Psiphon’s Windows app does have 27 proxy server locations but if you want to use the Psiphon’s VPN service, you can’t choose which VPN server to connect to.
Psiphon’s Android app provides the most choice with 27 VPN server locations in total and the iOS app has 25: The number of Psiphon VPN servers available depends on the app you’re using.
One positive is that Psiphon can be used within China to gain access to the download page for a better VPN. But be aware that Psiphon is not the most secure option. Users can send an email to in order to receive the downloads and bypass government blocks, which is a good idea and something we haven’t seen before.įor that reason, if you find yourself unable to download one of our recommended China VPNs may find Psiphon a very useful tool for getting past government blocks.
One of the reasons that Psiphon’s proxy service is so popular in countries like China is that it provides a simple way for users to download the software from countries that block VPN websites and download pages, including Psiphon’s. You can read about our best VPN recommendations for China here. There are VPN services out there that work reliably in China, while providing strong privacy and security. Psiphon openly states that it isn’t designed to increase your online privacy, and shouldn’t be considered or used as an online security tool.
This means that if you want high levels of privacy you should steer clear. While the SSH proxies do encrypt traffic, encryption is limited to your browser traffic, leaving other apps unprotected. The only way to connect out from these high-censorship locations is by using Psiphon’s proxy servers, as they provide additional layers of obfuscation (SSH+). In other words, Psiphon VPN is blocked in China. Psiphon warns users that the VPN configuration (L2TP, or Transport Mode) does not have strong censorship circumvention capabilities.
Michael Hull, president of Psiphon, says there are 200,000 daily active users of the service in China.īut it’s not the VPN service that beats the Great Firewall – it’s Psiphon’s proxy service. Having no kill switch and the presence of leaks leaves your personal data exposed to any snooping third parties. Our tests of the Windows app revealed WebRTC leaks. While Cure53’s 2017 security audit of Psiphon revealed “no noteworthy security risks,” we did experience a few leaks during our testing which affected both the VPN and the proxy service. There’s no VPN kill switch feature, which would help to prevent your IP address from being exposed in the case of a connection drop. You can use the split tunneling tool with proxy configurations which tunnels server requests made within your home country outside of Psiphon’s servers, giving you faster access to these sites and reducing data usage.īecause Psiphon’s main goal is to access blocked content through the SSH+ proxy service, the apps don’t provide many advanced privacy settings at all. Psiphon’s proxies use SSH, SSH+ (obfuscated), and HTTP configurations. It’s fairly secure when used in combination with AES 256-bit encryption, but it’s needlessly weaker than the competition. Psiphon VPN operates exclusively on L2TP/IPSec rather than our preferred protocol OpenVPN. Psiphon specifically states that it will not give detailed or ‘potentially user-identifying information’ to partners or any other third parties, but we still don’t recommend it for those seeking high levels of privacy. The logs are used mainly for troubleshooting purposes and to ‘determine the nature of major censorship events’, where sites and services can be suddenly blocked without warning. These are further aggregated by date, sponsor and region.Īll of the data Psiphon collects is discarded after “at most” 90 days, which is a little longer than we’d like. Psiphon is supported by ads, and it does share statistics with sponsors so they can see, for example, how often their sites are visited through Psiphon and from which countries.
Psiphon admits to inspecting domain names (websites) users visit while connected, but not full URLs.