Hello all. There is a lot of information and opinions easily accessible regarding Tor over VPN and VPN over Tor setups. I would like to find out if there are any positive or negative privacy & security implications of having a VPN over VPN setup.
Now, I run a VPN client on my router. Some sites that I try to access have been blocking the servers of my VPN provider as of late, notably Youtube. What I tend to do is connect my computer to another VPN (sometimes another provider even) on top of the VPN that’s on my router, hoping to circumvent the blocking. At times I have to rotate VPN server very frequently.
The same situation arises when I wish to bypass a geo restriction. Rather than changing the VPN on my router, I will run another client on my target device to another VPN server.
Out of curiosity I starting looking up if this has any negative implications but didn’t find much information. I hope some of you have any thoughts or resources on this. Thanks!
The most obvious downside is speed loss and bigger latency.
If you are using trusted VPN providers, everything else is on the plus side, I guess. It’s like double-hop advertised by some VPN providers, but even more secure, because if 1 of your providers, say, do logging, it is to some extent mitigated by other not logging.
But it doesn’t matter if you are using some trash VPNs or don’t adhere to other privacy practices.
In short: it depends. At what you want to achieve, in the first place.
Yes, increased latency and lower speeds are two negatives that come to mind.
Is such a setup functionally the same as a multihop from providers such as Mullvad? I assumed multihop works as follows: A tunnel is established from the client to the entry node. The entry node then establishes a separate tunnel to the exit node, where the traffic then leaves to its destination.
What I think happens in this VPN over VPN scenario that I am describing is as follows: The client establishes a tunnel with the inner VPN. This tunnel itself goes through the tunnel of the outer VPN (the one the router is connected to).
On the premise that what I stated above is even accurate, I wonder if this is then somehow fingerprintable or has any other positive or negative implications on privacy or security.
Client > router and its vpn > 2nd vpn > internet. You can’t connect to what you call “inner VPN” bypassing router and its vpn. But if you mean: internet>“inner VPN” > router’s “outer VPN” > you, then you’re right.
You can’t know this for sure, you have to believe that VPN provider doesn’t decrypt your traffic at the 1st node and doesn’t pass it without encryption to the 2nd node. In such setup with two vpns chained by you, you can be sure at least about that everything is coming encrypted to the 2nd VPN.