Safing

Portmaster Pro price drop: €80/year starting today

Viktor — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Portmaster Pro now costs €80/year or €8/month, down from €99/year and €9.90/month. The change is live today. No action required.

How this affects your subscription

If you’re an existing Pro subscriber on recurring billing, the new price applies automatically on your next billing cycle. If you renew manually, you’ll see the updated price the next time you add time to your account.

Either way, nothing to do on your end.

Note: PayPal limitations prevent updates for subscriptions renewing on or before March 6. If affected, contact support after your renewal to resolve this.

Why we’re lowering the price

First, we want SPN accessible to more users. The SPN routes connections through a separate path, giving each connection a distinct IP address. It’s the core of what Pro offers, and a lower price can remove a barrier for users whose threat model calls for it.

Second, on the IVPN side we are preparing a product suite that will include Portmaster alongside other services. We’re adjusting the standalone Portmaster Pro price now so that users who prefer to keep services compartmentalized aren’t disadvantaged when that suite becomes available.

What doesn’t change

Portmaster Free remains free
Portmaster Plus remains at €40/year
Features, SPN functionality, and platform support are unchanged
Portmaster and SPN remain open source
Accepted payments: credit card, PayPal, Bitcoin, Monero, cash

Thinking about upgrading?

Portmaster Pro adds SPN access on top of everything in the free tier. Beyond the extra features, a paid subscription directly supports Portmaster’s continued development, including the ongoing work toward better VPN integration and future Android support.

If you’ve been on the fence about upgrading or signing up for Pro, now is a good time. Current pricing and plan details are at safing.io/pricing.

Portmaster Development Roadmap: 2025 Survey Results

Viktor — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When we launched the Portmaster 2025 User Survey, we wanted to make sure the community’s input determines what we improve on next. Over 300 of you shared valuable insights and feature requests, we extend our gratitude to those participating. We have read and evaluated every submission, and today we are sharing how your feedback is directly shaping our development roadmap.

From Feedback to Features

Your responses highlighted a clear need for more granular control, better compatibility with other tools, and improved settings management. Here is how we plan to address that.

A strong theme was the need for quick, temporary controls for troubleshooting and specific use cases. To address this, our first priorities are:

Pause feature: We will add a global switch to temporarily disable Portmaster or just the SPN, allowing you to quickly check network issues without restarting services.
Network activity automatic refresh: For those who need (close to) real-time monitoring without manual action, we’re adding an option to automatically refresh the Network Activity view at set intervals.

Regarding VPN compatibility and integration, improving how Portmaster works with VPNs was the most prominent request. Our next major project is an integration of IVPN tunnels within the Portmaster app, giving you flexible, per-app control over your IVPN connection. This foundational work building on WireGuard integration will also inform us on improving compatibility with other privacy-focused VPNs.

You also shared that managing your Portmaster rules needs to be easier. As a first step, we will improve configuration export with addition of batch export options.

Looking ahead

Exploring Android Support

The single most requested platform for us to develop next was Android. We hear you. In parallel to the roadmap above, we are investigating what it would take to bring Portmaster to Android. We will share more details and invite your participation as we make progress.

Next Year

Further down the line, we will prioritise ARM support and notification improvements. The timing and scope of these additions are to be defined once we have made progress with the above.

We’re also planning improvements to SPN node options and reliability for next year. These enhancements require dedicated infrastructure expertise that we’re currently allocating to foundational Portmaster work. Once we have those resources available, we’ll be able to give SPN the focused attention it deserves without compromising the app improvements we have identified based on your feedback.

Thank you for being an essential part of this process. This roadmap is a direct result of your participation, and we are committed to building the future of Portmaster with you.

The IVPN & Safing Team

Help Shape the Future of Portmaster: Take the 2025 User Survey

Viktor — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Update (15 Sep): Survey submissions are now closed. Thank you for participating!

We are launching our 2025 User Survey to get feedback from the Postmaster community. Following the recent release of Portmaster v2 and Safing joining forces with IVPN, we are at a significant milestone.

This survey is our opportunity to better understand your Portmaster experience, what you value, and where we can improve. Your feedback will help guide our roadmap and ensure we build the features and improvements that matter most to you.

What is the survey about?

We want your thoughts on usability, compatibility with other tools and services, and future feature development.

Who should participate?

The survey is for every user of Postmaster. Whether you use the free version or are a Plus or Pro subscriber, we welcome your feedback.

How long it takes to complete?

It takes just 5-15 minutes to complete, depending on the level of detail you provide.

The survey is be open until 15 Sept 2025.

Our commitment to privacy

We built this survey with your privacy as a priority. It runs on open source software hosted on our own infrastructure. Your submission is anonymous, we do not link survey responses to your Safing account during storage or analysis. Most questions are optional, allowing you to share only the information you are comfortable with.

Ready to share your thoughts? To access the survey now, please log in to your Safing Account.

What happens next

After the survey closes, we will analyze responses. We plan to share a summary of the aggregated results with the community in a future blog post, so you can see how your input is shaping the direction of Portmaster.

Thank you for your continued support and for helping us make Portmaster better.

IVPN & Safing team

Portmaster v2 is Here: Foundation for the Future

Viktor — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’re excited to announce the official release of Portmaster v2! The latest stable version, 2.0.23, is now available and v2 is our recommended default for all Portmaster users.

A New Chapter for Portmaster

As you may have seen in our recent announcement, Safing has joined forces with IVPN. This marks a significant step forward for Portmaster and its community. The transition brings together a shared vision for privacy and security, and more resources to ensure Portmaster’s continued growth. The groundwork for v2 was laid by the original Safing team, with the IVPN team now focused on ongoing maintenance, bug fixes, and new developments.

Why v2 Matters

Portmaster v2 doesn’t introduce flashy new features, but it brings major foundational improvements that pave the way for future innovation and stability. These core changes require a fresh install, as they couldn’t be delivered via auto-update.

Key improvements:

Offline Installers
Set up Portmaster without needing an internet connection — perfect for secure or air-gapped environments.
Streamlined Updates
Updates now download and install faster and use less storage, making the whole process more efficient.
Better Linux Support
Improved compatibility with immutable Linux distributions such as Fedora Silverblue and NixOS.
Smarter DNS Monitoring
Enhanced VPN compatibility and privacy, with more robust DNS monitoring.
Modern Database Engine
A switch to an SQLite backend increases stability and keeps the database lean.

“Working with IVPN on Portmaster v2 was a fantastic experience! We collaborated closely on finalizing the release, and the IVPN team did a great job testing and squashing bugs in the final stages. Portmaster v2 is a high-quality, well-tested product thanks to IVPN’s dedication.”
— Daniel, Co-Founder of Safing

Installation & Migration

Upgrading to Portmaster v2 is simple. The installer will automatically migrate your existing v1 configuration and remove Portmaster v1, ensuring a smooth transition.

If you need to revert for any reason, you can easily roll back: just uninstall Portmaster v2 and reinstall v1 - your settings will be preserved. Note: Leave ‘Delete application data’ unchecked on Windows during the uninstall process.

Ready to upgrade?
Download the latest v2 release here.

What’s Next?

Deeper IVPN Integration
We’re working on integrating IVPN functionality directly within Portmaster, similar to the current SPN integration, to provide even more privacy options.
Community Survey in August
We want to hear from you! Watch out for our upcoming survey — your feedback and suggestions will help shape the future of Portmaster.
Continued v1 Support
Portmaster v1 will remain available and supported for at least six more months, giving you plenty of time to upgrade when it suits you.

Get Involved

Your input drives Portmaster forward. Share your thoughts, report issues, or join the discussion:

Thank you for being part of the Portmaster journey!

Safing Joins Forces with IVPN: A New Chapter Begins

Raphael — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We’re excited to announce that Safing is being acquired by IVPN, marking the beginning of a new era for our company and our products. This decision comes after months of collaboration and careful consideration, and we believe it will bring significant benefits to our users and the privacy community as a whole.

Meeting an Ally

About six months ago, we noticed something unusual: high-quality pull requests were coming in for our Portmaster code. Upon investigation, we discovered that IVPN, a respected ally in the fight for privacy, was behind these contributions. Their meaningful improvements demonstrated their commitment to privacy and mission focus. Impressed by their dedication, we reached out to IVPN to explore potential collaboration. As our discussion progressed, it became clear that by combining our strengths, we could achieve far more than we could separately.

Better Together

After careful deliberation, Daniel and I (Raphael) have decided that the clearest path forward is for IVPN to acquire Safing. This wasn’t an outcome we initially sought, which allowed for an honest and open discussion about the best path forward for everyone involved.

Here are just some of the reasons why IVPN is such a good fit:

IVPN is well respected in the privacy community
They have extensive experience in running a privacy-focused network,
A larger team capable of integrating and improving Safing’s technologies, and
Expertise in mobile platforms, charting a path towards Portmaster on Android and iOS

No Unexpected Changes

IVPN’s stewardship of Portmaster and SPN will bring no unexpected changes:

Portmaster and SPN will remain open source.
IVPN is committed to maintaining and improving the software and services you rely on.
IVPN has no plans to change the business model, pricing, or policies in ways that would present a disadvantage.

Looking to the Future

For Daniel and me, this transition comes at a crucial time. Developing Portmaster, maintaining our many systems and growing our community all at the same time has become more and more challenging. With IVPN’s help, Portmaster and SPN can now grow faster than ever. We’re grateful for our supportive community, without which all of this would have never been possible, and we are confident that IVPN will continue to nurture and expand on everything that we have built together.

While we will not be joining the IVPN Team, we will take on an advisory role and plan to stay connected with the community through Discord and may occasionally contribute to Portmaster’s development. We believe this change will ultimately benefit the community, providing the necessary resources and expertise to drive the project and our vision forward.

Closing Thoughts

We want to express our heartfelt gratitude to our users, supporters, and the entire Safing community. Your trust and enthusiasm have been the driving force behind our work. We’re excited for you to get to know the fantastic team at IVPN as we have over the past few months. They share our values and commitment to privacy, and we’re confident they’ll take what we’ve built to new heights.

Thank you for being part of the Safing journey. Here’s to the next chapter in our mission to protect online privacy!

Watch the joint announcement video or read IVPN’s announcement post for more details.

Company Journey Update Jan

Raphael — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We Hit the Milestone: Safing is Now 100% Subscriber Funded, Thank You for Your Support!

To be honest, back in October, we were unsure if sharing the situation Safing was facing was the right move. We didn’t want to cause alarm, but at the same time, we recognized the need to increase Safing’s revenue to avoid downsizing and slowing progress. We feared this could signal the beginning of the end.

Thankfully, that’s not the case. Just three months later, we’ve hit a crucial milestone for the first time: Safing is now 100% funded by our subscribers!

We’re aware this might be a peak, and the coming months could see a decrease, but reaching this milestone is still a significant achievement. We’re extremely grateful for all the support we’ve received from you!

