Staff

Hello! It's in menu "Member Area"-->"Access without our client", direct link: https://airvpn.org/direct_access Instructions for Windows are here: https://airvpn.org/windows Kind regards

Hello! Thank you for your inquiry. Under a technical point of view, you can find some information on the FAQ, while this admin will leave to customers and users comments and reviews about p2p performance on different servers and from different locations. p2p is allowed on all servers. p2p is allowed on all servers. Anyway, you will be able to access Pandora and some other USA geo-discriminatory services even from non-USA servers. We'll launch soon (a matter of days, indeed) this additional service. Please see the FAQ for exhaustive explanation on that. https://airvpn.org/faq In order to see servers availability and information: https://airvpn.org/status Kind regards

Hello! The hardware check is over and no faults have been found in the hardware. Therefore, the reasons of the crashes remain unfortunately unexplained at the moment. We have brought the server up again and we'll investigate the issue further. Kind regards

Hello! Can you please try a connection over the TOR proxy directly with OpenVPN (i.e. not using the Air client)? You can generate the appropriate configuration and get certificates and key with the configuration generator. Kind regards

Hello! Can you please make sure that you have selected a TCP port (the proxy can't handle UDP) and that the proxy type (http or socks) is correct? Kind regards

Hello! Your current setup already provides a very robust anonymity layer. You can restrict the TOR exit node for which a circuit is established. However, narrowing down the possible exit-nodes might or might not lower the anonymity and/or the security layer, you should evaluate that. Some links: http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=311501 http://www.ghacks.net/2008/01/29/configure-tor-to-use-a-specific-country-as-an-exit-node/ Just in case you estimate that the above restriction is necessary but potentially dangerous for you, you might evaluate AirVPN over TOR as a replacement of your current TOR over OpenVPN setup, in order not to allow the few exit nodes you'll be going to use to see your traffic and real packets origins and destinations. https://airvpn.org/tor In the vision of a "connection as secure and anonymous as possible", if performance has not high priority you can also consider to: - connect over OpenVPN over TOR in a host machine - connect over TOR from a VM, in order to have TOR over AirVPN over TOR in your VM If performance has higher priority, but anyway you want to harden your anonymity layer (if for any reason you can't allow yourself to trust only our servers), you may consider OpenVPN over OpenVPN (however, you'll need two accounts to do that): - connect over OpenVPN in a host machine - connect over OpenVPN in a virtual machine toward a different Air server OR a competitor VPN service server, so that in the VM you will have a connection over OpenVPN over OpenVPN, which is generally much faster than [TOR over] OpenVPN over TOR Just search for "MAC spoofing". Anyway, you should ask yourself whether you really need that. The MAC address of your computer card never gets out of your LAN (it's just not a part of the network layer so the MAC address of your computer network card is visible only to your router and the devices inside your LAN). See here for some more information: https://airvpn.org/index.php?option=com_kunena&func=view&catid=3&id=5303&Itemid=142#5306 Kind regards

@HorseClaws Hello! Outbound port 25 is blocked to prevent spam. This is the only non-neutral constraint on our servers, it is absolutely necessary because spamming would cause a quick blacklisting of all of our IP addresses. The solution is quite straightforward, just use a different port and use SMPT over SSL or other forms of encryption/authentication. Clear text SMTP handshaking and mail sending must be avoided at all costs in any case. Kind regards Hello! If your ISP SMTP server does not accept connections from IP addresses outside its own IP range even if you have a valid account with it, you are forced either to disconnect from the VPN each time you send the e-mail (very annoying) or just find another mail provider that does not impose such (perhaps idiotic) restrictions. Kind regards

Hello! Phoenicis has "badly" crashed three time in 7 days. The datacenter technicians will therefore perform a full hardware check in order to try to detect the problem. The hardware check will take at least 6 hours, and the downtime will be even longer if some parts will have to be replaced. We will keep you informed. Kind regards

Hello! We're very glad to inform you that a new 1 Gbit/s server located in the Netherlands is available: Lyncis. The AirVPN client will show automatically the new server, while if you use the OpenVPN client you can generate all the files to access it through our configuration/certificates/key generator (menu "Member Area"->"Access without our client"). The server accepts connections on ports 53, 80 and 443 UDP and TCP. As usual no traffic limits, no logs, no discrimination on protocols and hardened security against various attacks with separate entry and exit-IP addresses. Do not hesitate to contact us for any information or issue. Kind regards and datalove AirVPN admins

