Alphabet Outline VPN

A virtual private network (VPN) lets you secure your privacy by routing your net traffic through an encrypted tunnel to a distant server. But using one means trusting a VPN company to protect your personal information, and your web traffic. Outline, from Alphabet-endemic Google-adjacent company Jigsaw, lets yous sidestep that trust issue by running your ain VPN on a server y'all control. It's easier to employ than some consumer services, simply does have some caveats and might be improve suited for use past modest companies than individuals. It'southward currently in beta, with some countenance-raising restrictions, but information technology already combines the friendly user pattern of the best VPNs with the DIY mentality of the open-source community.

Roll Your Ain VPN

The divergence between the Outline VPN and every other VPN service out in that location is that Outline isn't actually a VPN service. Instead, it's a tool for speedily creating and using a VPN yous own and control. With Outline, y'all no longer have to worry about another company managing your personal information and potentially seeing your traffic. You are the chief of your domain.

SecurityWatch To its credit, Outline has gone to nifty lengths to establish its security bona fides. The Outline applications are free and the lawmaking is bachelor on GitHub for the world to peruse and hunt for potential vulnerabilities. Jigsaw, the Alphabet incubator that spawned Outline, is also working to tackle other online safety challenges.

Outline was also submitted for a third-party audit by Radically Open Security in November 2022, and the results have now been made public as a PDF. That's keen, every bit information technology means that not merely apprentice issues hunters just besides trained professionals take examined Outline.

Under the hood, Outline is powered past the Shadowsocks protocol. I haven't seen many other VPN companies utilise this technology, only it is also open source and picked over for potential vulnerabilities.

Notably, Outline does not collect any data about you lot, your online activities, or even your hosting configuration. It does gather some data every bit office of its software update process, and what it describes every bit not-identifiable information later on a crash.

Hands On With Outline

The Outline experience is comprised of ii pieces. The first is Outline Manager, which is for creating and managing VPN servers. On its own, this first piece won't protect your web traffic. The second is the Outline client. This app is what creates the actual VPN connection and actually secures your traffic. Both are bachelor from the Outline website.

The Manager software is currently supported on Windows and Linux, with macOS support coming soon. The client software is available equally a VPN for Android, Chrome Bone, Linux, and Windows, with iPhone and macOS support in the offing. This is a bit more complicated than it sounds, as I'll explain below.

Installing the Outline Director is the work of a few seconds. Yous need to bring your own server to make Outline work, yet, but Outline suggests creating an account with DigitalOcean to host your VPN activities. In fact, you can sign in or sign up for DigitalOcean from within the Outline Manager app. I actually spent far more time futzing with DigitalOcean than I did with Outline, that's how piece of cake Outline makes the process of setting up a VPN server. The Outline manager notes that the software has been tested on Amazon EC2, Google Computer Engine, Linode, Liquid Spider web, and Vultr.

Note that while Outline is free, servers are non. Any web hosting service you lot decide to go with will have some hosting fees involved. DigitalOcean charges just $5.00 per month for 500GB of bandwidth, and included a $x credit when I signed up. Yous can choose your own hosting service with a virtual machine or virtual private server, or hook up Outline to the server you have in your garage. You take i of those, right?

I granted Outline access to my DigitalOcean account all from within the Manager app. A few seconds afterwards, information technology had taken care of all the back-end work and presented me with some choices of server locations. I selected New York, and the Outline Managing director spit out some keys for me to use to get devices online. These are what you need to access the VPN server you created.

You can create any number of keys to bring other people or devices online, and manage them all from inside the Outline Manager. You can also revoke those keys, and even delete your VPN server if you don't trust information technology any more. Spinning up a new one takes merely a few seconds.

New keys in hand, I fired upward the Outline windows client. I entered the cardinal when prompted and seconds after I was online via VPN. I confirmed that my apparent IP address was indeed dissimilar when the VPN was active.

I cannot overemphasize what a remarkably piece of cake experience this was. I have set up and used dozens of VPN services, but Outline was totally different. I expected that, similar most open-source DIY projects, this would be the piece of work of an entire afternoon. Instead, information technology took about eight minutes from download to deployment. I actually concluded upwardly drumming my fingers, trying to effigy out what to practice with the rest of my solar day. In this respect Outline is already a winner, even in this beta iteration: it'south intended to make creating and deploying a VPN niggling, and information technology succeeds in every respect.

Speed and Functioning

As Outline is notwithstanding in beta, I have not performed a total speed exam evaluation. Even so, my preliminary results from using the Ookla speed exam tool showed a significant drib in download and upload speeds, and greatly increased latency—far more than I would unremarkably run into with a commercial VPN. (Note that Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, which besides owns PCMag.)

Given that Outline lets yous prepare and run your own VPN, these speed test results are more likely a product of DigitalOcean'southward hosting scheme. Outline, call back, is simply providing the software and management tools. The cease user has to bring the server, which is probably having a bigger impact on speeds.