101%

Help us stay at 100% by subscribing to Portmaster Pro or Plus:

If you would rather donate instead, here are two easy options:

Donate via Open Collective Donate via GitHub

Together, we can make it!

The Android App Is Next

We know many of you are eager for us to expand to new platforms, and Android is next on our list. As soon as we consistently meet the 100% target for Safing’s current size month by month, we can start planning for a new team member who will focus on completing the Android version.

I don’t want to make any predictions right now, as it’s hard to say if this high will sustain. We’ve observed in the past that November and December are stronger months (similar to retail) but usually followed by a start-of-the-year dip and a summer dip as well.

We will keep you updated, and your feedback is always welcome!

Here’s Also a Video Thank You From Me :D

*Percentage of costs Safing can cover with revenue only, based on the last three full months on average.

Portmaster v1.6

Raphael — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Backup and Restore - Hit the Ground Running

With Portmaster 1.6 you can now import and export all your configurations. So the next time your windows needs a reinstall or you want to try another linux distro you can easily take your Configurations from one Portmaster to the other.

Portmaster:

Windows (.exe)

Free Download

Debian/Ubuntu (.deb)

Free Download

Fedora (.rpm)

Free Download

We also created a new GitHub repository where the community can share profiles: Portmaster-Community/apps
Contributions are super welcome, and some profiles are already there. If this gains a lot of traction we will think about how to integrate this into Portmaster directly - then you won’t have to go looking for the profile but Portmaster tells you that you can apply a community profile automatically.

So, if you have a super neat configuration for an application please share it with the community!

Manage Multiple App Profiles

With this update you can merge multiple app profiles into one or remove them.

Other Changes

The complete list of technical changes can always be found in Portmaster’s GitHub Releases.

Removing Deprecated Network Rating

Daniel — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The deprecated feature “Network Rating” will be fully removed beginning of December 2023.

This feature has been deprecated in Portmaster v0.8 (over 1,5 years ago) and has been hidden away in Portmaster since. Most Portmaster users surely never heard about it.
Back then, we made the switch to simpler toggles, because most users were confused by the Network Rating multi-toggles.

In the Way of Progress

However, we decided to just mock the changes in the UI until we had a replacement or there was a good reason to remove it. Unfortunately, the time has come that the Network Rating system is a hindrance for our next step: Sharing Portmaster Settings
Together with the community, we are beginning to work on recommended settings that can be shared with all Portmaster users. At some point this will also work automatically - what a huge win for people who want to install-and-forget and still get the best privacy by default!

Where is the problem? Well, when settings are exported, their raw values are shown, and for toggles this often is 0, 4, 6 or 7 - because these values are used for the Network Rating system. This makes it really hard and confusing to work with these settings.

Seamless Migration

When the update that removes Network Rating is rolled out in early December, all network rating settings will be migrated to normal simple switches, assuming a “Normal” network rating.

The migration itself will be seamless and backwards compatible. This means that you will be able to import exported settings that still use the network rating numbers instead of the simple switches (booleans).

Something Better Will Come

There is a great silver lining on the horizon: We are currently improving the configuration layering of Portmaster and will add conditional layers in the future. This means that you will be able to change any setting based on a condition.
Want a setting for gaming mode? Want to change which apps can connect when at home or at work? Want to have especially strict setting when traveling? This is the direction we are going. It is going to be a lot simpler and a hell of a lot more powerful than the current Network Rating system.

We don’t know when we will start working on this replacement, but if you can’t wait, you can make your voice heard here.

We hope this change is not a great inconvenience for you and are looking forward to hear what you think about what we have planned.

Company Journey Update

Raphael — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Safing is all about pushing the boundaries of online privacy and bringing privacy to all people.

We want to take everyone along on this journey: Safing is not about making big money together with investors, but it is deeply connected with the community that supports Safing and enables us to truly focus all our decision on the benefit of our users.

This is why we are now sharing our current financial progress in Portmaster: As of October 2023 the Safing team is funded to 62%* by people subscribing to Portmaster Plus & Pro.
We share this because we feel that you are as invested into Portmaster as we are, and we count on your support to help us get that number up to 100%.

62%

Help us get to 100% by subscribing to Portmaster Pro or Plus:

If you would rather donate instead, there are two easy options:

Donate via Open Collective Donate via GitHub

Together we can make it!

What would happen if we go beyond the 100%? We would hire more people – hire someone who can focus on Android! Portmaster has a lot of places where we want it to grow, and together we can accomplish that.

If we can’t make it to 100% in time, we will downsize further. We chose to go with you, the community, and not take investors on board because we believe that investor influences can hurt Portmaster in the long-run.

Some History: Safing has been in business for almost 7 years now. We made Portmaster available as an alpha back in 2020 and released version 1.0 late last year. Portmaster and SPN are the only products we develop. We keep a tight focus and invest everything into providing you with the best application firewall and privacy suite out there. The initial development has been funded by multiple FOSS and Research Grants. Read more about them on our Influences Page.
Some of those grants were one-time-only and others would have been designed to get us into the venture capital direction, which we decided not to go with.

Help us make Portmaster the best it can be: Come on board and take a stake in a long and fruitful future!
To everyone who has already subscribed: Thank You Very Much! You push boundaries and bring privacy to the masses.

*Percentage of costs Safing can cover with revenue only, based on the last three full months on average

Portmaster v1.5

Raphael — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Bandwidth Data, Now in Even More Places!

Get a better understanding of which connection is eating up your bandwidth and block it. We added more graphs displaying the amount of data sent and received by each application and connection. Check some of them out in the screen-shots below.

Bandwidth in and out for a single connection:

Want to see your data live? Download now and subscribe today.

Portmaster:

Windows (.exe)

Free Download

Debian/Ubuntu (.deb)

Free Download

Fedora (.rpm)

Free Download

Per Application

Bandwidth in and out for a whole application:

Total bandwidth in and out sorted either the most data sent or received:

For the Whole System

Combined system bandwidth, located on the Dashboard:

Other Changes

The complete list of technical changes can always be found in Portmaster’s GitHub Releases.

Black Friday Promo

Raphael — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Black Friday is coming and the (online) shopping sprees are here.

In these times, privacy and security are extra important. When hunting for deals, you log into and browse multiple websites - leaving behind a trail of behavioral data and with that, a big potential for others to take advantage of you.
We at Safing want to help you and your loved ones stay private and secure.
Keep them safe and secure this 2023 Holiday Shopping Season with Portmaster. 🎅
Don’t let them shop online naked: We are giving you 2x 2 weeks of Portmaster Pro so you can pass them on and keep everyone protected. (and save you the hassle of cleaning up their mess 😉)

Update your Email

Everyone with an active yearly subscription valid in November 2023* and an email address in their account**, will get an email with two gift codes before the Black Friday Week (20th Nov - 24th Nov).

Get Portmaster Pro Yearly

If you are a subscriber of Portmaster Plus or pay monthly, here is a guide on how to change your Plan to Portmaster Pro Yearly.

Up Your Protection Today – also with Portmaster Free

Portmaster comes included with ad, tracker and malware filter lists active by default, this increases everyone’s security and privacy. Go install Portmaster for everyone who is doing online shopping the coming season.

Stay safe out there and happy shopping!

*The Portmaster Pro Subscription needs to be active between UTC 00:00 15.11.2023 and 24:00 17.11.2023, in case of the 17th there might be some delay to the delivery of the free codes due to working hours.
**The email needs to be valid during the sending process and you are not legible for this promotion after the 17.11.2023 even if you had a valid subscription during the time period.

Portmaster v1.4

Raphael — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Dashboard is the new front door to Portmaster

From the start we knew that a control center type view will be important in the future. The network monitor is super exciting but when the best tutorials for Portmaster out there tell new users to basically ignore it for the beginning, we know, that this is not the best start into Portmaster.

The goal with the dashboard is to bring a quick overview to help new users understand what is going on in Portmaster and veteran users what is happening on their machines. I feel like this update is a great start into this direction.

Portmaster:

Windows (.exe)

Free Download

Debian/Ubuntu (.deb)

Free Download

Fedora (.rpm)

Free Download

Feature Overview and Toggles

Portmaster is packed with different features, and more are to come! An overview of which features are active was needed. For now it’s mostly the Network History and SPN toggle, but it will come in handy in the future.

Beta Features on the Dashboard

We included some beta features into this stable release. Beta because there can still be bugs, we included them anyway because those features can’t break anything. We wanted to give everyone a more complete vision of where we see the dashboard going. Feedback is always welcome!

Other Changes

The complete list of technical changes can always be found in Portmaster’s GitHub Releases.

Portmaster v1.2 & v1.3

Daniel — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Network History has Arrived!

Many of you have requested this for ages and I am glad to announce that we are finally delivering. Record the network activity of any app for as long as your hardware can manage!

The Network History is tied into our Portmaster Plus and Pro packages.

Portmaster:

Windows (.exe)

Free Download

Debian/Ubuntu (.deb)

Free Download

Fedora (.rpm)

Free Download

Better Process Detection

Portmaster used to regularly have “Other Connections”. These were connections Portmaster was not able to attribute to a process. We improved the system integration on both Linux (via eBPF) and Windows (via our kernel driver) in order to get higher quality data about the connections. This means that you normally should not see any connections in the “Other Connections” app anymore. In our tests, every single connection was attributed correctly!

This is not to be confused with the “Network Noise”, where connections from other devices on the network are pooled, but your device is not listening to them.

Portmaster is easy privacy and peace of mind

With Portmaster we set out to create an application that makes privacy as easy as installing an application. Unfortunately, Privacy is quite the battle at the moment, and it gets reduced on multiple angles. Portmaster is built to be a good start in your privacy journey. With Portmaster Plus we added the next step. With the free version you gain great privacy out of the box, and the upgrade helps you understand your device better.

Portmaster Plus: Investigate Everything

The motto for the Plus upgrade is “investigate everything”. Because Portmaster sits inside the network chain it can give you super interesting information about what is going on on your device and in your network. While Portmaster Free is focused on privacy and blocking unwanted connections, Portmaster Plus gives you the insights and information about your device and network you didn’t have before. Recording the network activity of any app is only the start and you can expect more features designed to increase your investigative powers in the coming months.

Portmaster Pro: Protection Everywhere

The SPN takes a different approach than a VPN. It was designed from the ground up for privacy on a per-connection basis, routing each connection independently through the network with layered encryption. The tradeoffs: the SPN is slower than a VPN and routes traffic through fewer exit nodes to improve traffic mixing. For a detailed comparison, see our SPN vs VPNs post.

Focus on Portmaster

As you can tell by the recent changes we’ve made, we are shifting our focus to Portmaster for a while. Read all about this in our blog post Portmaster Free | Plus | Pro = ?.

Other Changes

The complete list of technical changes can always be found in Portmaster’s GitHub Relases.

Portmaster Free | Plus | Pro = ?

Raphael — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We are changing the name of Portmaster Supporter to Portmaster Plus. This comes with many new features and more focus on Portmaster Desktop.

