Hello
Using the mullvad browser with mullvad extension, I am not clear how their proxy works. Is it encrypted? Are there any security or privacy risks to using the mullvad proxies in the mullvad extension?
Just confused because proxies traditionally have not had encryption, so… How does this one work?
They’re fine. I haven’t used this feature myself but I think they designed it with the purpose in mind of providing even more privacy than just connecting normally to the VPN. The idea is you split your different connections through different Mullvad servers. Say you had for example a tab opened to Privacy Guides and another tab opened to Youtube. Both of those connections could be going through different servers. The add-on provides a straightforward user-friendly way of implementing this.
My understanding is that Mullvad uses proxies as a “2nd hop” connection. When you connect to a proxy in the Mullvad VPN browser extension, you still have all the benefits of a VPN connection, because your “1st hop” is to a Mullvad VPN server.
So [you] >-encrypted tunnel-> [Mullvad VPN Server] >--> [Mullvad Proxy Server] >--> [Open Web]
Is the hop to the 2nd server (proxy) properly encrypted though? Proxies don’t traditionally have good encryption
How does it work though? Is the proxy properly encrypted? There must be some differences, because reddit for example will block mullvad VPN servers, but it is pretty easy to beat with the proxy
Not sure, my assumption is no (if we set aside https/tls). But I don’t think that really matters too much, since it is just an additional hop.
Regardless of whether you are using the proxy feature of the browser extension or not, the encrypted tunnel only covers your traffic between your device and the vpn server, it doesn’t apply to your traffic once it leaves the VPN. Mullvad might encrypt the connection between VPN server and Proxy server, but even if they don’t security would still be comparable to using the VPN in the traditional way, so using the proxy feature would not reduce security unless there is something I’m overlooking.
My assumption is yes, but I’m not the best person to ask because I don’t use this feature. If you click on the add-on though and scroll through some of their proxy choices it looks like they’re using wireguard relays for their SOCKS5. If no one can give you a definitive answer you could just email Mullvad… Being the based company that they are, they even offer a public PGP key so you can encrypt your emails to them. 