Hello! As far as we can see, the maximum supported throughput (to encrypt and decrypt AES-256 on the fly) by the E2000 CPU is 7 Mbit/s. So the performance you detect is probably fine for the routers capabilities. You can try a connection directly from your computer to make a comparison. Kind regards

Hello! This is your own personal vision of practicability. Our vision is meeting our customers and users requirements. We have been asked how to hide the IP address of a client to our own servers, and an answer is OpenVPN over TOR, not TOR over OpenVPN. We have been asked how to hide the IP address of a client AND the payload contents of the clients packets to our own servers, and the answer is again OpenVPN over TOR, not TOR over OpenVPN. When you tunnel over TOR over OpenVPN, there's nothing more you can do, our servers will see your real IP address. When you tunnel over OpenVPN over TOR, you have plenty of chances to hide your traffic to our servers as well (just to make an example, with TOR over OpenVPN over TOR: you connect a host machine over OpenVPN over TOR, and you connect a guest machine over TOR, so from the VM you have TOR over OpenVPN over TOR). Actually, when life or personal freedom is at stake, our users don't mind about performance. If they have to send out highly sensitive data (for example for whistleblowing or to document brutality of an oppressive regime) it's a fact that they don't care whether it will take 10 hours instead of 1 minute. We just offer all the available options, then it's up to the user to decide which one to follow according to the power of his/her adversary or adversaries, but it's important that there's no confusing information about that, it must be very clear that TOR over OpenVPN does NOT meet the requirement to hide simultaneously the client real IP address and the traffic payload to our servers. This is a very Western-like point of view which does not take into account how an "anonymous" activist works and what he/she really needs. Actually, performance is not a problem up to the point that the most careful persons go even further, chaining OpenVPN over TOR over another VPN over proxy etc. This can be easily done following the most basic security rule, separate accounts and routes for separate activities. The price in terms of performance hit is totally irrelevant. That's quite obvious, because if you tunnel Bitcoin over TOR, it does not matter the the TOR exit node will come to know your transaction, because when you obtain the code and use it to activate any account you wish in our https website (always over TOR, to hide the IP address to our website) you solve automatically the two problems: it's irrelevant that the TOR exit node is compromised/malicious AND the correlation between the Bitcoin payment and an account in Air is destroyed. The importance of their posts is their reproducibility, just like with any scientific inquiry. Run your own TOR exit node and you'll be able to reproduce those results. This is argument has been partially faced in another thread: https://airvpn.org/index.php?option=com_kunena&func=view&catid=3&id=5317&Itemid=142 In general, if you are not "caged" and you can entirely trust an SSL certificate, then you're safe, but that's not always the case (and we go back to the discussion about vInspector and similar products). The real and successful attacks performed by hostile entities are numerous and we can come back to them when possible. I do not think your first sentence is entirely accurate, on various levels. The second sentence is true—if it were true, but you need evidence to buttress it. You have just to consider all the stolen SSL certificates in real cases in the past (for example the Comodo affair http://techblog.avira.com/2011/03/24/stolen-ssl-certificates/en/ ) to have some significant examples and ideas about how it was possible that such attacks were successful. It is indeed a real world scenario and the argument is exactly on this point. Feel free to start a poll, although there might be a bias due to users who don't care or don't have the time to answer about that. Most of the demands for hardening the anonymity layer through partition of trust (in order to hide IP address and traffic to our own servers) come from citizens living in human rights hostile countries. It's not a setup really necessary to file sharers, for example. In addition, you can use two different accounts, only one of them connects over OpenVPN over TOR every and each time. Kind regards

