VPN provider ProtonVPN has presented a new protocol for bypassing government blocks. The Stealth protocol would be able to bypass most firewalls and VPN blocking methods, ProtonVPN claims. There are regularly countries that do not allow the population to use VPN services to visit censored websites, for example.
According to ProtonVPN, traditional VPN protocols such as OpenVPN, IKEv2, and WireGuard are relatively easy to spot on a network. As deep packet inspection (DPI) becomes more widely available, it will become easier for authoritarian regimes to block VPN services that use these protocols. In 2020, ProtonVPN came up with "alternative routing" a way to bypass such VPN blocks.
However, regimes do not sit still either, according to the VPN provider. Solutions to obfuscate existing VPN protocols would therefore no longer work properly. The Stealth protocol was built from scratch and would be almost undetectable, according to ProtonVPN. The VPN provider will not let you know exactly how the new protocol works. Stealth is available for both the free and paid VPN service. At the moment, the measure can only be activated in the ProtonVPN Android app. Soon it will also be available within the apps for iOS, Linux, macOS and Windows.