computer's power input from one A/C source (such as a wall outlet or power strip) to another (a portable UPS) and back again."
no they haven't built an impregnable system, neither has anyone else in the history of the world.
they have raised the bar very fucking high, though.
normal vpn company: oh yes, Officer, here's their credit card details and a list of all IPs they've ever connected from, and DNS logs from our internal servers
mullvad: OK, I guess you have the corrupted partial contents of memory of one machine that you managed to dump after dawn raiding us with guns and using liquid nitrogen to freeze the DRAM for a cold boot attack where you now have 90 minutes before entropy claims another victim.
one company tried a lot harder and made things a lot better. dumb equivalence arguments are dumb.
I think you need to familiarise yourself with the Mickens Security Model: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/08/mickens_on_se...
making yourself resistant to casual subpoena attacks for little cost is valuable thing for a lot of people.
This is an excellent heuristic. Personally I like to evaluate trustworthiness in terms of integrity and competence - can I trust their values and can I trust that they know what they are doing? Words are cheap of course. Consistent action across several years is much harder to fake. It also overlaps with another heuristic I use to model and predict the behaviour of a company; a company's behaviour will converge on the shareholders' goals over time.
> This "our servers have no disks" thing is kind of thing is marketing.
You are correct that we considered that aspect while writing the blog post, but please read the content before passing judgement. See the section titled "To recap about “no disks in use”" in particular.
On the topic of "air of legitimacy" I'll just leave these here:
* Our apps have been open-source since we launched in 2009
* Our response to Shellshock: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8385332
* Our thoughts on WireGuard in 2017: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2017/9/27/wireguard-future/
* Experimental post-quantum KEM support in 2017: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2017/12/8/introducing-post-quant...
The blog post you commented on also talks extensively about how it was one of our first steps in making our infrastructure transparent. Here are just two things we've done as part of that project:
* "This is the first time a modern off-the-shelf server platform gains coreboot support, and it is an integral part of realizing our vision of transparent and independently auditable VPN servers." - https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2019/8/7/open-source-firmware-fu...
And finally, we've spent 2-3 years designing a transparency log with distributed trust assumptions. One of many critical parts necessary to achieve our vision of transparent server infrastructure. I'll wager that there's no transparency log with a stronger threat model than ours. https://www.sigsum.org
We're certainly not without fault, but hopefully this helps inform your opinion of Mullvad.
Best regards, Fredrik Stromberg (co-founder of Mullvad VPN, Tillitis, Glasklar Teknik)
The “compromise” is coming from inside the house. Might as well claim no one knows the admin passwords because they are written in a notebook that the management keeps in their home safe.