Mullvad and Obscura VPN
The VPN Company Mullvad has presented an interesting solution to hide your credentials from your VPN provider.
Mullvad has advocated for anonymous accounts for a long time and it’s possible to buy access via anonymous accounts by paying with cash or using crypto currency. This doesn’t require you to give them your billing information or other account information.
When customers shares billing information to their VPN supplier, the company acts as a man-in-the-middle and can see both your personal information, connecting IP information and browsing history.
When Mullvad cooperates with Obscura this information will now be hidden for Mullvad. This solution is only supported on Apple MacOS.
On Mullvad’s homepage they stated on the 11th of February 2025 the following:
"While connected through Obscura, your traffic first passes through Obscura’s
servers before exiting to the Internet via Mullvad’s WireGuard servers. This two-
party architecture ensures that neither Obscura nor Mullvad can see both your
identity and your Internet traffic."
Obscura states the following on their homepage:
“Obscura’s servers relay the WireGuard tunnel between your device and Mullvad’s servers. Essentially, WireGuard-over-QUIC.
This looks something like:
<user> --> Obscura Server --> Mullvad Server --> <internet>
This ensures that no single party has the information to leak or correlate your traffic and your identity, since:
- Obscura’s servers are unable to decrypt the WireGuard packets it relays, since they are encrypted to a Mullvad server’s WireGuard pubkey.
- Mullvad’s servers never see your connecting IP since Obscura’s servers are effectively doing NAT.
Your device connects to Obscura’s servers over QUIC, meaning:
- Obscura connections are harder to detect or block since they look like regular internet traffic (HTTP/3 uses QUIC for transport).
- Obscura avoids the TCP-over-TCP meltdown problem since we use QUIC’s unreliable datagram extension.
Still curious? Read our blog post on Obscura’s design.”