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barathr 6 hours ago [-]
As others have pointed out, this is like Apple iCloud Private Relay, and other multi-hop privacy systems that have been built on and off over the last several decades (Tor included).
Perhaps we should arrange a new thread about this?
dongcarl 6 hours ago [-]
Good to see you here Barath :-)
I didn't realize Chris Wood was also an author!
maxloh 6 hours ago [-]
I don't understand the point of this.
Many (if not all) of the benefits on the landing page are available in Mullvad too, which is a more mature and reputable product, has all clients fully open-source, and powers the exit servers for Obscura.
Why should I choose this over Mullvad?
maxloh 6 hours ago [-]
Mullvad is a Swedish company, which has stricter privacy protection laws in place.
According to Obscura's legal page, it is a New York-based company [0]. Under US law, a secretive court order could compel a US company to update software or implement targeted logging on a specific user without notifying that user.
The only scenario where Obscura would be useful is if Mullvad were compromised. Why would I trust a New York company to shield me from a more reputable Swedish company?
[0]: "(2) your written notification must be mailed to 169 Madison Ave.; Ste. 11185 PMB 63183; New York, NY 10016..." https://obscura.com/legal/
dongcarl 5 hours ago [-]
(Carl from Obscura here)
I love folks who are also reasoning through security models! A few things to note here:
- With traditional Single-Party VPNs, even if you trust them fully and they're honest, they can still be compromised or hacked. With Obscura, even if we're hacked there's nothing to leak (other than WireGuard packets fully encrypted to Mullvad's servers).
- The change in trust is that instead of trusting a single company (Mullvad), you're trusting that not both Obscura AND Mullvad have been compromised, which is strictly less likely.
maxloh 4 hours ago [-]
The "Obscura and Mullvad" argument actually makes sense. Having a company outside of EU jurisdiction makes it hard for both layers to be compromised at the same time.
Another question: How does the Obscura client get the Mullvad exit server’s public key? Are they hardcoded at compile time, fetched from Mullvad's server, or fetched from Obscura's server?
The latter seems to be dangerous if there isn't some kind of signature verification done on the client side before using the key.
dongcarl 2 hours ago [-]
Good question! It's the latter right now (which is not ideal), but I think Mullvad is going to sign their server pubkeys pretty soon and we'll switch to that.
We do currently show it in the app and there's an easily clickable link so you can verify against Mullvad's website for the pubkey
miohtama 6 hours ago [-]
The EU is working to make what Mullvad is doing illegal.
Yeah, it's basically not possible to offer an actually secure and private service in the US. If men with guns and gag orders haven't shown up at their new york office yet, they will as soon as this VPN gets popular enough to show up on their radar. At that point if they have any integrity they'll shut their service down like Lababit did rather than allow it to be compromised by the state.
NordStreamYacht 29 minutes ago [-]
Sweden was compromised years ago, Assange's case is proof.
- We allow you to choose an exit location (I believe iCloud Private Relay restricts you to the same location)
- Our exit hop is Mullvad instead of Cloudflare+Fastly+Akamai
- We use QUIC for transport instead of HTTP/3 (which is built on QUIC and has a bit more overhead)
Barbing 5 hours ago [-]
Same country at least - the iCloud Private Relay options, iOS:
“1: Maintain general location
2: Use country and time zone
Maintain your general location to receive localized content, or enhance your privacy by using a broader IP address based on your country and time zone.
Safari Private Browsing always uses an IP location from your country and time zone.”
bossyTeacher 6 hours ago [-]
Because its CEO is known as the sponsor of the Orebro party?
Many src-dst connections but as a single logical connection. There's no way any middlebox could easy capture full data even metadata.
http2/QUIC can do something similar with frames (and hopefully multipath)
Don't place your whole stream inside a single src-dst IP connection. Demux them into many paths over the Internet. We need more variety of "traffic shapes" to combat Internet surveillance.
