I saw that Proton VPN recently posted here that their Linux GUI has now been released - and they offer Tor over VPN on one of their tiers.
Anybody know of any other options?
Once again… Don’t use Tor with a VPN.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TOR/comments/o75etr/stop_the_tor_vpn_questions_full_explanation/
Linux…cool. But, I wouldn’t trust a third-party.
I mean … what’s the harm in asking? Knowing what solutions are available that meet a couple of criteria doesn’t mean that I necessarily intend using any of them.
In any event, I appreciate the explanation. If you don’t mind I’m C&P-ing here (for my own reference) the part of your post where you discuss the key vulnerabilities with both VPN over Tor and Tor over VPN. I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting what I thought were the important points!
Tor over VPN:
As you can see, to connect to Tor, you gotta route your traffic through the VPN server, essentially making the VPN server a permanent entry node to the Tor network, instead of trusting the first (guard) node in the circuit (which were invented to try to mitigate a traffic correlation attack). This will move the point of trust from your ISP to the VPN provider. Introducing a 3rd party that probably has extensive amount of payment and personal information about you into an anonymizing scheme is wrong. Not even gonna mention that due to the nature of the IP protocol, they will still know your IP address (no matter how “no log” they are).
VPN over Tor:
This approach on the other hand makes the VPN a permanent exit node, which defeats the purpose of Tor, because the middle and exit nodes are supposed to change frequently. You might be accessing the VPN “anonymously”, however this has limitations since you wont be able to visit onion services (at the end of the chain, youre not in the Tor network anymore) and you wont be able to route UDP traffic, since Tor can only work with TCP data.
You can debate over this. Yes, in the most cases you can trust your ISP more than your VPN provider. And the thing with the traffic correlation attack is not a attack case that are used against the normal TOR user. In my opinion, TOR over VPN had the advantage that you can control by yourself which is your entry point to the TOR network. If you live e.g in North Korea, your entry point to the TOR network should not be your local ISP. For this you also can use TOR Bridges, I know.
This will move the point of trust from your ISP to the VPN provider. Introducing a 3rd party that probably has extensive amount of payment and personal information about you into an anonymizing scheme is wrong.
I personally see nothing compromising / wrong with using a free VPN (one that doesn’t require account creation / payment) via OpenVPN and then launching the browser. OpenVPN has a network manager plugin / gui, will work with Ubuntu.