Portmaster Free Stays!

To be very clear: All features in the free version stay the same and nothing previously free is moved behind a paywall. We continue to fight for better and easier privacy for everyone.
The features we added to Portmaster Plus are cool nice to haves such as the Network History. You can read more about that in the Portmaster v1.3 release post.

We believe privacy is super important, therefore all privacy features are included in the free tier.

Portmaster:

Windows (.exe)

Free Download

Debian/Ubuntu (.deb)

Free Download

Fedora (.rpm)

Free Download

Portmaster Plus is Growing

We start this new plan with the Network History, but more is already on the way! We have been working on a lot of features in the last months. You might have seen that we have been releasing v1.1 and v1.2 in the last couple weeks. The Plus Plan is meant for people who are curious about what is going on on their devices. New features will focus on increasing the information you have about connections to empower you to make better decisions.

Portmaster Unlimited is now Portmaster Pro

Portmaster Pro is basically the same as Portmaster Unlimited, the name is just shorter and we wanted to make it a bit clearer through the names who we consider this plan for. Basically, the idea is that Portmaster Free is for everyone who wants to improve their privacy, Plus is the first step up, and Pro is for everyone who needs extended privacy protection.

I learned over the last years that not understanding what the SPN brings to the table results in a bad user experience, which I don’t wish anyone. But we can’t make it more clearer, that SPN is not a VPN nor is it Tor - I still get emails every week asking me why we are not like a VPN or if we are using TOR and why we charge money for it. It’s super cool to have so many people who understand the value of SPN and help us to develop it further and increase the functionality. In the meantime, I believe having less people mistake it for something it isn’t, is better for the SPN in the long run.

Why the Change

I have to admit we have been a bit optimistic in regards to how many people will just use Portmaster Supporter for the value Portmaster is delivering for free. Unfortunately, we underestimated the required effort to sustain Portmaster Free. While the free users are growing, basically no one signs up for Portmaster Supporter. We love our Portmaster Unlimited/Pro customers and they are the reason we have been able to come this far, and we do understand that not everyone can afford the 9.90€ per month. So, we thought about what can we offer in between - simply reducing the price was not an option due to server costs - and decided to create Portmaster Plus, where we can offer features that are not needed for privacy directly, but improve the experience. Most of them have been requested by a lot of users, and even though I understand that they would have liked them for free, we need to pay the development and maintenance as well, so we opted to create Portmaster Plus and put the features in there.

Sustainability of Safing in the log run

I believe that this change should have come earlier, and as mentioned above, we were too optimistic, and as a result the team behind Safing shrunk over the last months. At the moment, Safing is back to only 3 very dedicated people. This is okay for the moment, but it isn’t exciting in regards to developing new features and getting onto new platforms - Mac, iOS, and, of course, finishing the Android app. In addition, David - one of our Co-Founders - left Safing this year, which did have an impact on the roadmap as well.

Focus on Portmaster

This focus on Portmaster and enabling Portmaster to pay for itself seems so obvious now. It was always awkward to ask people who enjoy Portmaster to use SPN. Because, they might have a VPN and are happy with it. We still see VPNs as a bad option for privacy, but I believe that you have to know what fits your situation best (ie. threat model), and SPN does not fit everyone - we get that.
With Portmaster Plus, you can support the software you love directly and get some great features in return. In the future, I would love to see two development teams, one for Portmaster and one for SPN, both being directly supported by their respective customers!

Portmaster 1.1

Raphael — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

All new SPN map

In this release we re-imagined the SPN map. It now focuses on making more information easier to discover and understand. When you open the map now, you can see that some countries are darker than others - this allows you to easily see which countries already have SPN nodes.

Portmaster:

Windows (.exe)

Free Download

Debian/Ubuntu (.deb)

Free Download

Fedora (.rpm)

Free Download

It is also easy to see which nodes you are currently using and if they are operated by Safing or by the community. Safing nodes are displayed as triangles while community nodes show as circles, and are colored in blue and green respectively, if in use.

The information boxes for nodes now have a lot more information and you can get to all the details a lot faster.

There are many more views to find so go around and discover all the new things in the map!

Other Changes

Of course there have been many under the hood improvements like optimized traffic management for SPN or extended DNS caching. A complete list of changes can always be found here: GitHub

Next Steps

Thank you to all the people telling us their feature ideas - we know you are exited about many new Portmaster features. I am glad to let you all know that for the next update we are focusing again on firewall features. I can’t share much at this point but stay tuned, there are many requested features in the pipeline.

Valentine's Day 69 Sale

David — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Portmaster Unlimited Is on SALE for Valentine’s Day

Just for 48h around Valentine’s Day - Portmaster Unlimited costs:

6.90€ a month instead of 9.90€
69€ a year instead of 99€

Get the deal for 30% OFF. Whether you participate or not - thank you for all of your support!!

Why? People Asked, So We Thought It Was Time to Test A Proper Sale

Ever since Portmaster Unlimited came out, people have been asking for sales. Would we offer discounted prices for Black Friday? What about reduced pricing for students? And Would Portmaster go on sale for for Christmas? So far, the answer has always been no. This changes today with the 69 Sale.

make VPNs jealous!

Get 30% OFF

69 == mature?

Of course the 69 pricing is a bit silly, but it was too hard to resist, especially for Valentine’s Day. Also we are all human and need some humor from time to time to brighten our days :) Hope you enjoy the deal & thank you all for your support!

After Snowden, We Quit Our Jobs to Build Privacy Software - It Reached v1.0

David — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In Olden Days, the Internet Was Still “Perfect”

The year was 2013. The Internet was still this amazing place where anything was possible: You could hang out and chat with your friends. You could also debate with strangers from all over the world. Or you could simply go ahead and discover new and quirky websites every day. In the end, you could just be you - without anybody ever spoiling the fun.

There were talks about bad actors, true, but those were dismissed by the large public. It all still had this innocent vibe. I myself was the biggest Google fanboy out there and never questioned all of the trust I put in them; my whole digital life had a home with Google, and nothing was ever going to stop me. Why talk about rain when sunshine clearly is filling the sky?

This all reminds me of the movie “The Truman Show”. Truman, the main character, lives a perfect life: Great job, happily married and his best buddy is there for him anywhere, anytime. But what he does not know yet - is that he is the main character in a massive reality TV show. His entire life is being broadcast to the entire world. He is being exploited and monetized without his knowledge or consent.

All along, Truman always thought he controlling his life. But since his childhood he was pushed towards the goals of the show runners. He was manipulated. Without even noticing.

But Something Was Off

something was just not right

And then - just like us - Truman had his “Snowden moment”. The moment he realizes something is just not right. Something is off. And even though he knew his perfect world was about to crumble, he could no longer look away. He had to face the truth.

Snowden Revealed How Threatened Our Freedoms Are

In summer 2013, the Snowden Revelations unarguably showed that mass surveillance is happening on a global scale. Right in front of our eyes. And still to this day, citizens across the world are being spied upon. They are being monetized, exploited and sometimes even persecuted because of what they say or do online.

At the same time, little or no transparency is given about the programs of mass surveillance and how they are being utilized. The same applies to big-tech algorithms. In hiding, they decide what billions of people see every day.

As such, mass surveillance is a threat to our democracies and freedoms.

Snowden could not stop these programs, but his revelations made it impossible for the world to continue looking the other way. So while things did not change and some things even got worse, Snowden still changed the world. He changed everything. He changed our perception.

We Quit Our Jobs to Develop Privacy Full-Time

And that is where our story begins. Because of Snowden, along with millions of others, we started seeing and discussing the issues of our modern age. And mass surveillance is a complex problem. Super complex. It is a problem that needs to be tackled on many different fronts; be it legislation, regulation, education or with software.

After lots of thought, three guys from Austria quit their day jobs to fully invest their time into creating privacy solutions for the masses. They founded a company named Safing.

“safing”
- to secure something from a threat
- to make something safe

Privacy Was Hard - There Had to Be a Better Way!

Us three being quite the nerds, we knew there were ways to protect yourself from mass surveillance. The only problem: it was hard and technical. For everyday people it was just not realistic to easily protect yourself from mass surveillance.

Too much hassle was involved. We knew there HAD to be a better way. Was it too much to ask wanting our moms to be able to manage their own privacy? It SHOULD be that easy. That is what Safing is all about. Making privacy easy for the masses.

From A Spare Room With Crude Desks to an Office With Employees

So we just went for it and quit our well-paying jobs. To start out, we set up base in a spare room in one of our homes. We moved some desks inside and got going.

Many obstacles lied ahead. Financing our research and development phase with no income yet. Hiring our first amazing employees. Creating company culture. Building team structure. Getting our first “alpha” users. And of course, moving from that spare room into our first office.

Oh my, what a day with big smiles!

With an Amazing Team and “Alpha” Testers, We Reached 1.0

Things sped up since. With an amazing team, as well as countless efforts from privacy enthusiasts - using and testing our software from the earliest days - we could mature and develop Portmaster into what it is today.

What started out as a dream caused by the Snowden Revelations, has now became reality.

With version 1.0, Portmaster does the heavy lifting for you. It is an install & forget solution. Perfect for beginners, like my mom. At the same time, advanced users can configure everything to their hearts desire. We are super proud to have made it this far!

People WANT Privacy - That Is Clear

And do not take our word for it. If there is any learning from our journey, it is that people WANT privacy, if it is easily available. Just look at what happened to our GitHub stars when we got to 1.0 - can you spot when that happened?

correct - the 1.0 release was recent

Even as our software was labeled as “early development” - it managed to get 4.0k GitHub stars. Thousands of people downloaded and tested early software. Those people were in search for easy privacy.

The masses do not want their entire lives to be surveilled by default. It is simply that they did not have a choice so far. And this is changing. We see it in our growth. Portmaster is the fastest growing open-source project in 2022 without investments (#4 overall). And you will notice this trend too. More and more people are standing their ground to make privacy possible in the age of mass surveillance.

And along our societies, Portmaster will continue to evolve to a better future. There are tons of features planned, and we want to continue to make things simpler and simpler. To grandma and beyond!

Portmaster

Windows (.exe)

Free Download

Debian/Ubuntu (.deb)

Free Download

Fedora (.rpm)

Free Download

Portmaster 1.0, A New Era for Privacy

Raphael — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Just in time, after reaching the milestone of 4k stars on GitHub, Portmaster finally reaches version 1.0. 🎉

Portmaster:

Windows (.exe)

Free Download

Debian/Ubuntu (.deb)

Free Download

Fedora (.rpm)

Free Download

Navigate Portmaster Smoothly

The biggest feature coming with version 1.0 brings all functions of Portmaster together. With the new “Side-Dash”, you can now easily jump between apps to investigate their connections or quickly jump to their settings. Monitoring your computer and configuring your personal preferences becomes a breeze.

Explore Your Multiple Identities

With the new “Side-Dash” you can now easily see what countries each app is connecting through and how many identities you have per app. With Portmaster Unlimited, it also has become easier to navigate to the world map, making exploration not only informative but also fun.