I'd argue it's even more effective than encryption. Split your activity and mix them, monitor traffic over a single transport is useless.
skaul 6 hours ago [-]
So two hops, basically. First hop sees your IP address but not the website you're going to, second hop sees website but not IP address. Similar to Private Relay: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102602.
dongcarl 6 hours ago [-]
(Carl from Obscura here)
Yup, exactly!
skaul 2 hours ago [-]
Cool work. Can I ask: why not use MASQUE for this, instead of WireGuard-over-QUIC? Is it because it meant less changes on your partner's side?
mulmen 6 hours ago [-]
But if both services keep logs de-anonymization is a join.
dongcarl 5 hours ago [-]
(Carl from Obscura here)
Very true, but if even 1 of (Obscura, Mullvad) is honest, there's no de-anonymization.
For traditional Single-Party VPNs, you just need to compromise 1 party, with Two-Party Relays, you need to compromise both.
PunchyHamster 6 hours ago [-]
They don't even need to. If you observe enough of them you can correlate traffic patterns between them and find out which one is used by which endpoint
side note: i really wish more companies did the no email + randomized account number flow. there is a certain popular "pro-privacy" product beloved by many here that requires an email address and refuses to offer a similar account number method, which has turned me off the product.
dongcarl 5 hours ago [-]
(Carl from Obscura here)
Yeah we thought the randomized account number flow was an ingenious idea, so we did that and made the last digit a Verhoeff checksum to check for mistypes!
Though sometimes people forget to write the number down and... There's not much we can do.
mulmen 6 hours ago [-]
> there is a certain popular "pro-privacy" product beloved by many here
Please don’t speak in riddles. Just say what you mean.
john_strinlai 6 hours ago [-]
for what purpose? there is nothing to be gained from pointing fingers, and takes the discussion in an even more unrelated direction.
although i guess people's curiosity is also dragging my comment in an unrelated direction anyways. lose-lose situation.
my main point is that the account number method is really nice, and a great selling point for such privacy-conscious products. not offering it in a privacy-conscious product is enough signal that it has made me choose not to purchase the product. that's the important bit, and where i was hoping to drive the conversation.
bityard 6 hours ago [-]
There is even less to be gained by issuing vague unactionable warnings and/or accusations...
john_strinlai 6 hours ago [-]
it's not a warning or accusation...
this isn't some hidden feature you get caught with your pants down over. if you try to sign up to something and it doesn't offer an account number, you know that it doesn't offer an account number instantly.
no time wasted for you. it's not some nefarious plot by the company.
it's just a business decision. i was hoping to talk about the business decision of that particular sign up flow.
PunchyHamster 6 hours ago [-]
Incorrect. Pointing out bad products is a warning to other people to not waste time on it. We should be doing it more, not less.
I also have no idea what company/service you're talking about
mulmen 6 hours ago [-]
Because it creates confusion as proven by the responses mistakenly assuming that you were referring to proton.
john_strinlai 6 hours ago [-]
and if i mention the company, the responses are all about the company instead of the feature.
next time i will just keep my thoughts to myself and we'll all be happy.
mulmen 2 hours ago [-]
You could have just ended your comment at:
> side note: i really wish more companies did the no email + randomized account number flow.
Everything you said after that added confusion and this tangent instead of the conversation you wanted to have.
john_strinlai 53 minutes ago [-]
actively not choosing a product because of the lack of a feature seemed relevant enough to discussing said feature. the problem was that i forgot how weird online conversations are. i cant imagine a person in real life latching on to a small detail so strongly, ignoring basically everything i said.
_bernd 4 hours ago [-]
Yeap :/
t-writescode 6 hours ago [-]
They’re almost certainly referencing Signal.
ignoramous 6 hours ago [-]
> ... a certain popular "pro-privacy" product beloved by many here ...
How does this prove Obscura and Mullvad can't just both gather tracking data and then just combine it on demand?
dongcarl 5 hours ago [-]
(Carl from Obscura here)
This doesn't prove it. However, Obscura makes it so that there's no *single party* that if hacked or otherwise compromised would hurt your internet privacy.
woah 6 hours ago [-]
and how is it better than just connecting to mullvad over nordvpn or something?
dongcarl 5 hours ago [-]
(Carl from Obscura here)
Other than the obvious hassle? XP
If you connect to Mullvad over NordVPN:
- You're giving both Mullvad and Nord some payment information (with Obscura you only give that to us, Mullvad has no idea)
This is where part of your money flows to (I have opinions about this).