The fact remains when a connection is made to a server, the login credentials must be authenticated and the user's IP be visible in order to process the connection. Yes, this information is not "recorded" but it is visible--and it has to be. So in the final analysis, if a strong opponent comes after you (a government warrant), this "visible" information will be recorded and used against you. No, that's plainly false. If you connect over Air over TOR, our servers see the TOR exit-node IP address. We don't perform authentication on an IP basis and we our servers don't block connections from TOR exit nodes. Please see here: http://www.zoklet.net/bbs/showthread.php?t=99012 Nodes like that are not uncommon and it's very easy to run them and sniff all the traffic. Sites which allow non-https connections are very many. Even Yahoo and Facebook do not force https (and GMail forced it only recently) and for the experience of this admin even activists living in human rights hostile countries make those mistakes, which are fatal in social networks and e-mail web wrappers sites. The guy in the above thread was able to discover some interesting things and passwords, and a government can do much more. Unfortunately the evidence shows the contrary. Even e-mails of chinese people (who surely have a lot to fear from their government) could be sniffed in the above example. So you confirm that partition of trust is very necessary when someone deals with critical activities for which identity disclosure causes direct harm to physical safety and personal freedom. Look deep into darknets and specialized forums, you will discover a lot of interesting things. The above link was just an example. In real life, anonymity is not unlinked from privacy. The correlations you can perform when you control a significant portion of the TOR network may well lead to identity disclosure So the fact remains that the VPN can see your IP--and in truth, it has to, in order to connect to the server and to forward the IP packets. No, that's plainly false. If you pay with Bitcoin and you use the code to activate an account with a configuration to connect over Air over TOR, our servers NEVER come to know neither your identity nor your real IP address. If you forget to run the TOR proxy the OpenVPN client will not even reach any of our servers. On the contrary, if you use TOR over Air, our servers can see your real IP address. So one solution or the other is to be decided on a case by case basis, according to the adversary you have to face. They are two different partitions of trust. But "keep" does not mean it cannot be seen. And in truth, it has to be seen to authenticate the user. But the larger point here is this: if compelled to by a government, all users can be identified by their login credentials and their IPs. Connecting to Tor first to "hide" an IP from the VPN would be senseless since the authorities would already have identified you by the credentials and the IPs recorded. By exiting out of Tor, neither the authorties nor the VPN operator can know your destination. If the authorties come after you, for whatever reason, and they see you exited out of Tor--it is by magnitudes more difficult to be identified than if you exit out of a VPN server. No, again this is false, see above. With the specified setup, we NEVER know neither the identity nor the IP address of the customer, so we can't disclose those information, not even if we had a gun pointed to our head. Those information could not be discovered not even if one of our servers was monitored in real time. Kind regards

Hello! With the due respect, are you joking? First of all we're not in the USA, second and more importantly we don't turn on logging because "an USA individual" asks us to. Kind regards

Hello! Thank you for the nice discussion. Absolutely not: Air has been designed exactly with the purpose to leave the option to customers to NOT allow the admins to know the identity from the login credentials. It is well explained in the link given in the previous post: if you buy a code with Bitcoin from an independent reseller and you connect over TOR, there's no way in this world that Air admins can get to know your identity. Unfortunately not. If you use only TOR, you anyway need to trust: - that the exit node is not malicious or compromised; - that your adversary does not control the relevant portion of the TOR network you connect to. Control over the TOR network is possible by an adversary with enough power (for example a well determined government which controls the ISPs and the border routers). Bypassing the trust on one single party requires partition of trust. So, with VPN over TOR you defeat a malicious exit node and an adversary which has the power to control your line AND (the Air server you connect to OR the relevant portion of the TOR network). With TOR over VPN, you can't defeat this type of adversary and you don't defeat a malicious exit node. Kind regards

The link does not work. And I strongly suspect this is rubbish to the nth power. The traffic is encrypted and cannot be parsed in plain text. I have never heard or read of anything bypassing strong encryption. This is fanciful nonsense. Hello! You can imagine a situation where a citizen is "locked in a cage": the adversary must have the ability to poison the victim DNS and propose alternative (or stolen) SSL certificates which "look like" the original site. The victim is led to believe that he/she is not in a such a "caged" network and that the certificates he/she receives from the https websites are not fake. With the device advertised in the tvhawaii's link, the adversary can more easily succeed in its attack, because the device acts as a gateway to the real https website and sends fluidly (quickly enough so that the victim can't notice any suspect lag) the real pages of the site the victim connects to. Each vInspector devices is advertised as capable to handle up to 3.5 Gbit/s SSL throughput. Actually, this admin has had direct experience that this method has been repeatedly used by human rights hostile governments in order to capture and "decrypt" the traffic of their citizens to/from https websites, including GMail and Facebook. Kind regards