Portmaster Is Now A Complete Package

As an ever maturing product, re-labeling Portmaster’s development stage has been a long time coming. But as I wrote back in January, I did not feel like we had the range of features for a proper version 1.0. Now - with the introduction of the Side Dash - this has given us the glue we needed between all current features to make them feel connected, marking a new chapter.

Portmaster is now a complete package that should be evaluated and reviewed for what it is today - without any disclaimers and promises about the future. We are super excited to have reached this milestone! 🎉

Portmaster Is Not Done Yet

Naturally, this does not mean we are done with Portmaster or that bugs can no longer appear. However, reaching version 1.0 is a huge checkpoint in our journey, with many milestones and features yet to come.

Next Up

Our current development and the next releases will continue to focus on stability. We also want to include at least one “hero feature” in every bigger release, so the UI and features are guaranteed to mature and evolve.

Another thing we now have the capacity to do is to kick off migration to mobile. Kick-off is the key word. Also, the first supported platform has more similarities with a cyborg than with a pear.

Thank You

Whether you have been with us for a while or if you heard about Portmaster for the first time. Thanks for enjoying Portmaster. Thanks for 2^12 GitHub stars.

With version 1.0, Portmaster should be recommended as one of the first steps anybody should take within their privacy journey.

Join the Safing Discord

raphael — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Discord Server Join Now

Join Now

Get Involved in Portmaster Development Through Discord

We are passionate about sharing and interacting more directly, and Discord finally gives us this option - Some team members wanted this for the longest time!

Email is too siloed and sending a newsletter with draft designs seems unnatural as well, Reddit is too public and Twitter not conversational enough - so this is why we landed here.

Discord will be the place were we will:

Post upcoming designs
Do polls on ideas
Share concepts for new features
Ask for feedback

There will also be a place for the community to help each other. We as a team will also be in there, but we are currently very busy working on Portmaster. By bringing all of you together, we aim strengthen the community and get you help faster.

We Want to Get Closer to the Community

We also thought about other platforms, but settled on Discord as this is what most people already have. We want to be present where you already are, not invite you to yet-another-platform.

Sometimes when I ask people to vote for the Portmaster on alternativeto.net (or the SPN) the answer is: “No, I don’t want to create a new account.” I totally understand. This is the nice thing about Discord - many of you already have it.

For those who don’t want to install their software, rest assured, Discord works great in the browser – no installation required.

This Is a Trial – No Promises

We are not sure if we have the capacity to manage this sort of community, as we are focused on developing Portmaster. Some of you already volunteered to help moderate the community and we appreciate this a lot!

But if this turns out to not work as intended we will close this server again.

Special Areas for Portmaster Supporters

If you support our work, we want to hear your voice loud and clear. For this, we are working on giving you the option to “link” your Discord ID in your Safing Account. This will give you access to private Discord rooms with even better access to the Safing team.

In these private rooms you can ask questions, discuss ideas with the team and ask for help. You can also help us to decide where to expand the SPN next and give feedback on speeds around the globe. Some of the team already said they will mainly focus on those channels.

So hop on over, and invite others who are interested to discord.gg/9ScnccuXaZ

How SPN Compares to VPNs

daniel — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

	SPN	Most VPNs
Multiple Identities (simultaneous)
Automatic Geo-Unblocking
Individual Apps Settings
Easy Setup
Availabilty
Open Source		/

One Shoe Does Not Fit All - What Is Your Threat Model?

What is the best way to protect diamonds worth a few thousand dollars?

You could leave them in your living room for everyone to see. But that would be careless.
You could build an atomic bunker in the middle of the woods. But that would overdo it.
A safe in your house is probably a better solution.

Welcome to the world of threat modeling. Before choosing any tool, especially within privacy, it is important to ask:

What do I want to protect?
From whom do I want protection?
How much time can I invest?

We need different solutions for different needs - there simply is no perfect solution for everyone. You are the only one who knows the value of your diamonds and who is after them. So only you can decide which solution is best for you.

Understanding your threat model might be difficult at first, but it will save you a lot of time and help you avoiding wrong decisions.

With that mindset, we believe SPN is for people who want more than a simple VPN and at the same time do not have the time or skills to go through the hassle of setting up Tor for their full device.

Now, let us jump into the comparison of SPN vs VPN.

A VPN Only Gives You One Identity

Open any VPN app, and you are presented with your most important choice: Choose the country you want to browse the Internet from. You exchange the identity of being a customer of your ISP with the identity of being a customer of your VPN provider. In this setup, you need to trust your VPN provider more than your ISP.

This is how this looks like:

SPN Gives You Multiple Identities, For Each App

When you first open the SPN, it will not ask you from which country you want to browse the Internet. Why limit yourself to one?
The SPN does not just use one server in one country, but uses many servers in many countries - all at the same time. This results in having many identities, not just one.

This is how this looks like:

Instead of just “beaming” yourself to another place, you can now be everywhere at once. Connections are individually routed through the network, balancing privacy and performance.

Automatic Geo-Unblocking

The longer your connections stay within the SPN, the more private they are. This is why the SPN selects the final server (exit node) as close as possible to the destination server (eg: server of a website).

This also automatically unblocks geo-restricted content, as you will be accessing the content in the country it originates from.

In case you have special requirements, you can of course instruct the SPN to use a specific country for a website. Note: currently this feature is tricky to set up - it will improve in the future

VPNs cannot do this automatically, as they can only use one “exit” server at once, even if they are “multi-hop”.

You Can Easily Exclude Apps or Domains from SPN

While there are some VPNs that are able to exclude the local network (LAN) or certain apps from the VPN, the SPN takes this to a new level.

Similar to Portmaster firewall rules, you can very easily exclude any combination of domains or apps from being routed through the SPN. By default, it excludes local network resources, as well as any captive portal. You do not need to turn it off to log into the WiFi when traveling.

Both VPNs and SPN Are Easy to Setup

SPN is part of Portmaster, which seamlessly integrates into your system and has a straightforward installation process.

Most VPNs provide a custom app that is easy to install - some require you to manually configure a client, though.

SPN is Open Source

An auditable and open source code builds a high level of trust in the software. Instead of having to trust a privacy policy of the company, people can check the source code and see what it really does on a technical level.

The beauty with this is, the bigger the community around a software gets, the more secure it becomes, often outperforming proprietary software. Zero-day exploits and long-forgotten vulnerabilities become rarer since someone from the community usually discovers them.

The SPN is fully open source. Everyone can inspect the code and verify what it does. While some VPN providers open source their clients, most do not publish their server-side source code.

SPN and Privacy by Design

VPN technology was originally designed to connect corporate networks securely. VPN providers have adapted the technology for consumer privacy, with varying results. Features like kill switches and no-log policies address real risks within the VPN architecture.

SPN was designed from the start for consumer privacy on a per-connection basis. Because it is integrated into Portmaster’s network stack, it does not rely on external kill switches or default-route manipulation.

IP and DNS leaks are prevented by Portmaster, the underlying application that runs SPN, which controls all network connections on your device. All traffic goes through multiple servers and is encrypted in layers, so no server knows both who you are and where you are going.

Conclusion

Going back to the threat modeling we started with, users who need per-connection IP separation and onion routing across all applications may find SPN a better fit than a traditional VPN. Both tools address different threat models.

Part 2: Technical Deep-Dive Comparison

If you are curious, explore more technical details in the additional write-up below:

	SPN	Most VPNs
Cryptographic Identity Protection
Community Nodes
No Network Logs		/
No Kill Switch Needed
Full-Device Protection
Exclude Apps		/
Exclude Domains

Cryptographic Identity Protection

VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) are, well, networks that carry data packets through a tunnel from one point to the next. They are a more or less seamless part of the network. Packets destined for the Internet go into the VPN and out again without change. This means that packets are just relayed somewhere else and do not receive any advanced protection. Multi-Hop VPNs just relay your packets via one more server, but the problem remains: The packets do not receive any extra protection. Every server in that Multi-Hop chain can see all your traffic. Yes, the last server cannot see your IP address, but the previous servers can see all your traffic unencrypted and could potentially log your traffic. Additionally, if the VPN client authenticates with the last server in the chain, it may also have your VPN login data.

The SPN protects your traffic and identity with proper cryptography. Every packet is end-to-end encrypted to every single server along the chain of servers the connection uses. This was originally invented for Tor and is called Onion Routing. This way, every server in the chain only knows the previous and the next hop. No server knows who you are and where you are going to.

But the SPN goes even one step further. Instead of using your username and password - which makes you identifiable - to log into the SPN, Portmaster authenticates itself not against the network itself, but against the SPN Account Service, which verifies you are allowed to access the network. It then gives you special cryptographically blinded tokens, which prove your access permission, but are not linked to your account anymore.

This way, no server in the SPN will know your username.

Node Ownership and Logging

As VPNs are centralized, all their servers are operated by one entity. Because traffic passes through their servers, logging policies are an important trust factor when evaluating a VPN provider.

SPN invites the community to join the network and strengthen it by adding diversity to the operators of the network. In addition to the cryptographic protections, this makes it very difficult for anyone to track you through the SPN. Because of the cryptographic identity protection mentioned before, there are no logs with identifiable data to begin with.

SPN Does Not Need A Kill Switch

VPNs came up with the idea of kill switches, because they need to change the “default route”, which is more or less what tells your device where to send all its traffic to. If you install a VPN, it will add a “virtual network” to your device and will update the default route to point to that network. If your device sends network packets to that virtual network, they will be encrypted and sent to your VPN provider, who will then release these packets to the Internet to do their thing. So far so good.

But when the connection to your VPN provider breaks - for whatever reason - your operating system will disable the virtual network and automatically change the default route to point to your ISP. This happens in a blink of an eye - your VPN software will not even notice.

SPN easily solves this since it is part of Portmaster, which tightly controls all the network connections of your device. It always knows what is going on and stops any leaks in its tracks.

Private Account and Payments

For a truly private experience, it is not only important to protect connections, but also your identity when signing up and making a payment.

Payment options vary across VPN providers.

When you sign up for the SPN, you can just go with the pre-filled random generated username and choose a password. You need to fill out a country with a matching phone prefix for tax and legal reasons - just to make everything legal and well on our side. While we cannot verify what you fill in these fields - we do not look at your IP address - we trust that our users are well-meaning and trustworthy.

Payments can be done using Bitcoin and Monero, or by sending cash (Euros). If you do not need to protect your privacy in that regard, we offer credit card payments and PayPal for your convenience.

Conclusion

SPN and VPNs both conceal your IP address by routing traffic through servers. SPN goes further: each connection travels a separate path through the network with layered encryption, providing a different IP per connection across all applications. Users whose threat model requires this level of per-connection isolation may find SPN better suited to their needs.