Not sure if you are also aware of it.
osnxkwmxkwnd 6 hours ago [-]
This sounds pretty neat, and I do dig the website, though I can’t help but think it’s an odd combination to have bitmap/pixelated fonts and graphics inside perfect squircles.
Seems like you guys have two distinct ideas of a visual identity completely at odds there. Shape contrast is nice and can be rather fun to play with, but it has to be handled with care. Right now it feels like the designer had a bunch of ideas and didn’t know how to bring them together in a cohesive identity.
Bonus point for the TRON reference at the end! “I fight for the users!”
dongcarl 5 hours ago [-]
(Carl from Obscura here)
I'm a sucker for retro 8-bit graphics and fun mascots, so we went with that, but when we experimented with 8-bit for actual UI and long text we immediately found it to be super unusable and unreadable :-(
> Bonus point for the TRON reference at the end! “I fight for the users!”
Ah ofc the HN poster knows the reference :-) I've had it as my email signature since high school I think.
ChocolateGod 6 hours ago [-]
Your traffic is still unencrypted by the VPN provider at the other end of the Wireguard connection, I am not sure how this changes that?
fh67 5 hours ago [-]
https://obscura.com/check/
does this page know the difference between a direct mullvad user and an obscura user, if so, how?
Hi Carl, thanks for being here to answer questions. Two questions: Do you have any active testers in Iran right now, and secondly, how is this architected to deal with advanced DPI boxes in ISP networks that detect flows of encrypted traffic and drop it? The methods I'm seeing people use with success from within Iran right now are very different than something like a commercial mullvad or competitor VPN.
Some of them rely on people having a helpful third party in ("free") country to set up a private relay in something like Azure IP space that isn't used by any other VPN users, so it doesn't attract a level of attention (or attention by multiples of different peoples' encrypted flows) that publicly published commercial VPN services do. It's a hard problem to solve on a scale of more than a couple of people.
The multi party relay concept is great, my concerns are more with traffic detection/DPI in between the end user and the first hop in the relay.
dongcarl 5 hours ago [-]
Can't speak to Iran, but we use QUIC for transport (with an experimental TCP/TLS mode).
Besides the website being complete slop, one very good reason to avoid this is that it's made by Andrew Lee (of Freenode hostile takeover fame).
ramblurr 6 hours ago [-]
So like OHTTP but for UDP traffic? I suppose they are using MASQUE CONNECT-UDP?
They are careful to not exactly claim the same anonymity properties of Tor, though I think a lay reader will read that differently (ie, that they do have the same anonymity property as Tor).
That said being able to verify the inner wireguard conn to mullvad is nice. Of course you have to trust them that they aren't colluding with mullvad to share your identity/ip. But same goes for OHTTP.
dongcarl 5 hours ago [-]
(Carl from Obscura here)
Actually it's WireGuard over QUIC Unreliable Datagrams!
Many VPNs don't log activity. Headline is objectively false.
dorongrinstein 6 hours ago [-]
I love the website, messaging and idea. Well done.
if you guys need a place to host, please consider controlplane.com
iAMkenough 6 hours ago [-]
Basically a middle-man for a Mullvad VPN, where if Mullvad decides to pull out of their agreement with this company, you lose your connection and are hopefully refunded.
The single point of failure for this product is Mullvad and its leadership's changing opinions.
dgellow 6 hours ago [-]
Obscura itself is also a point of failure
nalekberov 6 hours ago [-]
I don't like 'us vs others' kinda comparisons, it's just marketing trick, which means they care more about sales than your privacy.
Secondly, Mullvad did what Obscura does now years ago.
We wrote a research paper on the general principle a few years ago: https://conferences.sigcomm.org/hotnets/2022/papers/hotnets2...
