A Brief Analysis of VPN Technologies on the Market

As a new player in the VPN solution field, Echo VPN is bound to have unique technical blessings to provide better services for the majority of users and to distinguish itself from other accelerator providers.

At present, the technologies of mainstream VPN solution providers in the app store are mainly divided into the following schools:

Proxy-based

The history of proxy technology is relatively long, and it is therefore relatively mature. Many VPN apps communicate with VPN servers based on programs such as v2ray/shadowsocks/trojan. The TUN technology on the client absorbs the traffic of applications and restores the traffic generated by applications into TCP/UDP data and rebuilds the connection, and then connects this connection to the VPN provider’s VPN server in a proxy mode, then access the Internet from that server.

As can be seen from the above description, this method requires extracting TCP/UDP data packets and reorganizing connections on the client side, so it requires more CPU resources and thus consumes a certain amount of user battery; at the same time, because the connection is processed at the TCP/UDP layer, if the application itself has unencrypted traffic, or if a TLS certificate is injected by some malicious VPN providers, it is likely that the user’s traffic will be presented to the malicious VPN provider in plain text, which poses a certain privacy risk.

Traditional VPN Protocols

Traditional VPN protocols refer to the use of IKEv2/IPsec supported by iOS/android providers to connect to the VPN servers of VPN providers, thereby routing the traffic of applications on the user’s mobile phone back to the country of the VPN server.

The biggest problem with this protocol is that the characteristics are obvious, so it is easy to be identified and therefore not stable enough.

Echo VPN’s Technology

Echo VPN’s current mobile client uses our self-developed VPN protocol implementation to build encrypted tunnels and route traffic according to the selected mode.

In China App Acceleration mode, the client sends targeted China-app and China-destination traffic into our acceleration backbone. In Privacy VPN mode, it uses the privacy network path for general secure access.

On the server side, Echo VPN terminates our own protocol and routes traffic through a high-performance forwarding layer, including fd.io VPP where applicable, to optimize latency and throughput.