Portmaster 0.9 Available Now: Graphs & Full-Device Monitor

daniel — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

You Can Now Search & Monitor Your Full Device - with Beautiful Graphs

Many of you have been asking for this, and finally it is here: The new network monitor with elaborate search, powerful filters and grouping support - with beautiful graphs everywhere! The graphs show the amount of allowed and blocked connections over time.

This update is HUGE - and several months of development went into this feature. When viewing a single application - as previously possible - Portmaster only had to handle hundreds of connections. But with the new, full-device monitor, Portmaster has to handle thousands of connections simultaneously. Because of this new technical challenge we had to restructure a lot of Portmaster’s underlying tech stack.

Exciting news, since Portmaster now can handle thousands of connections at once, a lot of the groundwork for a longer history has been completed. In the future, you will be able to save connections not only for 10 minutes, but for days and weeks.

Portmaster Adds Support for DNS-over-HTTPS

We have supported DNS-over-TLS (DoT) from the beginning. Due to popular request we now additionally support DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH). Just paste your favorite provider into the setting and go! If you do not want to depend on your ISP for resolving the IP of your DoH resolver, you can also add the IP manually for even better security.

We still think that DoT is superior due to the fact that it is a lot less overhead that can (and did in the past!) leak identifier data about you.

You Can Now Import Custom Filter Lists

An even more requested feature has been the ability to add custom filter lists in addition to the defaults. You can now specify a file that Portmaster automatically imports and monitors for changes. Compile you own list of baddies and block them!

New Place for Version, Tools, and Restarting

Showing the “interesting” bar at the top of the settings page has always been a quick-fix. We finally got to replacing this with a much better solution. You can now find all this information and buttons on the bottom of the navigation bar to the left.

An Improved GeoIP Database

We have also been hard at work below the surface. Since MaxMind has switched its free GeoIP database to a more restrictive license, we started building our own GeoIP database by combining data from different sources. This improves many aspects of Portmaster and SPN - for example, we now have a more accurate map of the current network.

For techy people out there, we will likely write an in-depth blog post about how we are building the GeoIP database. Stay tuned!

Explaining the SPN

Another thing we have been continually improving is how we communicate what the SPN is and what it brings to the table. I think we are getting the hang of it, step by step. A recent step was a revamped SPN page - which you can check out.

Thank You!

To all our users and customers: Thanks for using Portmaster and the SPN, thanks for reporting bugs and for telling your friends.

If you like these newest updates, you would do us a big favor by sharing this blog post far and wide. Thanks again - all of this is only possible through your support.

What Makes Portmaster A Great Alternative to GlassWire

safing — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Overview Chart

	Portmaster	GlassWire
Open Source
Setup	Easy	Easy
Protection Type	Device	Device
System Integration	Kernel Extension	Windows Filtering Platform
Availabilty
Secure DNS
Individual Apps Settings
Adaptive Threat Model

Detailed Comparison

One Shoe Does Not Fit All — What Is Your Threat Model?

What is the best way to protect diamonds worth a few thousand dollars?

You could leave them in your living room for everyone to see. But that would be careless. You could build an atomic bomb shelter in the middle of the woods. But that would overdo it. A safe in your house is probably a better solution.

Welcome to the world of threat modeling. Before choosing any tool, especially within privacy, it is important to ask

What do I want to protect?
From whom do I want protection?
How much time can I invest?

We need different solutions for different needs - there simply is no perfect solution for everyone. You are the only one who knows the value of your diamonds and who is after them. So, only you can decide which solution is best for you.

Understanding your threat model might be difficult at first, but it will save you a lot of time and help you in avoiding wrong decisions. This comparison blog showcases the strengths and weaknesses of Portmaster and GlassWire and hopes to assist you in your decision-making.

Portmaster is Free and Open Source Software

Open source software allows anyone to look at the code of the software that they are running. An open source code is auditable and thus builds a high level of trust in the software instead of the privacy policy of the company. Anyone can check out the source code, review it or even build the software themselves directly from the source code. It allows you to see what the software is really doing on a technical level.

An open source approach allows people to contribute to the software and make the software better and more secure, often outperforming proprietary software. Zero-day exploits and vulnerabilities become rarer, since someone from the community usually discovers them.

Portmaster is free and open source software with a great community involved. Portmaster’s funding and business model are publicly documented.

GlassWire is Proprietary Software

Proprietary software does not allow people to look at the code of the software that they are running. So, reviewing and inspecting their project is either impossible or difficult. It also implies that vulnerabilities and security bugs are only patched by a small group of people. They may be good at it, but having thousands of people look at the code is far more efficient.

As you cannot access the code or build the software yourself, you cannot verify the software’s claims. The only way to verify the software’s claims is to use workarounds like running an external analysis tools. In the case of GlassWire, you would need to run an independent analysis software to see what GlassWire might be up to. And there is no way to truly find out how it integrates into the system. It is difficult to independently verify a proprietary application that monitors all your device’s connections.

Portmaster and GlassWire Are Easy to Install and Use

GlassWire is available for Windows and Android, while Portmaster is available for Windows and Linux. The installation process is simple for both, and both start working immediately after installation and a restart. They also enable autostart upon boot by default. GlassWire also has a lite version for slower computers, while Portmaster has a single version for each operating system. Ultimately, both are quick and simple to set up.

GlassWire Requires User Effort to Achieve Better Privacy

GlassWire bills itself as a network security tool that visualizes your past and present network activity on a simple graph. The majority of GlassWire’s features, such as ‘Discreet Alerts,’ ‘RDP Connection Detection,’ or ‘Multiple Server Monitoring,’ are geared toward monitoring logging and alerting the user of new connections, new devices, or possible malware. These metrics are useful to IT/security professionals as logging is an important part of their work.

The GlassWire software includes an Evil twin detector to find bad Wi-Fi access points. For those who do not know, an evil twin is a network attack that uses a Wi-Fi access point that your device will connect to. These access points usually have names that are the same as legitimate access points. If you connect to one of these evil twins, they will try to snoop on your traffic.

GlassWire has another feature called “Who’s on your Wi-Fi or Network?” which allows your device to constantly scan for devices on the network and notify you when a new device connects to the same network as yours.

Apart from this, GlassWire also allows you to give network ratings to different networks. Like, you can set your Home Wi-Fi as a trusted network and all others as untrusted networks. This allows you to keep different settings for different networks.

From the perspective of protecting your privacy, GlassWire does not automatically block or give you the option to block ads, trackers, NSFW, etc. GlassWire is more concerned about logging possible trackers, threats, etc. and notifying the user about them. It expects the user to detect and block bad apps/connections, rather than using a predefined technique to stop them automatically. To use GlassWire as a privacy tool, you are required to invest a lot of time into configuring its settings & to block bad domains/IP addresses. GlassWire does not include built-in filter lists for blocking known bad domains.

Portmaster Focuses on Privacy And Protects You By Default

Portmaster is a privacy tool with features built to protect your privacy by default. Portmaster enables secure DNS for all your connections while blocking a wide variety of trackers and ad networks lurking in your apps. This has two advantages. First, the secure DNS allows you to limit the tracking from your ISP and second, your apps are stopped from sending usage data to trackers or connecting to malware domains.

To detect trackers and bad domains, Portmaster uses filter lists. These lists are similar to lists used by tracker blockers for browsers like uBlock Origin. These lists contain domains discovered to track users and are auto-updated on a regular basis by open source communities around the world. Within Portmaster these filter lists can be customized to your needs by de/selecting different categories such as ads, trackers, malware, NSFW, etc.

Just like GlassWire, Portmaster allows you to configure different settings for different network environments. This way you can easily switch from your trusted Home Wi-Fi to an untrusted network, like in a coffee shop.

Portmaster also allows you to log and display different metrics about different apps. Like which domains, IP addresses they are connecting to and in which country the servers are located, along with the time a connection started and ended.

Another useful feature of Portmaster is the ability to block incoming connections by default. This prevents devices from your local network or devices from the Internet to connect to your computer unless you specifically allow them to.

Most of these privacy protections are enabled and handled by Portmaster automatically, but for everyone who loves configuring the details, there are tons of settings you can tweak: outgoing rules, incoming rules, block p2p connection and much more.

Both Applications Are Open About Their Business Models

Software development and maintenance requires funds, so Portmaster and the GlassWire are supported by a business model. Many of the features mentioned by GlassWire, such as remote connection monitoring, Wi-Fi network monitor, Virus total scanning, and longer connection history, will cost you $39, $69, or $99 depending on your needs.

Portmaster is free and open source. Paid plans are available for SPN access and advanced features. A transparent business model is important for privacy tools: it allows users to understand how development is funded and what incentives exist.

Portmaster and GlassWire Provide a Simple Dashboard for Detecting and Responding to Privacy Threats

As far as network monitoring is concerned, the dashboard is an important part that will allow you to understand the network activity of your device. You would want to know which domains/websites were allowed to connect and which were blocked while you enjoyed your memes. In this case, Portmaster and GlassWire take a similar approach. They display all connections on a simple and easy to understand dashboard. GlassWire uses graphs, while Portmaster uses numbers. These connections are also sorted per app to help you differentiate connections made by your browser from the connections made by your chat app.

When it comes to connection details, both Portmaster and GlassWire show the type of traffic, the IP address and country of the connected servers, as well as the time a connection started and ended.

GlassWire as well as Portmaster allow you to better understand your network activity by displaying the past and present connections of apps on the dashboard. GlassWire can display past network activity for up to a month on the free plan. Portmaster currently cannot show a long connection history, but it is on Portmaster’s roadmap.

Portmaster and GlassWire Allow You to Configure Settings System-Wide and Per-App

Portmaster has global settings which define behavior for the whole device. But sometimes, an application may break due to a blocked connection. Allowing that connection system-wide might hurt your privacy. With Portmaster, you can easily solve this problem by creating an exception for a specific application, leaving other apps unaffected.

You can even block risky connection types system-wide, such as p2p or incoming, and then create exceptions for trusted apps.

GlassWire Seems to Be A Proxy for the Windows Filtering Platform

GlassWire is closed-source, so the analysis below is based on blackbox testing.

What we did find out is that GlassWire uses the Windows Filtering Platform (WFP) in user-space mode, creating rules for applications essentially exactly like the Windows Firewall does itself. This is a similar approach to that of Simplewall. When Windows Firewall is disabled, this also makes GlassWire blind and incapable of blocking anything.

GlassWire also uses a background service to collect additional data about connections.

Finally, an oddity we came across was that GlassWire provides a tray icon with the “Exit” option. But pressing that button makes GlassWire stop blocking connections, but it does not end GlassWire or the service as expected - instead it continues to run and monitor connections. This appears to be misleading wording that may not align with user expectations.

Portmaster Integrates Into the System Using the Kernel Extension

On the other hand, Portmaster uses the Windows Filtering Platform (WFP) in kernel-space mode. This means that it has its own kernel extension with custom logic. This kernel extension sees every network packet that goes in or out of the device. The Portmaster can analyze the packet data to extract information from it, such as domain names and encryption settings of HTTPS connections. As a result it can make a lot of smart decisions.

