User:Pjust70/sandbox

AirVPN offers an Internet service aimed to enhance personal data protection, improve privacy and bypass Internet censorship through technical tools focused around a virtual private network (VPN) service and The Onion Router.

AirVPN was founded in 2010 by Italian activists and is currently operated by a company with the same name in Italy.

The service is based on OpenVPN and optionally on Tor. AirVPN develops and releases desktop applications for GNU/Linux, macOS, OS X, Microsoft Windows operating systems and mobile apps for Android. Manual setup is available for DD-WRT, Tomato, MerlinWRT and OpenWRT routers, as well as pfSense systems. . To date, AirVPN designs, develops and distributes exclusively free and open source software released under GPL.

AirVPN is based in Italy and operates servers in countries where no mandatory data retention law is in force. According to the privacy notice and terms, the service is compliant to the EU 2016/679 General Data Protection Regulation "GDPR" and does not log and/or store clients traffic content or metadata. The service privacy terms, furthermore, explicitly claim that entering any personal data into the service accounts information is not required.

Features
AirVPN bases service delivery essentially on OpenVPN and Tor. OpenVPN is configured in TLS mode: the Control Channel supports up to TLS-DHE-RSA-WITH-AES-256-GCM-SHA384 cipher suite while the Data Channel up to AES-256-GCM with AEAD for packets authentication cipher suite. TLS version 1.2 is supported as well. Perfect Forward Secrecy is achieved through Diffie-Hellman key exchange with 4096 bit DH keys.

Users can chain OpenVPN and Tor, Tor and OpenVPN, any local or external proxy and OpenVPN, OpenVPN and additional TLS and SSH tunnels.

AirVPN supports IPv6 as well as IPv6 over IPv4. When OpenVPN 2.4 or higher versions are used, the service supports also "tls-crypt", a typical OpenVPN operational method to encrypt the whole Control Channel, which has been instrumental in bypassing OpenVPN blocks enforced by the Great Firewall of China.

The free and open source software "Eddie", developed by AirVPN, automatically allows a connection of OpenVPN on Tor on all supported desktop platforms by preventing the infinite routing loop problem without requiring manual setup by the user. However, this feature is not available on the Android version.

The software may optionally set firewall rules to block traffic to flow outside the VPN tunnel, a feature named "Network Lock" and thought to prevent unintended "traffic leaks" in clear text or coming from the client real IP address.

The servers running OpenVPN are dedicated servers and each one runs its own DNS server.

Related activities
AirVPN runs mirror servers to distribute open source software which is allegedly "compatible with AirVPN mission". STunnel, VLC Media Player, Tor Project and some GNU/Linux distributions such as Tails and Devuan use AirVPN mirrors too.

AirVPN runs Tor nodes and has supported and supports financially or technically various organizations and foundations including EDRi, OpenNIC and OpenBSD Foundation.

Reception
In 2011, after the LulzSec members identity was compromised by logs kept by the HMA VPN service, The Guardian published a part of AirVPN press release. Claims by HMA were, according to AirVPN, incorrect and dangerous for the "mere conduit" status of Internet Service Providers. Privacy International wrote that AirVPN offers a service which Privacy International "would happily recommend"

In 2011, AirVPN was praised by Rick Falkvinge for having started to accept Bitcoin as payment method, a feature which still maintains nowadays.

Ever since 2011 TorrentFreak has interviewed AirVPN each year in the annual comparison of VPN providers.

In 2015, Tom's Hardware led a survey amongst the magazine readers and AirVPN came out as the top choice with the highest average vote from the readers. The magazine consequently wrote a dedicated review which described the service favorably.

In 2017, AirVPN was the 4th top donor to finance an OpenVPN security audit under Ostif initiative.

In 2017, Freedom House mentioned AirVPN as one of the tools which are effective to evade Internet Censorship in Saudi Arabia and other countries.