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Popular VPN provider Nordvpn uses their own VPN protocol based on Wireguard, Nordlynx.

They claim that using Wireguard alone would be less private:

WireGuard alone can’t ensure complete privacy. Here’s why. It can’t dynamically assign IP addresses to everyone connected to a server. Therefore, the server must contain a local static IP table to know where internet packets are traveling from and to whom they should return. It means that the user’s identity must be stored on the server and linked to an internal IP address assigned by the VPN.

and that their solution, based on a double NAT, fixes this issue:

We needed to find a way for the WireGuard protocol to work without posing a risk to our customers’ privacy.

And we found it. We developed something called a double NAT (Network Address Translation) system. This is the key to a secure connection.

To put it simply, the double NAT system creates two local network interfaces for each user. The first interface assigns a local IP address to all users connected to a server. Unlike in the original WireGuard protocol, each user gets the same IP address.

Is their (non-technical) analysis accurate, or are they selling snake oil? At first glance (from a non-professional), it seems to me that they are merely isolating part of their servers from others; all the benefits depend on their server architecture and essentially users are trusting them that they are not being tracked, even though Nordvpn could be lying about their server-side setup.

I googled to see if there have been any independent security reviews of this protocol, but I found nothing apart from what the company claims.

If this scheme really has privacy benefits oven Wireguard, why has the technique not been standardized, and why is it not used more widely?

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    I'm not sure about the snake oil part. There's no shortage of those products. However, I have to observe this is so totally on-brand for WireGuard. In the past few years, WireGuard has proliferated everywhere, why not marketing cap statements. Make Lateral Movement Great Again. Commented Feb 15 at 14:30

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Wireguard is a fairly simply protocol - which is good in one way but also means that it leaves things to be desired in more complex setups.

This means it is pretty common to have VPN software which uses Wireguard as the underlying transport but then adds a managment layer on top to have scalable authentication for lots of users, integrate with Zero Trust policies or other requirements. NordVPN is no exception here.

Apart from that VPN technologies usually focus on confidentiality and integrity for the transferred data, but are not about privacy. This is true for Wireguard, but also for IPSec, OpenVPN, ... Similarly TLS/HTTPS is not about privacy of the endpoint either, but is only about protecting the data in transit. So if keeping privacy of the endpoint is a requirement then one has to usually explicitly add this to a VPN technology, which is what NordVPN is describing.

... why has the technique not been standardized, ...

Standardization is a considerable effort. In order for something to be standardized there has to be a common interest of multiple players to have something interoperable. And such standardization is often a multi-year effort which in many cases results in an - from the perspective of a single use case - overly complex solution to meet the various use cases of all participants.

Because of this it is common that vendors use proprietary solutions if there is no need for interoperability or interoperability might even bad for business. And even if interoperability is useful it is not unusual to start with some non-standardized solutions first and only later make a standard out of it.

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  • Thanks! This answers many of my questions; my main remaining one is whether this technique is effective, or it boils down to "trust the server not to track you" like the standard implementation. Commented Feb 16 at 10:21
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    @FedericoPoloni: From my understanding the protocol basically allows them to separate user management and network management and make associations between these two more temporarily. This separation is good for privacy in case an attacker compromises one of their systems. But you still need to trust the VPN provider to not store unnessary information. Commented Feb 16 at 11:22
  • @SteffenUllrich By that same logic every improvement in security of a system that processes PII is an improvement in privacy which... is not untrue, but kind of muddies the waters and makes it harder to identify real improvements in privacy (things that actually remove a company's or individual's access to PII). (VPNs are about who you (have to) trust, not privacy. ) Commented Feb 16 at 15:43
  • @DavidMulder: There is no defined treshold at which something positive for privacy will be commonly accepted as a marketable privacy improvement. But this was not the question - it was about being snake oil or not. And it clearly is some kind of improvement to what wireguard provides by its own, so obviously not snake oil. – Commented Feb 16 at 17:00
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    @DavidMulder: Unfortunately we live in a world where everybody fights for attention and marketing is just part of it. It is not enough to do something useful, you really have to draw attention to it at least if you want to get some kind of return of investment from it. Not that I like it, especially the exaggerations and fictions vs. facts :( Commented Feb 16 at 17:57

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