HidesterVPN and its CamoVPN protocol

[NNT 0]

Just found this VPN for curiosity. https://hidester.com/

On it's website a protocol called CamoVPN has been described as a better protocol for circumventing china's firewall than OpenVPN. https://hidester.com/wiki/index.php/CamoVPN

This caught my eyes, since I am in China now. After a little bit thought I guess that could be another fancy name of obfuscation method(I've already have a backup VPN using obfsproxy protocol). What do guys think about this VPN?

[Casper31 73]

Just found this VPN for curiosity. https://hidester.com/

On it's website a protocol called CamoVPN has been described as a better protocol for circumventing china's firewall than OpenVPN. https://hidester.com/wiki/index.php/CamoVPN

This caught my eyes, since I am in China now. After a little bit thought I guess that could be another fancy name of obfuscation method(I've already have a backup VPN using obfsproxy protocol). What do guys think about this VPN?

At first glance hidester seems oke, but realize  they use fonts from google to track you. That`s bad for the privacy. There are better  solutions as a backup.

 

Have a good day,Casper

[LZ1 672]

Hello!

 

It sounds like a protocol which is just a re-branded SSL, that Eddie already supports. But it's a proprietary technology of theirs and the subsequent lack of clarity about what they're using, is in itself an argument against them . Other companies in this industry offer this kind of thing as well. Special "camouflage" protocols/systems. It's just for marketing purposes.

 

I went around their site and if the goal is to compare it to Air, the result is quite harsh on Hidester. It seems there's many inconsistencies:

• They'll say they use Piwik for internal analysis, which is good. Air does too. But then they'll say they use XYZ third party companies and that these handle customer data, anyway.
• They'll say they offer encrypted proxies and then say their proxies are unencrypted and not all their responsibility. Air runs no proxies.
• They'll say they don't keep traffic logs, while using other more egregious forms of tracking on their site, such as Hotjar web pixels, google fonts and the aforementioned data-sharing. Air has piwik, that's it.
• They'll say a lot of pretty baseless things about other VPNs, such as "we don't overload our servers like others do", under "Top Speed". Air makes no such claims, because it's not helpful; possibly defamatory too.
• They'll talk about their location deployment policies and then still add Russia as a location, which is a dubious choice. I think Airs policy is much more consistent then.
• They'll say their servers don't restrict and yet elsewhere say P2P is available on "selected" servers. There's no apparent DMCA policy either, besides only using specific countries for P2P, where they might not get a DMCA notice. Likewise, there's no restriction, but they throttle those who consume too much.

There's too many things to mention.

 

To my eyes, it also doesn't look so appealing how unabashed they are about affiliate marketing: "High Conversion Rate = More Money!", which means few, if any, reviews about them are trustworthy.

 

They spread myths as well, such as by going so far as saying users will be "Hackerproof", by using their product. I think that's a dangerous misconception, among many.

 

Other worrying things, headed under "VPN Service" in the legal section include:

 

Hidester Service may send diagnosis data to a third party analytics provider for troubleshooting purposes such as identifying connection errors and possible bugs in our application.

 

In terms of technical features, I think it's a real shame they don't do better:

 

• I think it's quite strange that they offer all sorts of proxies, camo-stuff, browser fingerprinters, password-generators(!), 2-3 kinds of leak tests, but no DNS of their own, for their users.
• They actually instruct users to consider using Google's DNS, among others, which has to be a big no-no. 
• There's sparse information about their client and that means it's probably proprietary software. Although if the pictures are to be trusted, it looks nice enough to me, in terms of simple design.
• They don't elaborate on their killswitch and it doesn't seem like it can do too much or how it's implemented.
• There's no port-forwarding options, from what I can see.
• There's no support for Tor or much else, in their client. But to their credit, they don't seem to use protocols such as PPTP.
• Their software/company doesn't support routers. But again, to their credit, they offer 5 connections per account, which is good. On the other hand, their ToS says you can only make one account, as far as I can see.
• Their software requires MacOS 10.5 or higher, but when it comes to Windows, they simply write "Microsoft Windows". Which presumably means their client also runs reliably on Windows XP, Windows 98 and maybe DOS too?
• I think it's poor practice to supply a Proxy list on their own website and then list in their legal section that these proxies aren't from the company itself and aren't encrypted.
  