Note, besides, that I don't recommend choosing a VPN on speed solitary. Value and commitment to privacy are far more important than the fastest VPN. In any case, Outline is still in beta, and so take these results with a grain of salt.

Major Advantages

I've frequently heard people refer to antivirus software equally "malware, but good." Consider that information technology can move files, modify itself, and fifty-fifty delete files without input from the user. If you didn't intend to install antivirus, information technology would be malware. The same is true with VPNs from a trust perspective. You install a VPN to protect your spider web traffic from snoops on your local network, to provide a mensurate of privacy on the wild wild web, and to proceed your activities hush-hush from your ISP. But in doing so, you give the VPN company as much insight as your Internet service provider, and then they had better be a good steward of your data.

Outline solves that by putting you in charge. Yous don't have to trust a VPN company with your data because you're the one that owns (or rents) the server(s) and manages them, as well. Using a commercial VPN safely in some countries is difficult if non actually impossible. Outline sidesteps that problem, also, since you command every aspect of the VPN.

Nearly VPN companies require that yous merely connect up to five devices at a fourth dimension, but with Outline you're only limited by the corporeality of bandwidth your server allows. Outline lets you easily create secure keys to get other devices and people online, with no limitations. You lot have to distribute those keys (in the form of URLs) yourself, preferably through a secure system similar Bespeak or ProtonMail. This makes it ideal for a small-scale organisation, like the newsrooms Outline targets with the copy on its website.

In addition to being shockingly like shooting fish in a barrel to prepare and deploy, Outline also handles some of the trickiest parts of VPN management. It automatically finds and applies software updates, and makes it easy to destroy and create new VPN servers with but a few clicks.

Major Limitations

Outline is easily the simplest, and friendliest digital DIY software project I've ever seen. It makes installing WordPress look similar rocket science by comparison. Only for all of that smooth, in that location's a lot that Outline doesn't even so do.

For i affair, running your own VPN means that yous take to, well, run your ain VPN. Outline will handle software updates, but you're on your own for server management and then on. Role of what VPN companies provide is a roster of ready-to-become servers in dissimilar parts of the earth. Presumably, those servers have met some level of security compliance, too. I tin't say the aforementioned thing nearly the VPN I spun up with Outline because, quite frankly, I have no idea what I am doing when it comes to server configuration.

It also ways that you just have admission to the servers yous tin can rent or run yourself. For case, with a DigitalOcean account, I was only able to create VPN servers in viii locations: Amsterdam, Bangalore, Frankfort, London, New York, San Francisco, and Singapore. Nigh consumer VPNs offer hundreds (if not thousands) of servers in dozens of countries.

Another major issue: at that place isn't still much support for the Outline customer or Manager software. Outline Manager, which is used to create and manage your VPN servers, is currently available only for Windows and Linux, with the Linux installation looking like it requires quite a bit more than try than the Windows application I used.

The Outline VPN client is currently only available for Android, Windows, and Chrome Os. That means that if y'all desire to connect a Mac or iPhone to your Outline VPN server, y'all'll accept to do some manual configuration.

I am also surprised and a flake disturbed about some of the limitations of the Outline client listed in its FAQ. Information technology says, "On Windows, Outline doesn't piece of work equally a total organization VPN yet," meaning that not all of your traffic may be encrypted. Information technology goes on to helpfully provide information on how to ensure that your traffic is encrypted, but that might be beyond the average person (who, admittedly, will probably not be using this service). Notably, the Outline Windows client alerted me that this was an issue when I started it up for the showtime fourth dimension.

Hide in Plainly Sight

A good friend of mine pointed out that on a large, commercial VPN service yous are just one of many users on any given server. Someone watching that VPN server might exist able to figure out that you're in at that place, somewhere, only they'll even so have to sort through all the other users. The same isn't truthful for my minor Outline VPN server. In effect, I traded my IP accost for the IP address of the DigitalOcean server.

To exist articulate: All VPNs aren't really in the business organisation of providing total anonymity. For that, you need a tool like Tor. Simply although Outline makes the case for many small VPNs being harder to close down than a few large companies, I wonder how easy it will exist for a adamant adversary to place your VPN's IP address with you. Too, I would dearest to run across Outline add together more than tools—setting up a Tor node or accessing the Tor network via VPN, for example—in future versions.

VPN for the Masses

Outline sets out to democratize VPN technology and succeeds admirably. Information technology'southward incredibly piece of cake to apply, and makes managing and deploying VPN access a snap. Its major drawbacks have more to practise with information technology beingness beta software than any underlying issues. We besides saw eyebrow-raising initial speed test results, although that is likely more than to practise with my hosting service. Nosotros'll do more than testing on this and other facets of Outline, are forthcoming, pending its release from beta.

All that said, managing your ain VPN server really simply makes sense for those truly defended to a kind of security cocky-reliance, or distributing VPN access to several other people.

Outline is definitely targeted at the latter, simply the former tin do good as well. If you're looking for an interesting weekend project, await elsewhere because Outline lets you set up a VPN before your coffee finishes percolating.