The Decoupling Principle: A Practical Privacy Framework [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33897450 - Dec 2022 (3 comments)
Perhaps we should arrange a new thread about this?
I didn't realize Chris Wood was also an author!
Many (if not all) of the benefits on the landing page are available in Mullvad too, which is a more mature and reputable product, has all clients fully open-source, and powers the exit servers for Obscura.
Why should I choose this over Mullvad?
According to Obscura's legal page, it is a New York-based company [0]. Under US law, a secretive court order could compel a US company to update software or implement targeted logging on a specific user without notifying that user.
The only scenario where Obscura would be useful is if Mullvad were compromised. Why would I trust a New York company to shield me from a more reputable Swedish company?
[0]: "(2) your written notification must be mailed to 169 Madison Ave.; Ste. 11185 PMB 63183; New York, NY 10016..." https://obscura.com/legal/
I love folks who are also reasoning through security models! A few things to note here:
- We believe that all software running on a user's computer should be open source, so you can audit and build your own client: https://github.com/Sovereign-Engineering/obscuravpn-client
- With traditional Single-Party VPNs, even if you trust them fully and they're honest, they can still be compromised or hacked. With Obscura, even if we're hacked there's nothing to leak (other than WireGuard packets fully encrypted to Mullvad's servers).
- The change in trust is that instead of trusting a single company (Mullvad), you're trusting that not both Obscura AND Mullvad have been compromised, which is strictly less likely.
Another question: How does the Obscura client get the Mullvad exit server’s public key? Are they hardcoded at compile time, fetched from Mullvad's server, or fetched from Obscura's server?
The latter seems to be dangerous if there isn't some kind of signature verification done on the client side before using the key.
We do currently show it in the app and there's an easily clickable link so you can verify against Mullvad's website for the pubkey
https://codamail.com/articles/privacy-law-directory/internat...
"EU surveillance co-operation"
As for what's different: We're a Multi-*Party* Relays (vs. traditional VPNs which are Single-Party Relays): https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2024/11/17/where-are-...
With Multi-Party Relays you no longer have a trust a single entity not being malicious or compromised. More on this here: https://obscura.com/#how
Also, all our apps are open-source as well: https://github.com/Sovereign-Engineering/obscuravpn-client
Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Obscura.
The differences are:
- We allow you to choose an exit location (I believe iCloud Private Relay restricts you to the same location)
- Our exit hop is Mullvad instead of Cloudflare+Fastly+Akamai
- We use QUIC for transport instead of HTTP/3 (which is built on QUIC and has a bit more overhead)
“1: Maintain general location
2: Use country and time zone
Maintain your general location to receive localized content, or enhance your privacy by using a broader IP address based on your country and time zone.
Safari Private Browsing always uses an IP location from your country and time zone.”
1.5k comments discussion for context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717469
Many src-dst connections but as a single logical connection. There's no way any middlebox could easy capture full data even metadata.
http2/QUIC can do something similar with frames (and hopefully multipath)
Don't place your whole stream inside a single src-dst IP connection. Demux them into many paths over the Internet. We need more variety of "traffic shapes" to combat Internet surveillance.
I'd argue it's even more effective than encryption. Split your activity and mix them, monitor traffic over a single transport is useless.
Yup, exactly!
Very true, but if even 1 of (Obscura, Mullvad) is honest, there's no de-anonymization.
For traditional Single-Party VPNs, you just need to compromise 1 party, with Two-Party Relays, you need to compromise both.
side note: i really wish more companies did the no email + randomized account number flow. there is a certain popular "pro-privacy" product beloved by many here that requires an email address and refuses to offer a similar account number method, which has turned me off the product.
Yeah we thought the randomized account number flow was an ingenious idea, so we did that and made the last digit a Verhoeff checksum to check for mistypes!
Though sometimes people forget to write the number down and... There's not much we can do.