In order to give you an overview of what is happening on your device, the Portmaster directly feeds the raw network data into its Network monitor, showing you what your network has been up to within the last 10 minutes.

Contrary to GlassWire, Portmaster’s system integration is both documented and open source, so behavior can be independently verified.

Portmaster Safeguards Your DNS queries From ISPs to Enhance Your Privacy

Encrypted DNS queries allow you to bypass Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and eavesdroppers and directly resolve your requests at the DNS provider. With Secure DNS, you get to enjoy enhanced security by preventing threats like DNS based Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks and additional privacy from middleware. GlassWire needs extra software/setup to encrypt DNS queries, while Portmaster encrypts your DNS queries by default.

That being said, even if your ISP is uninformed of the websites you visit, they can monitor the IP addresses you connect to. Since many services employ dedicated static IPs for their infrastructure, ISPs can try to track your queries using conditional logic. So even though DNS encryption improves your privacy, it cannot safeguard all of your connections.

To fully protect your connections, we recommend using Tor, a trusted VPN or the SPN (Portmaster Add-On), which will provide additional privacy from your ISP.

Conclusion

Both Portmaster and GlassWire visualize network activity and allow per-app configuration. Portmaster adds privacy defaults, secure DNS, and filter lists out of the box. GlassWire is proprietary and requires more manual setup to achieve similar privacy outcomes.

#019 - Progress Update June

David — Thu, 23 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

What Makes Portmaster A Great Alternative to Simplewall

safing — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Overview Chart

	Portmaster	Simplewall
Open Source
Setup	Easy	Easy
Protection Type	Device	Device
System Integration	Kernel Extension	Windows Filtering Platform
Availabilty
Secure DNS
Individual Apps Settings
Adaptive Threat Model

Detailed Comparison

One Shoe Does Not Fit All - What Is Your Threat Model?

What is the best way to protect diamonds worth a few thousand dollars?

You could leave them in your living room for everyone to see. But that would be careless.
You could build an atomic bomb shelter in the middle of the woods. But that would overdo it.
A safe in your house is probably a better solution.

Welcome to the world of threat modeling. Before choosing any tool, especially within privacy, it is important to ask:

What do I want to protect?
From whom do I want protection?
How much time can I invest?

Understanding your threat model might be difficult at first, but it will save you a lot of time and help you avoiding wrong decisions. This comparison blog showcases the strengths and weaknesses of the Portmaster and Simplewall and hopes to assist you in your decision making.

Portmaster and Simplewall Are Free and Open Source

The Portmaster and Simplewall are both free and open source, with great communities involved. They are also both transparent about their funding. Simplewall is donation based while Portmaster has a clear business model.

Portmaster and Simplewall Are Easy to Install

The installation process for both Simplewall and Portmaster is straightforward. You simply download an executable which will handle the installation for you. Both provide the option to automatically start on boot to assist you in maintaining your established connection rules.

The Portmaster runs in the background by default to protect your privacy, but when you start Simplewall, it will automatically block all programs and ask you for permission for each one that tries to connect to the Internet.

By Default Portmaster Gives You More Privacy Than Simplewall

By default, Portmaster blocks a wide range of trackers, ads, and unwanted connections, while Simplewall blocks Microsoft telemetry.

One of the most effective strategies for blocking unwanted connections is to maintain and keep track of filter lists, which Portmaster does for you. Thousands of ads, trackers and malware domains are already blocked by default. These lists are gathered from open source intelligence and are also used by browser extensions, the Pi-hole, etc.

The Portmaster’s settings allow you to easily customize the filter list by selecting categories such as malware, NSFW, ad networks, trackers, etc. These lists are frequently updated, allowing the Portmaster to block a growing number of unwanted domains.

The defaults of Simplewall will disable Internet access for all of your apps and will disable auto-updates for your operating system, which is a debated topic. Simplewall’s biggest strength is its blocking of Microsoft telemetry using different IP addresses. However, a weak point with this approach is that whenever Microsoft changes one of their IPs, it will take a while until Simplewall catches up with that change. In order to create a more robust setup, a lot of extra work has to be done.

Also, if you want to block other trackers, there is no simple way to import IPs or domains into Simplewall.

Generally speaking, you can observe that Portmaster and Simplewall view a connection in different ways. Simplewall filters traffic based on individual apps or IP addresses, while the Portmaster filters connections based on domains, IPs or apps.

Since Portmaster can also block by domain, Portmaster can block connections from all the domain’s traffic-serving servers. Major CDNs may have hundreds of IPs serving thousands of websites, plus many prominent services like Google and Facebook have hundreds of IPs that are continuously changing. Even self-hosted servers use DDNS to keep their dynamic IPs updated against their domains. Simplewall’s approach of tracking all those IP addresses is relatively cumbersome.

Simplewall Requires More Manual Configuration

Whenever an application tries to connect to the Internet, Simplewall will display a notification asking you to allow or deny that app’s Internet connection. As you might expect, the first time you use Simplewall will result in a slew of pop-ups requesting permission to connect. Simplewall’s understanding of your preferences may lead to fewer pop-ups over time, but it is still unwelcoming. Simplewall allows you to create custom rules and has a tab for apps that use the Universal Windows Platform API, but it does not allow the import of any filter lists, whether of IP addresses or domains, which can be restrictive in a number of ways.

Nonetheless, there are some useful features, such as dragging and dropping an executable to disable its Internet access. Simplewall is effective at its job, but requires a lot of manual configuration to achieve privacy.

Portmaster Provides a Simple Dashboard for Detecting and Responding to Privacy Threats

The Portmaster’s interface is sleek and provides a pleasant user experience. The Portmaster displays connections made by specific apps on your device along with detailed metrics. This will provide you with a general picture of your Internet usage and the connections you are making.

As a result, you will be able to make better decisions to protect your privacy. The Portmaster’s dashboard categorizes all connections and displays them per app. This is a useful addition because you can now see which apps are connecting where. If you click on a connection, it also displays additional information such as the IP address, the server’s country, the number of concurrent connections, and whether your connection was encrypted.

There are numerous other options available in the Portmaster’s configuration, such as identifying and filtering on the basis of domains, IP addresses, local connections, P2P, and protocols (like SSH, RDP, HTTP, FTP, etc.). You can also adjust the settings per-app. So if you wish, you can watch YouTube videos on Chrome but not on Firefox. Overall, Portmaster achieves a good balance between privacy and usability.

Simplewall’s dashboard takes a different approach, with different tabs that allow you to manage your filtering process. We cannot say for sure, but its design appears to have been influenced by previous versions of Windows settings.

The tabs “Apps”, “Services”, and “UWP Apps” (Universal Windows Platform) allow you to view and customize the filters for installed, built-in, or system apps. “UWP Apps” are apps that use the UWP API, and displaying them separately can be useful in some cases. “System” and “user rules” allow you to configure protocols like DNS, DHCP, mDNS, NetBIOS, HTTP, FTP, Telnet, and so on. Simplewall also allows you to customize some Windows-specific settings, such as Windows updates or connections to the Microsoft account.

Simplewall Is Basically A Graphical User Interface for the Windows Filtering Platform

Simplewall uses the Windows Filtering Platform (WFP) in user-space mode, creating rules for applications essentially exactly like the Windows Firewall does itself. Simplewall is notified of new network activity through events. This means that Simplewall is limited to the data that Windows provides it with. Simplewall can see metadata about the packets, but it cannot see the data in the network packets itself.

Every rule created or activated within Simplewall results in multiple rules added to the WFP.

In the “Connections” tab, Simplewall does not show the data from these events, but only shows currently active connections, making it hard to catch very short lived connections.

Portmaster Integrates Into the System Using the Kernel Extension

Portmaster on the other hand uses the Windows Filtering Platform (WFP) in kernel-space mode. This means that it has its own kernel extension with custom logic. This kernel extension sees every network packet that goes in or out of the device. The Portmaster can analyze the packet data to extract information from it, such as domain names and encryption settings of HTTPS connections. As a result it can make a lot of smart decisions.

Portmaster and Simplewall Allow You to Block Incoming Connections

Your personal computer is not a server. There is no need for anyone to connect to your computer unless you know exactly what you are doing and how to do it. In general it is a good security practice to block all incoming connections and then allow pinhole traffic to connect as needed. This is possible both with Portmaster and Simplewall. You can block all incoming connections globally and then allow specific connections to pass through as required. This option can also be applied per app. This is valuable for self-hosted services or while using the distributed Internet.

Portmaster Safeguards Your DNS queries From ISPs to Enhance Your Privacy

With encrypted DNS, only your DNS provider can keep track of your DNS requests, while Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and eavesdroppers cannot easily determine the websites you visit or the apps you use. You also benefit from increased security by preventing threats such as DNS-based man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks.

Even if your ISP is unaware of the websites you visit, they can monitor the IP addresses you connect to. If services use dedicated static IPs for their infrastructure, ISPs can still use conditional logic to track your queries. Remember that only your queries are encrypted; any data you exchange with the websites is encrypted only if you see a padlock next to the domain. DNS encryption enhances your privacy, but it cannot protect all of your connections.

Depending on your threat model, we recommend using Tor, a trusted VPN or the SPN (Portmaster Add-On) to gain additional privacy from your ISP. To enable DoH/DoT system-wide with Simplewall, you may need to install additional apps such as yogaDNS or stubby. The Portmaster on the other hand, saves you time and effort by supporting and enabling secure DNS system-wide by default, allowing you to configure your preferred DNS provider. Furthermore, the Portmaster prevents other apps from using secure DNS to connect to a different DNS provider in order to stop DNS leaks from apps. However, there may be times when you need other apps to connect to a different DNS provider, and the Portmaster can assist you with that as well.

The Portmaster Adapts to Your Threat Model

Your home network is probably more trustworthy than a WiFi at a coffee shop. With the Portmaster, you can configure settings to be active in one situation but not in the other, like allowing sensitive connections at home but not at the public library.

This enables you to configure settings for different situations: as soon as your situation changes, all you need to do is flip a switch and all settings will immediately adapt to your configured threat model.

Portmaster also has a Simple/Advanced switch that shows or hides settings, allowing you to get even more control over your threat model.

Conclusion

Portmaster for Broad Privacy Defaults; Simplewall for Microsoft Telemetry

Both the Portmaster and Simplewall are open source solutions which are easy to set up. Portmaster has privacy defaults that block tracking and unwanted connections out of the box. Simplewall’s defaults focus on Microsoft Telemetry. Users who want broader privacy protection with less configuration may find Portmaster a better fit.

Why Is Portmaster Still "Alpha"?

raphael — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Software development is a challenge, especially when you are expected to support an abundance of different systems. The thing is, supporting different systems requires a lot of individual development and testing. And if you only have limited resources, you cannot do everything. That is the reason Portmaster only supports Windows and Linux at the moment.

