Free P2P VPN

People use a VPN — virtual private network — for a lot of reasons. However, for many people it is synonymous with hiding your network traffic, one thing that VPN can do. FreePN is a relatively new open source project that aims to build a free peer-to-peer VPN network. Like TOR, it is decentralized.

Right now, you can download for Ubuntu and Gentoo. There is a way to ask for early access for Debian, Fedora, and Arch. Windows, iOS, MacOS, and Android versions are promised for the future.

The code is on GitHub, so all questions are in theory answerable. Digging into the fpnd README told us most of the features we hoped to find on the main page (but didn’t):

The FreePN network daemon (fpnd) is a P2P implementation of a distributed virtual private network (dVPN) that creates an anonymous “cloud” of peers where each peer is both a client node and an exit node. Peers are randomly connected on startup and reconnected to new (random) peers as needed.

The FreePN network daemon (fpnd) is a P2P implementation of a distributed virtual private network (dVPN) that creates an anonymous “cloud” of peers where each peer is both a client node and an exit node. Peers are randomly connected on startup and reconnected to new (random) peers as needed.

In addition, the page notes that they only route http(s) traffic and, optionally, DNS traffic. IPv6 packets are dropped, unless you configure it to pass without VPN.

Is this a better answer than TOR? We don’t know. We weren’t clear on how you could set this up for some possible use cases, but there appears to be a fledgling support group on Reddit. If this works well and can support more platforms, it could be a good thing for online privacy and protection.

We’ve noted before that truly secure networking can be hard to accomplish. For many of us, a VPN is just an extra layer of security, or a way to watch TV that is only available in another country. But for some people, a VPN is a political necessity.