NymVPN litepaper and preview video released

Find a comprehensive deep dive into all the features of NymVPN ahead of its imminent launch

Author: Nym

November 2, 20239 mins read

Find a comprehensive deep dive into all the features of NymVPN ahead of its imminent launch

Today, Nym core team officially announces the NymVPN litepaper ahead of launch. The litepaper details the peerless privacy protections on offer, features a comprehensive competitor analysis, and explains exactly why NymVPN will be an essential tool for the future internet. NymVPN will preserve your privacy, resist censorship and keep all your data, including metadata, safe — even from the app itself. Let’s take a closer look.

NymVPN: unparalleled privacy protections

The NymVPN is the first truly private consumer product that encrypts data and protects traffic analysis of metadata.

NymVPN is entirely decentralised, powered by the Nym network, with no single central point of control or failure. It will be accessible with completely private payments in the form of zk-nym credentials, based on zero-knowledge technology, shredding any financial paper trail between the user and their access to the network.

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What’s more, NymVPN gives control to the users with two main options to choose from for their privacy needs:

VPN mode, a decentralised, secure 2-hop mode using the WireGuard protocol that’s optimised for speed — for medium-privacy/high-performance
Mixnet mode, for complete pattern protection security preventing even metadata analysis — for high-privacy/medium performance.

This is a groundbreaking product — until now, the privacy landscape has been fragmented, with even privacy-conscious users having to pick between or audit multiple technologies to understand what works for them. No longer: pick whatever you need in the NymVPN app and use the internet with confidence.

Features will include a built-in ‘kill switch’ failsafe so if your VPN or mixnet connection drops, your internet access is blocked too. In time, the VPN will also have split tunnelling features, so users can select exactly which application traffic to route through the mixnet or the VPN, so that they don’t have to switch between the two modes.

With the shifting sands of censorship and anti-digital rights legislation sweeping across the planet right now, a VPN will be an essential tool for anyone who wants to securely access the internet services that they require. And the Nym R&D team is also exploring proven censorship resistance technologies to further cloak mixnet traffic and make it indistinguishable from anything else — so that any person on the planet can enjoy the privacy protections that are their right.

With NymVPN, the privacy protections are without parallel.

Read the Litepaper now for an ultra in-depth deep dive of NymVPN, including competitor analysis and the wider privacy landscape. Learn how NymVPN stacks up against traditional VPNs — and even Tor.

With NymVPN, you get real privacy — made simple.

Why does the world need NymVPN? Because traditional VPNs aren’t really private. NymVPN is.

The VPN market is enormous and growing — in fact, a third of all internet users worldwide use a VPN. That’s billions of people who know they need privacy, integrity, and security. Unfortunately, the vast majority of VPNs do not actually protect your privacy.

Traditional VPNs bleed metadata

Although they mask traffic from your internet service provider, traditional VPNs are able to see your unencrypted traffic in full.

Even with your encrypted traffic, your metadata — data about data — remains exposed, and this metadata can be even more revealing than the content of messages itself.

As the former General Counsel of the NSA, Stewart Baker, once said: “Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.”

NymVPN uses its powerful mix network to obfuscate metadata, preventing powerful adversaries from conducting traffic analysis attacks and de-anonymising users through observing the network. Cloaking metadata is a complex problem and it is one that every existing privacy-preserving technology, even great projects like Tor and Signal, fail to address — until now.

Traditional VPNs are centralised — you have to trust the technology and the business, completely

Many centralised VPNs, even privacy-focused VPNs, claim they have a “no log policy” — but when push comes to shove, even supposedly private VPNs have turned over information to third parties.

What’s more, centralised VPNs have a central point of failure, putting them at grave risk of data breaches — possibly allowing observers to view traffic.

When VPNs are centralised, you have to trust their business structure, too, and sometimes this is complicated by many stakeholders who are not visible at first glance. In the case of ‘free’ VPNs, the user is the product — your every movement being tracked and then sold on to faceless data brokers for profit.

The question is: why risk entrusting any of this data to an unknown third party at all? It’s better to eliminate the risk of holding unnecessary data at all. This is what decentralisation via the Nym network offers.

