Current update: Following the changes at Remove IVPN - #22 by jonah the fact that Proton’s kill switch is not fully functional in all scenarios on macOS is no longer enough of a concern for us to warrant delisting it, because VPN providers cannot control platform limitations.
However, two issues with Proton remain:
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The completely different problem to the macOS one that Proton has on Linux, which is described at ProtonVPN IP Leakage on Linux and Workaround | PrivSec - A practical approach to Privacy and Security remains an issue (which I confirmed with testing of course).
The question here, I think, is whether this is a big enough problem to still consider Proton in violation of our current criteria, especially given that Proton specifically says to bind programs like torrent clients to the tunnel interface directly, which does solve this problem.
To be clear, the kill switch on Linux is fully functional, unless an application specifically binds to the physical network interface. This, to me, seems like an issue which would warrant using something like Qubes, if protecting access to the physical network interface is of utmost importance to you, so I’d really consider this a platform limitation of Linux more than a Proton failure. Linux being extremely permissive with what you can do with it is a double-edged sword in this regard.
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Proton still says that “the [killswitch] feature does protect you while switching servers with Proton VPN” which indeed remains demonstrably untrue on macOS. While this is no longer a technical issue for us, because of the criteria change above, it is still (IMO) a marketing issue with their misleading documentation.
The question here is whether this marketing issue is enough to warrant de-listing Proton VPN. Historically, I believe we have never de-listed applications for misleading marketing alone.
Hopefully we can end the Apple-related discussions here: I think all of the talk about how NetworkExtensions work on macOS are a bit besides the point, and we should focus our discussion on these two problems above instead.