  When you use the Proxies provided in our Hidester Proxy List, you must understand that these proxies are not managed by Hidester and that the traffic data exchanged between your device and these proxies is not encrypted.

You can also find their answers in TorrentFreaks 2018 questionnaire:

 

1. We do not log any information that can link a VPN IP-address and timestamp to a specific user. We do not collect connecting IP addresses from our members when they are using Hidester VPN Service.

2. Our company is incorporated under the name of Hidester Limited. We are incorporated in Hong-Kong, as this country does not have any data retention laws or regulations.

3. As explained above, we do measure total traffic volume (incoming and outgoing) by our members on a daily basis, to avoid excessive consumption of bandwidth by abusive users that would significantly reduce quality of service for other members. So far, we do not have had any problem with any our members.

4. Our website analytics tool is Piwik and is self-hosted on our server. This tool records information about hidester.com website visitors, and is not linking in anyway website visitors with our Subscribed Members.

5. Our P2P-enabled servers are opened in countries known by us to not process DMCA or local equivalent. So we in case we receive such enquiry, we simply apologize that we CANNOT provide further information regarding our Member as we do not record the data needed to link traffic sources and destinations.

6. We will reply to such a court order that we do not know which users are using our servers and that we are not legally obliged to do so. This has not happened so far.

7. All P2P-enabled servers are identified in the server list window of Hidester VPN application by a small double arrow icon on the right side of the server name in the list. Some servers are not P2P-enabled for legal reasons (hosting countries could force us to shut them down in case of court summon).

8. We are using Paymentwall, PayPal, and CoinPayments as our payment providers. Paymentwall and PayPal collect payers IPs and we cannot guaranty full anonymity for our Members using Paymentwall (Credit Card) or PayPal. For full anonymity even at account creation level, we recommend our Members to use CoinPayments with many cryptocurrencies of their choice to ensure full anonymity.

But once again, our NO LOG on traffic data does not allow us to link data traffic sources and destinations, which was the cornerstone of our VPN software development on all computer applications (Mac / Windows / Linux).

9. Our most secure VPN protocol is OpenVPN, running with an AES-256-CBC TLS 2048 bits Encryption. We recommend using this one for torrenting, except for Members located in censored countries, where CamoVPN might provide a more stable connection.

10. We provide a kill switch function, as well as a DNS leak protection when using CamoVPN and OpenVPN protocols.

11. We use third-party hosting providers VPS servers. We mostly use well-recommended hosting providers which exist for a long time on the market. We use OpenDNS and Google DNS servers for our services.

12. We have servers located in over 33 countries, the full list is available here. We do not offer virtual locations

 

But I commend them for a pretty website and for offering their software on many platforms including Linux.

 

Taking all this into account, I think it's frankly ambitious of them to offer a "Business VPN". I wonder which business would do this.

 

If I were them, I would suggest they slim down their product and focus on getting a few core things right, such as not using proxies, making their software open and following good practices for security.

 

As they say in their conclusion on WebRTC, "you’re only as anonymous as the systems you use", now isn't that true .

[zhang888 1066]

I will just put it here...

 

https://hidester.com/wiki/index.php/Install_HidesterVPN_on_Linux

 

wget http://hst.zone/dl-linux-x64 (check the link on the Hidester download page).
sudo chmod +x ./HidesterVPNBeta-x.xxxx-linux-x64-installer.run
sudo ./HidesterVPNBeta-x.xxxx-linux-x64-installer.run

No comments.

Definitely getting random shell scripts over http and then running them in sudo is a perfect, unhackable security in 2018 

 

https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=curl%20sudo&src=typd

[Staff 9973]

Can you please keep in mind that "its" has NOTHING to do with "it's"?  

 

Fixing the topic subject.

[RaineyPass 12]

The name...

[SDBF 22]

The name...

...sucks