Please don’t speak in riddles. Just say what you mean.
although i guess people's curiosity is also dragging my comment in an unrelated direction anyways. lose-lose situation.
my main point is that the account number method is really nice, and a great selling point for such privacy-conscious products. not offering it in a privacy-conscious product is enough signal that it has made me choose not to purchase the product. that's the important bit, and where i was hoping to drive the conversation.
this isn't some hidden feature you get caught with your pants down over. if you try to sign up to something and it doesn't offer an account number, you know that it doesn't offer an account number instantly.
no time wasted for you. it's not some nefarious plot by the company.
it's just a business decision. i was hoping to talk about the business decision of that particular sign up flow.
I also have no idea what company/service you're talking about
next time i will just keep my thoughts to myself and we'll all be happy.
> side note: i really wish more companies did the no email + randomized account number flow.
Everything you said after that added confusion and this tangent instead of the conversation you wanted to have.
If you're talking about Proton VPN, they do support "credential-less accounts" through their official apps, I believe? At least, on Android since 2024: https://www.androidpolice.com/proton-vpn-works-without-accou...
Proton VPN ensures privacy.
I guess they never heard of Zero Knowledge Systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Knowledge_Systems
This doesn't prove it. However, Obscura makes it so that there's no *single party* that if hacked or otherwise compromised would hurt your internet privacy.
Other than the obvious hassle? XP
If you connect to Mullvad over NordVPN:
- You're giving both Mullvad and Nord some payment information (with Obscura you only give that to us, Mullvad has no idea)
- You don't get our QUIC-based obfuscation (see more here: https://obscura.com/blog/bootstrapping-trust/)
You would go with this solution if you don't trust Tailscale or NordVPN, I guess.
I could be wrong but in Tailscale if you use Mullvad as an exit node, the traffic flows directly from your device to Mullvad's servers.
Whereas with Obscura, your traffic flows to the Obscura relay, then the Mullvad exit.
I'm under the impression that my personal device isn't the WireGuard endpoint for the Mullvad connection, Tailscale is.
This is where part of your money flows to (I have opinions about this).
Not sure if you are also aware of it.
Seems like you guys have two distinct ideas of a visual identity completely at odds there. Shape contrast is nice and can be rather fun to play with, but it has to be handled with care. Right now it feels like the designer had a bunch of ideas and didn’t know how to bring them together in a cohesive identity.
Bonus point for the TRON reference at the end! “I fight for the users!”
I'm a sucker for retro 8-bit graphics and fun mascots, so we went with that, but when we experimented with 8-bit for actual UI and long text we immediately found it to be super unusable and unreadable :-(
> Bonus point for the TRON reference at the end! “I fight for the users!”
Ah ofc the HN poster knows the reference :-) I've had it as my email signature since high school I think.
Packet padding but no docs about this?
Happy to answer any questions y’all might have!
Also, the technical folks may be more interested in our original post: https://obscura.com/blog/bootstrapping-trust/
Some of them rely on people having a helpful third party in ("free") country to set up a private relay in something like Azure IP space that isn't used by any other VPN users, so it doesn't attract a level of attention (or attention by multiples of different peoples' encrypted flows) that publicly published commercial VPN services do. It's a hard problem to solve on a scale of more than a couple of people.
The multi party relay concept is great, my concerns are more with traffic detection/DPI in between the end user and the first hop in the relay.
I believe QUIC has been harder to block for censors, esp with Chaos Protection on by default in Chrome. See: https://gfw.report/publications/usenixsecurity25/en/
They are careful to not exactly claim the same anonymity properties of Tor, though I think a lay reader will read that differently (ie, that they do have the same anonymity property as Tor).
That said being able to verify the inner wireguard conn to mullvad is nice. Of course you have to trust them that they aren't colluding with mullvad to share your identity/ip. But same goes for OHTTP.
Actually it's WireGuard over QUIC Unreliable Datagrams!
See: https://obscura.com/blog/bootstrapping-trust/
The single point of failure for this product is Mullvad and its leadership's changing opinions.
Secondly, Mullvad did what Obscura does now years ago.
Furthermore who needs a gamified VPN tool?
I totally agree for traditional Single-Party VPNs, which is why we are a Two-Party Relay. More here: https://obscura.com/blog/bootstrapping-trust/
Really? XD