Initially we intended to support macOS faster, but decided our time is better invested in developing the Portmaster to its best first. And only transferring it to macOS after achieving a certain level of maturity. This decision actually has a lot to do with our overall approach to development.

Others Develop All Features Bare-Bone and then Iterate

Traditional software development goes like this: the software is envisioned with all of its features, then a minimum viable product (MVP) is created for the whole product and then the iteration starts:

For a text messaging app you would need features like sending messages, pictures, videos, and maybe even a call function. It is not important that it performs perfectly on release. It is important that all features are visible and work in theory. That is the basis from where you start all the iteration and bug fixes.

Portmaster Must Stabilize Each Feature Individually

Usually, this approach makes the most sense but that is not the case for the Portmaster. If a text message cannot be delivered because of a bug, it is annoying, but it is not the end of the world. However, if the Portmaster has a bug, the entire Internet can break. Portmaster bugs have more severe consequences which is why we prioritize functionality over quantity. We make sure that a module works before adding the next thing.

Within Portmaster, each component is developed to a certain level of stability and maturity first. Only then we move onto the next one, and so the cycle repeats.

We develop the Portmaster to fully function with every update which means that each component works on launch – from the Privacy Filter, Secure DNS to the SPN. At the point of release, we are long past the prototyping stage where everything only has to work theoretically and only was tested in “lab” conditions. MVPs are typically released as soon as lab testing is concluded.

“Alpha” for Portmaster Is More About Missing Features than Instability

MVPs are what we all know as typical “Alpha” software. They are launched with the full spectrum of features, but some of those do not always work and there are bugs everywhere. You cannot expect reliable performance and they can be a pain to use.

We use the term “Alpha” for the Portmaster’s current stage of development, but generally when people try it out, they are very surprised by how polished the “Alpha” software is. Of course, this makes us happy, but it also shows that we have some additional explaining to do.

The main reason we call it “Alpha” software is because the Portmaster does not yet have all the features we want it to have. It is like having a four-course meal planned where the soup and main course are ready to be served, but the appetizer and dessert are not cooked yet.

Sure one can already enjoy the completed meals, but as a restaurant wanting to offer a four-course dish, half of the menu is still missing. So even though our Secure DNS on its own can be considered final software, other features are still not stable enough. And as the entire package is not “Beta” yet, we call the Portmaster “Alpha”.

Developers do not usually work like this because it takes so much time. Releasing the finished product feature by feature, with each going through “Alpha”, “Beta” and “Stable” is most common in business to business products, where reliability of the working system is more important than the overall feature set.

This applies for us as well because the nature of our product does not allow for annoying bugs which can be ignored. If a chat bubble in a messaging app turns purple because of a mistake in the code it does not affect the functionality. When the Portmaster fails, users often lose their Internet connection and are sometimes forced to deactivate or uninstall the Portmaster.

As a result we decided to focus on performance and quality, even if the road to wide adoption is longer.

Every Portmaster Release Is Tested in Three Stages

Our release process has three steps for an update to go through before it becomes available to everyone.

First, we start with a phase called Staging, which is where we do all the lab testing. This is before any public review, and only our developers have a look at the code.

The next step is getting others involved in the review process. This is where the Release Channel comes into play. In this phase early adopters receive the pre-release and then report bugs and test performance. We have two intense weeks of fixing everything that comes up, and only when the release is battle tested do we push the update to all our Portmaster users.

Drawback: People Judge a Book by its Cover

The biggest drawback is probably that users generally compare products on the level of features first. Naturally, the quality is important as well but when looking for something new, one has to start somewhere, and feature lists are easy to compare.

The approach of releasing a fully feature-stacked but barely working prototype makes it easier for customers to stumble upon the software. They can already use the entire product, even if it is buggy and features sometimes do not work. If we look at the gaming industry, we can see this approach. The industry tends to charge people a lot of money for unfinished software.

We are not saying the Portmaster is perfect. Yes, the Portmaster does have bugs, but we try to fix them as we go. We do not push out feature after feature, until all features on our list are complete and start to clean up our mess afterwards. Of course, we are not completely unique in that regard, but this is fairly unusual in the current consumer facing software landscape.

Because people are not used to this approach, they might see the “Alpha” label, expect the Portmaster is garbage, and do not even try it. If they try, they are surprised to see how polished alpha software can be. We prefer under-promising and overdelivering compared to the opposite. We believe this approach is more customer-friendly and is essential to sustainable growth.

The Missing Features For “Beta”

In the last year Portmaster has progressed really well, especially within technical stability. The application surely is in the final phase of “Alpha”. So what is needed for Portmaster to reach “Beta”? Here’s a sneak peek:

Importing & Exporting Portmaster Settings
Custom Filter Lists
Cryptographically Signed Updates
Full-Device Network Monitor

We will continue to move forward, into “Beta” and beyond. And who knows, we might squeeze in other surprises too. Stay sharp until then ;) Thank you for being part of this journey!

#018 - Progress Update February

David — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Portmaster 0.8 Available Now: Simple Toggles

david — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Ever since the complete Portmaster re-design 15 months ago, our main focus on development has been technical stability and new features. Today, this changes, with some of the biggest design and usability updates to date!

Polished User Interface For Easier Control

The Portmaster is powerful. But even with all its power, many new users who installed the Portmaster were overwhelmed or confused how to navigate the application or how to configure some of its settings.

As a result, the focus of version 0.8+ was better user experience and easier control.

Settings Redesign

The Settings is where all the magic happens. That is why we felt it more than appropriate to improve its styling and to make things more compact.

The description for each setting can now be easily viewed by clicking the (i) next to the setting instead of filling the page with information. This makes everything more compact, giving you a better overview of your configuration with less scrolling. Oh yes, the “On/Off” switches have now been replaced with simple toggles.

Simple Toggles Replace Complexity

The biggest learning curve for new users has always been the Network Rating, where you configure settings not only for the moment, but also for future environment changes. With Portmaster version 0.8+ new users now get simple toggles switches per default.

How Do I (De)Activate the Toggles?

Note: Simple Toggles are the default for new Portmaster installs.

Application Pages Now Have All the Details

One thing you could not do but would feel so natural was hopping between an application’s connection and its settings. Why not view what an app does and then react with just a few clicks?

With the new Application Pages you can now easily switch between an applications tabs: Connections, Settings and its Details.

We love this new approach - we hope you do too!

Delete App Profiles to Restore Defaults

Also, in case you experimented too much with settings and broke an app - you can now easily fix that. Just open up its application’s page, open its “Details” tab and then press “Delete Profile” in order to restore its defaults settings.

Thank You!

To all our users and customers: Thanks for using Portmaster and the SPN, thanks for reporting bugs and for telling your friends. All of this is only possible through your support.

#017 - Progress Update January

David — Fri, 11 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Reminder: Free Period Ends February, 1st

david — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Just a quick reminder to all SPN customers. Your free period will end tomorrow, February 1st, 2022.

To continue using the SPN, please sign in to your SPN account and hit the “activate” button which will appear tomorrow, February 1st.

During the free period we pushed plenty of improvements and hope you are happy with the current speeds and experience.

Thanks for your support!

What Makes Portmaster A Great Alternative to Pi-hole

safing — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Overview Chart

	Portmaster	Pi-hole
Open Source
Setup	Easy	Advanced
Protection Type	Device	Network
Availabilty
Secure DNS
Individual Apps Settings
Adaptive Threat Model

Detailed Comparison

One Shoe Does Not Fit All - What Is Your Threat Model?

What is the best way to protect diamonds worth a few thousand dollars?

You could leave them in your living room for everyone to see. But that would be careless.
You could build an atomic bomb shelter in the middle of the woods. But that would overdo it.
A safe in your house is probably a better solution.

Welcome to the world of threat modeling. Before choosing any tool, especially within privacy, it is important to ask

What do I want to protect?
From whom do I want protection?
How much time can I invest?

Understanding your threat model might be difficult at first, but it will save you a lot of time and help you avoiding wrong decisions. This comparison blog showcases the strengths and weaknesses of the Portmaster and the Pi-hole and hopes to assist you in your decision making.

Portmaster and Pi-hole Are Free and Open Source

The Portmaster and Pi-hole are both free and open source, with great communities involved. They are also both transparent about their funding which gives additional insight into their organization and motives. (Portmaster / Pi-hole)

Portmaster Is Beginner Friendly

Protecting your privacy should not require a high level of technical expertise, which is why the Portmaster is designed to be simple for beginners. It is easy to setup and the default settings improve your privacy right out of the box.

However, experts can spend hours upon hours to configure every aspect to their needs, as mentioned in later passages.

Portmaster Protects Your Device, Pi-hole Your Network

The Pi-hole’s scope of protection is very different from the Portmaster’s. Since the Portmaster is an on-device network blocker, it will stop unwanted connections from leaving your computer even before the DNS.

The Pi-hole on the other hand will act as a DNS server, allowing many devices to connect to it and filtering traffic for all those devices. The Pi-hole can be used on the client-side with some additional setup, but because of its technical architecture, it is best used as a network service.

In comparison to the Portmaster, Pi-hole often involves the usage of extra hardware, such as a Raspberry Pi or a Virtual Private Server (VPS) as the server. This could result in additional costs and maintenance.

More setup and technical knowledge is required to access it outside the local network and keep the server secure. In the end, it may well be worth the extra efforts if your threat model demands it.

The documentation for the Pi-hole and Portmaster will provide more details if you wish to dig into the technical details.

Portmaster Allows You to Configure Settings System-Wide and Per-App

The Portmaster has global settings which define behavior for the whole device. But sometimes, an application may break due to a blocked connection. Allowing that connection system-wide might hurt your privacy. With the Portmaster, you can easily solve this problem by creating an exception for a specific application, leaving other apps unaffected.

You can even block risky connection types system-wide, such as p2p or incoming, and then create exceptions for trusted apps.

Pi-hole Can Manage All Your Devices

Many aspects of the Pi-hole are comparable to those of the Portmaster, such as content blocking, filter lists, query logs, etc. However, since the Pi-hole is a server it also has advantages over the Portmaster. It can be used to secure your whole local network, as well as any other device that can connect to the Pi-hole over the Internet.

Smart TVs, smart devices and printers in your network may send telemetry data or display advertisements. In such situations a Pi-hole is well suited, as many hardware and software limitations prevent the installation of client-side blockers like the Portmaster. The Pi-hole will prevent advertisements, trackers, and other intrusions at the network DNS level.

Any changes you make to the Pi-hole settings will be applied to all devices that use it to route their connections. It is not possible to change and save settings for a device or app individually.

Additional capabilities of the Pi-hole includes Gravity script, the Pi-hole command, Telnet API, customized logs and DHCP management, all of which will help you better manage your devices.

Portmaster and Pi-hole Both Provide a Simple Dashboard for Detecting and Responding to Privacy Threats

The interfaces of Portmaster and Pi-hole are both sleek and provide a pleasant user experience. Because of the significant technical variations between them, they have quite the distinct tweaking possibilities: The Pi-hole can display metrics from all devices on the network and can prevent devices from accessing the Internet at the network DNS level.