Zk-nym credentials — solving the paper trail problem with real privacy

It is no secret that peoples’ financial lives are not exactly private.

When users pay for access to traditional VPNs, they leave a digital, financial paper trail behind, linking their payments to their account.

To solve this problem, NymVPN uses something called zk-nyms to shred that paper trail and ensure full privacy from the moment a user pays.

Zk-nyms are a credentials system based on zero-knowledge technologies. The user can be confident that their payments are private, but to understand exactly why, let’s take a look at what goes on in the background.

Essentially, zk-nyms are an access token that allow users to access the Nym network. They are issued by Nym-API nodes on the Nym network, after validating a user’s subscription and payment. The current implementation is based on the Coconut scheme, a cryptographic protocol that enables the issuance and verification of anonymous credentials, but optimised for use cases specific to Nym. For a deeper dive head to the Cryptology ePrint Archive here.

By exchanging fiat to native NYM, not only do zk-nyms preserve the users’ privacy for the whole stack, but this also guarantees the health of the NYM ecosystem, creating a steady stream of fiat to NYM that then circulates in the decentralised network.

Learn more in Nym Head of Research Ania Piotrowska’s masterclass on zk-nyms.

The global decentralised infrastructure behind the NymVPN

Take a look at the Nym Explorer for the current distribution of nodes — at present, there are 637 mix nodes in total along with 240 nodes in the ‘active set’, currently mixing traffic, in more than 60 countries.

While the NymVPN encrypts traffic, the actual nodes that this traffic is mixed through are run completely independently by node operators in order to guarantee decentralisation. With the VPN mode, users will have their traffic run through two hops of these nodes. With the mixnet mode, users will have their traffic run through five hops of these nodes with ‘mixing’ performed in the inner three nodes of the flow.

This decentralised system is the result of a great deal of academic work designed to create a self-sustaining privacy system. Contrary to privacy projects like Tor which rely on community goodwill, the Nym network is incentivised and governed democratically by its own community. It is the fastest, most reliable mixnet in existence today, making real the idea first conceptualised by legendary cryptographer David Chaum decades ago.

Check out the original Nym whitepaper and the brand new NymVPN litepaper for an even deeper dive on the Nym token economics.

Everyone is invited to participate in the health of this democratic, decentralised system. NymVPN users can, for instance, ‘delegate’ their NYM tokens to mix node operators — a vote of confidence in the quality of service of that node, and an investment, because delegators will receive a share of that node’s rewards.

Node operators and delegators therefore have a symbiotic relationship. Uptime and good quality mixes are rewarded, whereas if nodes perform poorly, the community can remove their NYM tokens from that node at any time, and place them in a competing node.

The whole system is carefully designed to promote community self-governance, along with an incentivised anti-surveillance business model — one that’s completely at odds with the current pro-surveillance business model of web 2.0. And with the payment conversion from fiat to NYM detailed above, Nym core expects an increase in activity in this ecosystem as more NYM tokens are acquired.

Below are the two main key entities in the underlying NymVPN network. Note there are more entities in the wider ecosystem specifically relating to our blockchain, smart contracts, economics including vaildators on the Nyx blockchain etc.

Mix nodes/relay nodes: These nodes form the backbone of the Nym network. They are responsible for routing users’ internet traffic through multi-hop paths, adding layers of privacy and security to online activities. Relay nodes are operated by independent individuals, each contributing to the network’s powerful decentralisation.
Gateways: These are the entry point and the exit points for traffic.

Again, in VPN mode, the data goes through two hops — via an entry gateway and an exit gateway, both encrypting traffic and located in different geographies.

In mixnet mode, the data goes through 5 hops. That’s the entry gateway, three intermediary ‘mix nodes’, where traffic is shuffled or ‘mixed’ so it’s indistinguishable, and the exit gateway.

Together, these entities form a decentralised, private environment where users can enjoy online activities without compromising their personal data or security.

By the end of 2023, NymVPN Beta will be available for testing to the Nym community. The paid version of NymVPN will launch very, very soon.

Keep an eye on this blog and Nym socials for updates as they happen. Join the Nym community and tell the Nym core team what you think — we’d love to hear your feedback.

In the meantime, read the litepaper now, and get ready for launch. 🚀