Hello! It's not possible to decrypt the packets you send to the VPN server and the packets you receive from the VPN server (not even by someone who's monitoring your line), except by your client. The device you link is meant to decrypt and re-encrypt SSL traffic for which it has already all the keys. This can be obtained in corporate environments or with malicious means, to which an OpenVPN hardened security based VPN is not vulnerable. To have a closer hint on how these devices work: https://supportcenter.checkpoint.com/supportcenter/portal?eventSubmit_doGoviewsolutiondetails=&solutionid=sk65123 EDIT If you're curious to see the strength of AES (Air data channel is encrypted with AES-256-CBC): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard#Known_attacks The fastest known attack against AES-256 requires 2^254 operations for key discovery... and OpenVPN executes TLS re-keying every 60 minutes. Kind regards

Hello! That's the whole point. An account used for critical activities for which the account holder does not want to let VPN administrators know its real IP address must always connect over the VPN over TOR. It's not difficult at all (once you have configured OpenVPN or our client to use a TOR proxy, OpenVPN will not even connect if you forget to run the proxy) and a careful person will always do that, or use separate accounts for separate activities. In our case, we are unable to correlate because we don't keep logs. But if a server is monitored in real time by an hostile entity, here you can see the great advantage of VPN over TOR. You can defeat an adversary even if it can monitor YOUR line AND VPN servers lines simultaneously, and this is a huge, really enormous benefit. Anyway, this sends us back to partition of trust. We have repeatedly been talking about the strong advantages of Air over TOR in order to perform partition of trust when absolutely necessary: https://airvpn.org/index.php?option=com_kunena&func=view&catid=3&id=54&limit=6&limitstart=6&Itemid=142#1745 Obviously partition of trust can be performed with any other socks or http proxy, or with VPN over VPN (for example just running a client in a host machine and another client which connects to a different server in a VM), TOR is just a significant example which gives some notable advantages (for example in TOR Browser Bundle you find a customized browser perfectly prepared to mitigate any privacy assault). It all depends on which adversary you have to face. A file sharer adversary is completely different from the adversary in human rights hostile countries. Kind regards

Hello! The problem was here: but immediately after, when restarted, OpenVPN could handle correctly the TUN/TAP interface: It's difficult to say for sure, but maybe the TUN adapter driver had crashed. If the problem persists, we would suggest that you uninstall completely and re-install OpenVPN, making sure to authorize the installer to install all the drivers. In our package for Windows OpenVPN 2.2.2 is included, while if you need different versions please see here: http://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source/downloads.html Also, we strongly recommend that you secure your connection against leaks in case of unexpected disconnections. You can find the guides to do that (according to your system) in the forum announcement section link. https://airvpn.org/forums Please feel free to keep us updated. Kind regards

Hello! That's why we accept Bitcoin (also through a separate reseller) and Liberty Reserve. If you tunnel over TOR over OpenVPN, the VPN can see your real IP address. So, if your aim is to hide your IP address to our servers and use every protocol over TOR, you have to go with Air over TOR. If you don't want to hide your IP address to our servers AND you don't need to tunnel UDP over TOR AND you don't need transparent tunneling over TOR, then TOR over VPN is an option. It's the opposite. If you tunnel TOR over VPN, you'll need to configure every single program to be tunneled over TOR, and you can't anyway tunnel UDP. If you tunnel VPN over TOR, our servers can't know who you really are and you bypass proxy limitations and need to configure every single program to be tunneled over a proxy. So it's just a matter of what you really need. Kind regards

Hello! Can you please try connections to different servers and especially different ports and protocols? Just in case your ISP caps bandwidth on some or all UDP ports. Kind regards

Hello! You can achieve your purpose with DNAT, please see here: https://airvpn.org/index.php?option=com_kunena&func=view&catid=3&id=2849&Itemid=142#4695 Kind regards

Hello! Yes, TCP has a full error correction and therefore you have a slight overhead which results in slower performance. If there's high packet loss or fragmentation, TCP may be able to let you connect anyway (while UDP might be unable to do that) at the price of performance. You should check the logs during an UDP connection in order to see whether you have packet loss or fragmentation (fragmentation is not so rare on WiFi connections). Kind regards

Hello! We have detected no problem at all with Serpentis in the last week. Some more details? Kind regards

@superduper Hello! Please try to uninstall completely OpenVPN. Then re-install it making sure that you authorize the installer to install all the drivers. Kind regards

Hello! Can you please try a direct VPN connection with your computer, both toward TCP and UDP ports? It's likely that you have some bottleneck on your routers. Also, please consider that most DD-WRT routers don't have the CPU power to support an higher than 7-8 Mbit/s AES-256 encrypted throughput. Kind regards