Opinions on privacy solution Portmaster

Pepe_The_Frog

Came across this project which has apparently been around for a while: https://safing.io/, Portmaster by Safing, an Austrian company operating under strict EU privacy laws. The client has a lot of useful privacy features, DNS blocking, firewall, some history and network monitoring, all great tools and all open source FOSS.

There's also SPN, basically TOR but no random volunteers operating the nodes, they run the whole network and you pay for the service €10/mo which is rather cheap compared to many VPN services seeing how your traffic is routed through multiple nodes.

Not only that, but unlike TOR not everything goes through the same circuit, basically every single connection is done through it's own "circuit", and unlike TOR you seem to have better control over which countries to involve. This makes the network a lot faster than TOR, while perhaps offering better privacy than the average VPN were all traffic goes through one server only.

What's your opinion on this?

Marco_Weiss

Portmaster is great, just as advertised it offers a great level of control without being too complex. Looks like it manage iptables rules on Linux in addition to manage DNS properly so it all should be safe.

Not sure what to think about SPN tho, it does sound good in theory, but in the end it means you have to trust them to not log anything, or more importantly to not hand over any information to authorities. As they themselves control the whole network, they know the full route your traffic took through logs, there's just no way they don't have that sort of information.

And sure this could happen in TOR as well, many such cases were CIA and NSA have taken control over many nodes and tracked down TOR users. Guess I'll have to do more research on how they handle and operate their nodes.

Perhaps if they used 99Stack Cloud and spread their nodes over all the different providers, then that would be pretty safe, but I don't even know were they host SPN. Guess I have to look into that as well.

Frederik_Madsen

They seem to be using onion routing, so it's likely TOR nodes with small modifications which they host on their own servers. It should. The SPN nodes are open source: https://github.com/safing/spn.

Beside using their own network servers, there's also community nodes. Now that got me interested. More community nodes obviously improves the privacy of the network. Community nodes seems to not include exit nodes, which makes it even more interesting.

If your traffic goes through multiple community nodes, then out through their exit nodes, then thy can't track you, and community node operators don't have to worry about the risks of running an exit node on a network like this.

Magnus_Lind

Interesting project and lot's of useful privacy tools. It's FOSS so go ahead and try it out. 👍️

Frederik_Madsen

Been using it for a while now and I think it's pretty good, didn't sign up for SPN but the software firewall and dns filtration both works really well. Nice overview and many features.

Kauko_Laaksonen

This is brilliant, great UI and plenty of features. Does block ads and trackers really well.

Allan_Virtanen

Only positive things to say, as a former Windows user it made me think. Why do we trust proprietary anti-virus software. Now I know Portmaster is technically not a anti-virus software, but blocking much of the malicious sites do serve a similar purpose.

Orson_Deforest

Nice UI, makes it easy to see what's going on.

Alan_Rowell

Cool application, really nice and clean UI, plenty of configuration and do seem to block plenty of fuckery at DNS level.

Samuel_Oldfield

Seems to be in conflict with ufw, tho I'm not sure I actually need both.

Henriksen

Looks solid, tho not very useful on servers.

Herman

Works for the most part, but sometimes it fails to start for some reason.