Companies all over the world sell VPN services to secure your online activity, but can you really trust a VPN provider? If you want, you can create your own virtual private network with the open-source Algo software, and the cloud-hosting provider of your choice.
VPNs and Trust
Regardless of what the privacy policy says or boasts about security audits on a company blog, there’s nothing stopping a VPN from monitoring everything you do online. In the end, choosing a VPN service all comes down to trust.
If trusting faceless online services isn’t your thing, one alternative is to run your own VPN server. This used to be a daunting task, but thanks to the open-source project Algo from security company Trail of Bits, creating your own VPN is now easy.
For $5 per month, you can run and control your own full-time VPN server. Even better, you can use Algo to set up and tear down VPN servers as you need them, and save money in the process.
To set-up Algo, you have to use the command line. If that’s off-putting, don’t worry—we’ll walk you through every step.
These instructions might seem like a lot, but that’s only because we’re explaining as much as we can. Once you’ve created a VPN with Algo a few times, it shouldn’t take very long at all. Plus, you only have to set up Algo’s installation environment once. After that, you can create a new VPN server with a few keystrokes.
But can you trust that Algo’s scripts aren’t doing anything untoward? Well, the good news is Algo’s code is public on GitHub for anyone to look at. Plus, many security experts are interested in the Algo project, which makes misdeeds less likely.
What Algo Can (and Can’t) Do
A VPN is a good way to protect your online activity—especially on a public Wi-Fi network in an airport or coffee shop. A VPN makes web browsing more secure and stymies any malicious actors who might be on the same local Wi-Fi network. A VPN can also help if your ISP restricts certain kinds of traffic, like torrents.
But watch out, pirates! Downloading booty through your own VPN isn’t a good idea, as the activity can more easily be traced back to you.
Also, if you wanna watch Netflix over your VPN, you’ll have to look elsewhere—Algo doesn’t work with it. However, there are many commercial services that do support Netflix.
Prerequisites for Algo
To get an Algo VPN server up and running, you need a Unix Bash shell. On a Mac or Linux system, you can use your Terminal program, but on Windows, you’ll have to activate the Subsystem for Linux.
You’ll also need an account at a cloud server hosting provider. Algo supports all of the following: