Most of us are aware of the necessity of having strong VPN protection in place. But what are the inherent issues with standard VPN applications, and how can they be solved? While choosing the best VPN often comes down to its features, the problem with many of the modern VPN applications concerns easily recognizable traffic in certain Internet environments despite the implemented end-to-end encryption. But what can be done about it?

As part of our ongoing commitment to achieving the highest standards of transparency and security, Psiphon commissioned 7ASecurity to conduct a security review of its code base related to four new Psiphon enhancements. The resulting report is public and can be found at: https://7asecurity.com/reports/pentest-report_psiphon-e.pdf.  Using a “white box” approach, meaning the complete source code was available, the security team set out to determine Psiphon’s adherence to secure coding best practices, and to provide safeguard recommendations, where appropriate, based on their findings.

Figure 1: People around the world naturally turned to Psiphon in response to the Facebook outage.  Summary: Psiphon’s global usage surged by 1.75 Million daily unique users during the Facebook outage on October 4th, 2021. The rise was particularly acute in regions where Facebook platforms - including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook itself - experience regular disruptions due to intermittent, but active censorship.The regions that saw the most significant increases in usage include several countries where major censorship events have occurred within the past few years: Azerbaijan, Cuba, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Mexico, Sudan, and Syria.

 Supporting 5 million users in Myanmar is no small feat When the Internet goes dark, so does communication with the rest of the world. We know that many regimes use Internet censorship as a method to suppress public awareness,  civil protest, and mobilization, and a shutdown event is often a signal of bad things to come. This means more bad news is lurking around.  When the lights of the routers went off in Myanmar, the whole world changed for millions of Burmese.