The public beta of our VPNalyzer desktop tool is out now. Read More

Investigation into Commercial VPNs

Is your VPN provider delivering on its promise of privacy and security?
Find out with VPNalyzer.

Commercial VPNs are now a multi-billion dollar industry—yet their booming ecosystem remains critically understudied and opaque. VPNalyzer is working to change that.

Learn More Read our NEW Report!

Experts Rely on VPNalyzer

Our testing methodology and the VPNalyzer Tool was used by Consumer Reports as the first line of systematic investigation to evaluate a set of popular VPNs. Our work was featured in their white paper, which detailed their objective evaluation of popular VPNs and outlines how they used VPNalyzer and their own testing to arrive at three top VPNs.

Our work and insights were quoted in Should You Use a VPN? and VPN Testing Reveals Poor Privacy and Security Practices, Hyperbolic Claims.

Publications

"All of them claim to be the best": Multi-perspective study of VPN users and VPN providers

@inproceedings{Ramesh2023VPNUserStudy,
author = {Reethika Ramesh and Anjali Vyas and Roya Ensafi},
title = { {"All of them claim to be the best": Multi-perspective study of VPN users and VPN providers} },
booktitle = {32nd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 23)},
year = {2023},
address = {Anaheim, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association}
}

Reethika Ramesh, Anjali Vyas, and Roya Ensafi
To Appear In: USENIX Security Symposium 2023 (USENIX Security '23)

OpenVPN is Open to VPN Fingerprinting

@inproceedings{xue2022OpenVPN,
author = {Diwen Xue and Reethika Ramesh and Arham Jain and Michalis Kallitsis and J. Alex Halderman and Jedidiah R. Crandall and Roya Ensafi},
title = { {OpenVPN is Open to VPN Fingerprinting} },
booktitle = {31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 22)},
year = {2022},
address = {Boston, MA},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity22/presentation/xue-diwen},
publisher = {USENIX Association}
}

Diwen Xue, Reethika Ramesh, Arham Jain, Michalis Kallitsis, J. Alex Halderman, Jedidiah R. Crandall, and Roya Ensafi
In: USENIX Security Symposium 2022 (USENIX Security '22)
🏆 Distinguished paper award 🏆 and Won First Prize in the 2022 Internet Defense Prize 🏆

VPNalyzer: Systematic Investigation of the VPN Ecosystem

@inproceedings{Ramesh2022VPNalyzer,
author = {Reethika Ramesh and Leonid Evdokimov and Diwen Xue and Roya Ensafi},
title = { {VPNalyzer: Systematic Investigation of the VPN Ecosystem} },
booktitle = {Network and Distributed System Security},
publisher = {The Internet Society},
year = {2022},
url = {https://dx.doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2022.24285}
}

Reethika Ramesh, Leonid Evdokimov, Diwen Xue, and Roya Ensafi
In: Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2022
🏆 Won First Place at the CSAW '22 Applied Research Competition. 🏆

Help Us Help You

In order to gain insight into the opaque commercial VPN ecosystem, we need users like you to participate in our studies. By crowdsourcing and collecting data, we will be able to analyze how VPN providers that are used by consumers are performing with respect to security and privacy. Participants receive immediate individualized test results showing their test result and whether any privacy or security issues were identified. Results cover all the areas listed here.

User Survey

Understanding VPN Users: their needs, their mental models of VPNs, and the tradeoffs they make while selecting a VPN product.

Read our NEW report!

VPNalyzer Tool

Desktop tool with a one-click install process that helps test and identify security and privacy issues with your VPN.

Download

Stay Informed

If you want to stay informed about this project and our future releases, please fill this form to join our mailing list.

Meet Our Team

We are a group of computer science researchers at the University of Michigan who design and deploy scalable techniques and systems to protect users’ internet experience. We conduct systematic, data-driven studies to investigate security and privacy issues in the VPN ecosystem and aim to bridge the gap between its various stakeholders.

The VPNalyzer project is done by a group of computer science researchers at the University of Michigan, including: