Is VPN as secure as tor browser ?
Tor Browser does a lot more than a VPN and provides way stronger anonymity. A VPN simply routes your traffic through a VPN server hiding your IP address from the sites you visit and your internet activity from your ISP and others watching your connection. However this does not solve the problem of your traffic being traceable, it just shifts it to the VPN. The VPN will see everything your ISP used to see and while sites you connect to won’t know your IP address, the VPN will know your real IP address and which sites you visited. VPNs are privacy by policy. You have to trust the VPN not to keep any records of your activity without any guarantee for it. At any time the VPN can start or stop recording information about your activity. So even an audit by an independent company cannot guarantee the VPN is keeping its own promises and policy. Additionally VPNs are a single point of failure. Even if the VPN is not spying on you, you still have to trust it to secure its infrastructure against attacks. If an attacker gains access to the VPN server you are using they will be able to see and track your activity. Furthermore VPNs are an easier target to more advanced attacks on your anonymity like traffic correlation attacks than Tor is.
This is not even the biggest problem regarding anonymity and VPNs. Even if the VPN is trustworthy and not spying on you and there are no attackers spying either, most of the time the services and website you are using have much more effective ways of tracking you than your IP address and a VPN does exactly nothing against them. Cookies, browser fingerprinting, tracking and hardware IDs are much more accurate in identifying and tracking you than an IP address. VPNs simply do not grant you anonymity. They can be useful for hiding your internet activity from your ISP or people on your WiFi network if the VPN is more trustworthy than your regular network, however they simply do not make you anonymous to most services you are using. Tor Browser however routes your traffic through three random servers of the decentralized Tor network. Each server (also called node or relay) only knows the station before and after it in the route your traffic takes (also called circuit). The first node, the guard relay will know your real IP, your real identity, but it will not know your activity, it will only know the next node in your circuit, the middle relay. The middle relay will only know your guard relay and the last relay, the exit relay. It will neither know your identity nor your activity. The exit node will know the destination of your traffic, but it will not know your identity. It only sees the middle relay before it. It can also not track your activity across multiple sites and build a profile of you, because Tor Browser builds a new circuit with different relays for each site. (Your guard node will stay the same though. That’s a security feature against a certain attack on Tor). The same applies for the site you’re visiting. It will only see traffic coming from the exit node, but won’t know its origin, your identity. Tor is not privacy by policy like a VPN, it is anonymous by its design. No one besides you knows both your activity and your identity. Additionally Tor Browser is designed to resist against tracking techniques like cookies or browser fingerprinting.
Definitely not. VPN will route your traffic through just one server. It will hide your IP and ISP won’t know what websites you are visiting but the VPN company will know that. It’s better to use Tor where your traffic will go through three nodes before going to the actual websites so nobody can prove that you actually visited this website.
What do you mean by “secure”? What information are you securing, and from whom?
Tor provides vastly more anonymity than a VPN. It is inserting an untrusted party as a man-in-the-middle of your connection, however, so it gives them an opportunity to snoop on or change your traffic if you aren’t properly using transport-level encryption (ie https). Because it’s difficult as a user to verify that a website has https fully and properly configured, especially on a mobile device, I therefore don’t usually log into any accounts through tor and definitely don’t do any financial transactions.
What type of security are you talking about?
Tor uses multiple layers of encryption, so it’s somewhat more secure in that sense. The Tor browser does, however, disable or remove third-party services that check URLs to block known malicious sites and downloads (forgetting the name of this for some reason). It does come with a certain configuration of NoScript by default, so you’d be better protected against malicious scripts, even though you could configure a browser the same way and use a VPN.
I never store passwords on Tor browser so don’t know for sure if it offers Firefox Monitor like plain Firefox does. If it doesn’t, you could say that’s less secure in that you won’t get notice when your credentials are found in a credential dump.
Short answer: NO!
VPN and Tor are different things and cannot be really compared, even if it seems, at a superficial glance, they provide the same result. Above all, a VPN is not what many non tech people may think. I f you want to read something really interesting about VPNs , I suggest this long but detailed article by Dennis Schubert, a German Mozilla developer who tries to tell the truth about VPNs:
https://schub.wtf/blog/2019/04/08/very-precarious-narrative.html
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Both have their place depending on what you’re after, but I wouldn’t say VPN matches what Tor can do.
Tor is solid for privacy since it routes your traffic through several nodes, which can slow things down but offers good anonymity. VPNs, meanwhile, tend to be faster and secure your connection by encrypting data from your device. They’re useful if you want privacy on public Wi-Fi or to access geo-restricted content.
As an example, you can scroll through the selection on the VPN comparison table and see whether it would match what you’re looking for.
If you’re looking for something quick and private for everyday use, a VPN does the job, but for more anonymity, Tor could be a better choice.
They’re different. Tor Browser only handles traffic from that one app. VPN will handle traffic from all apps, services, internal OS stuff.
I use a VPN 24/365, and then sometimes I use Tor Browser too.
Just use a trusted vpn for securing: online gaming,streaming,torreting and every thing with accounts by the rest use tor which is more secure and makes you really anonymous.
Encryption Wise, both VPN and Tor use similar-strength encryption, usually AES.
But with Tor you get 3 hops, VPN you use 1 or 2.
Tor is better for anonymity (How to Overthrow CCP government, etc)
VPN is good for Torrenting, and preventing MiTM attacks.
I’ve used VPN for years and I’ve never had any problems. I like PureVPN because it is not a mainstream company. They have a trial, so it’s actually a pretty sweet deal to see if it works for you.
Check my profile for the link to the discounted offer.
So still confused. Please give a simple answer. Which is better at hiding stuff tor or VPN
What if a nation state runs most of these nodes?
He asked security I think…not privacy or anonymity
But what kind of security I can’t understand
Fantastic article, thanks for sharing. Best overview of a VPN I’ve ever read.
Simply: tor.
Paraphrasing the long comment, tor is built in a way where it is virtually impossible to spy on you, while VPNs simply say “we promise not to spy on you”. Even trusting this promise, they’re vulnerable to attacks or demands of governments. VPNs only gives you privacy from your ISP, not really anyone else.
This is in fact true for the US and most other countries. All nodes are owned by someone, most likely a government entity. If the government is trying to find you via your internet usage, they will always have ways of tracking you down. The best solution is talking to people in person, forget the internet, it is much more secure, and most likely there will be no records of what was said.
But what kind of security I can’t understand
Many people actually don’t see any difference between those three words: anonymity, privacy and security, so that’s why I said what I said. In relation to security there is not much you could even say here I guess: “will you get malware from using VPN or Tor? No.” and that’s it I think.