The Portmaster enables you to see connections made from specific apps on your device. This allows you to fully block Internet access for individual applications or block specific, unwanted connections. For even stricter settings, you can block Internet access on the device level and then create individual exceptions for applications.

Both Safeguard Your DNS queries From ISPs to Enhance Your Privacy

The Pi-hole needs some setup to encrypt DNS queries, while the Portmaster does this by default. With encrypted DNS, your DNS provider is the only one who can keep track of your DNS requests while Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and eavesdroppers can no longer easily determine the websites you browse or the apps you use. You also enjoy enhanced security by preventing threats like DNS based man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks.

Even if your ISP is uninformed of the websites you visit, they can monitor the IP addresses you connect to. Since many services employ dedicated static IPs for their infrastructure, ISPs can still track your queries using conditional logic. So even though DNS encryption improves your privacy, it cannot safeguard all your connections.

We recommend using Tor, a trusted VPN or the SPN (Portmaster Add-On), which will provide additional privacy from your ISP.

The Portmaster Adapts to Your Threat Model

Different places have different threats. Your home network is more trustworthy than a WiFi at a coffee shop.

With the Portmaster, you can configure settings to be active in one situation but not in the other, like allowing sensitive connections at home but not at the public library.

Portmaster also has a Simple/Advanced switch that shows or hides settings, allowing you to get even more control over your threat model.

Both Solutions Can Be Used Alongside an Existing VPN Connection

The Portmaster and the Pi-hole support running alongside a VPN. Some VPNs require additional setup, so it is always good if you check the compatibility of your VPN in the latest docs of the Portmaster and the Pi-hole.

Portmaster Makes It Easy to Block Domains By Category

The Portmaster allows you to easily block ads, trackers, malware and NSFW sites via integrated domain filter lists. You can manage these lists for your full device or configure them for individual applications.

These lists are created and maintained by privacy and security communities and are also used by browser extensions, the Pi-hole, etc.

Additionally, you can block all subdomains of entries in selected filter lists to further tighten your privacy.

Conclusion

Both the Portmaster and Pi-hole are open source solutions which greatly improve your privacy. The Portmaster is easily set up and has great privacy defaults. This gives you a simple way to fully control your device, wherever you go. The Pi-hole on the other hand needs some initial setup; but for the skilled it is a great tool for controlling and managing your home network.

#016 - Progress Update November

David — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Safing Privacy Network Reaches "Alpha"

david — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In October 2020 one of our supporters joked around and said he would gift us a video game if he got access to the SPN before Christmas. I am happy to announce we technically made it.

All Customers Now Get SPN Access 🎉

Yes, as of today, all customers get access to the SPN. Whether you pre-ordered the SPN a while ago or are going to purchase it today. You are in!

To Celebrate, All Customers Can Use the SPN For Free in December + January

This is an exciting moment for all of us. To celebrate and to say thanks, all customers can use the SPN for free throughout December 2021 and January 2022. Every paying person, new or old, gets automatic access.

Of course the free SPN access will not charge for your paid subscription. Only after the free period you will decide when to start your paid subscription.

Watch the SPN in Action

Check Out the SPN’s Current Status

Since the SPN is in “Alpha”, we highly recommend you check out the current status and capabilities of the SPN.

Switch Your Release Channel to Get the Newest Updates

Both the Portmaster and the SPN receive stable updates every few weeks. But in reality, improvements and fixes are pushed even faster. You can switch your Release Channel to “Beta” in the Portmaster settings to get access to all improvements sooner.

How To Report Bugs

If you stumble across bugs, please report them to the SPN repository on GitHub or send us an email to support@safing.io.

A Long, Research-Heavy Chapter Concludes

The Portmaster and the SPN have been years in the making. Safing is nearing its 5th anniversary, and concepts of these privacy solutions go even further back. Needless to say we are excited for this new chapter.

Expect Lots of Incremental Updates From Here On Out

In this new chapter, we no longer have to build new products, but we can improve existing products. The products still have their quirks, and our research is not done, but now we can focus our efforts on improving the tools.

So expect plenty of bug fixes, better technical stability and user experience, and of course some cool new features. Especially the SPN has a lot to see forward to; we decided to hide most of its features and only make them visible once we know how to properly present them.

As always, we will keep you in the loop with everything that is happening on the What’s Next? page as well as via our newsletter.

Thanks to Everyone Who Is Part of the Journey

We are super glad the SPN finally achieved this milestone and are hard at work pushing both the SPN and Portmaster into “Beta” and beyond. Thank you for your patience, your excitement, your support and your trust.

#015 - Progress Update October

David — Fri, 05 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

SPN Enters "Broader Testing" Phase

david — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Note December 2nd 2021:
This blog post is outdated. Check out the SPNs latest status.

On October 12th, the SPN reached the “Broader Testing”

What Does It Cost?

Reaching the “Broader Testing” phase is an important milestone for the SPN. Exciting weeks and months are ahead of us.

However, not all aspects and features of the SPN have been thoroughly tested, confirmed or implemented. As such, access to the SPN during the “Broader Testing” phase is free of charge, no credit will be charged from your accounts.

Who Gets Access?

Everybody who fulfills both these requirements is eligible for the “Broader Testing” phase:

You have pre-ordered the SPN before September 30th, 2021
You have an email attached to your account

What Happens If I Pre-Order the SPN After September 30th?

You will not be able to purchase your way into the “Broader Testing” phase retrospectively. However, you will be enqueued in the group right after - where you will be able to activate your SPN subscription as soon as the SPN reaches the “Alpha” phase.

Why Do I Need An Email to Participate?

In the “Broader Testing” phase, communication with all SPN testers is critical in order to find bugs and to mature the SPN into “Alpha” and beyond. Having users join the incomplete network without any means of communication would not help the SPN progress in any meaningful way.

We know many of you do not want to add an email address to your account due to privacy and we totally respect that. We thank you so much for your trust and are doing our best to progress the SPN into “Alpha” where everybody will be able to enjoy their SPN subscription.

What Will You Contact Me About?

During the “Broader Testing” phase we would reach out once ore twice per month to ask question like:

What is working in the SPN?
What is not working?
Where should we add more servers?
etc…

Your contributions and answers will shape the stability and future of the SPN. Thanks in advance!

Can I Add An Email Retrospectively?

Yes. If you pre-ordered the SPN before September 30th, 2021 you can add an email to your account retrospectively and still get access to the “Broader Testing” phase.

Thanks to Everyone Who Is Part of the Journey

We are super glad the SPN finally achieved this milestone and are hard at work pushing it forward into “Alpha” and beyond. Thank you for your support, your patience and your trust.

SPN “Broader Testing” Status and Goals

As we are heavily iterating and improving the SPN, all goals, issues and next steps will change over the next weeks. Visit the SPN Status Page in our docs for an up-to-date version.

Snapshot as of October 11th

0.1 How Can I Activate the SPN “Broader Testing” Phase?

read the blog post to see if you are eligible
log in to your Safing account to receive your access code
in the Portmaster App
- switch to the “Beta” Release Channel
  - Restart the Portmaster and Reload the UI
  - You should now see a yellow “BETA” in the global settings
- Enable the SPN
- enter your Special Access Code
- configure the Use SPN setting globally and for different apps, depending on your needs

0.2 How Can I Test that the SPN Is Running?

Go to https://duckduckgo.com/?q=what+is+my+ip to see your current IP address before activating the SPN
Enable the SPN
Reload DuckDuckGo and check if the IP address has changed
Bonus Step: Visit some of the “what is my IP” websites, your IP address should change frequently (based on the destination server location)

1. Normally Works Well - Report if Broken

Portmaster Client successfully connects to the SPN
Normal browsing of websites
Big file downloads
Video streaming
Low Bandwidth: up to 5MBit/s

2. Under Investigation - Please Test and Report

Video Conferencing
UDP based applications
Medium Bandwidth: targeting 30MBit/s as next step

3. Under Construction

Connecting to the SPN via Portmaster is currently very basic, new views showing what the SPN is currently doing are being designed and developed
we will add instructions for how to test that the SPN is working on your device to the docs before October 12th

4. Known Issues

The SPN re-uses connections to nodes. Due to missing route evaluation during routing calculation we currently cannot guarantee the minimum three hops.
Speeds might vary greatly as we do not know the resource profile of the SPN yet.
The SPN seems to be failing after sleep/suspend. Investigating. Disable/Enable SPN as a workaround.
We’re leaking open file descriptors somewhere, which also affects Portmaster after some time. Restart Portmaster as a workaround.
For stability, the client is artificially more sequential in order to provide more stability. This might lead to lag when lots of connections are initiated at the same time. Eg. when browsing to “big” websites.

How To Report Bugs

Bugs can be reported on the SPN repository on GitHub

Portmaster 0.6.22 Available Now

david — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Exploring Portmaster Just Got Easier

Ever since the dawn of Portmaster people have reported confusion around the threat-model based approach of blocking and allowing connections. And they are absolutely right, some features of Portmaster are rather complicated and do not “click” immediately. But today, the learning curve just got smoother.

Introducing Info-Popups

Complex features of Portmaster now have small info-icons next to them, which you can open to learn more about what they do:

We hope this makes your experience easier - feel free to re-explore Portmaster to learn everything it does to protect your privacy. Tell us what you think and suggest where we should add additional explainers. Which leads us to the next big change:

Contact Us Directly Within the Portmaster

Starting today, you can easily contact us from within the Portmaster. Simply visit the “Get Help” page to report a bug, suggest a feature or report in/compatibility. You will also find helpful links to the extended Portmaster Docs, with the Settings Handbook, DNS Configuration Guides, VPN compatibility reports, etc…

Report Issues via Email or GitHub - With or Without an Account - You Choose

We know not everybody has a GitHub account, and some would prefer not to create an account just to report an issue. That is why you can report us privately without an account or via mail. As always, you chose what you are comfortable with.

Maybe you are experiencing issues others have had problems with too. While typing out your title, the Portmaster will display all public related issues.

Portmaster receives public GitHub issues from the Safing update server, which acts as a proxy. The update server regularly bundles all public issues and then distributes it to Portmaster clients together with intelligence data, such as the newest malware/trackers/etc filter lists. This way, Portmaster never pings GitHub servers while still being able to show related issues locally, which you then can open to read into the reports and discussions.

For the curious, extended docs on how the update system works is planned - you can always follow the next page to keep up to date with our work.

#014 - Progress Update August

David — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

#013 - Progress Update July

David — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

#012 - Progress Update June

David — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

#011 - Progress Update May

David — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

#010 - Progress Update April

David — Fri, 07 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

How Weak Business Models Destroy Everything We Fight For

david — Thu, 06 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

For a TLDR read titles only

Software Is Bloody Expensive - Someone Has to Pay

Software != Only Development

When thinking of software and its costs, we quickly think of Development. And we might also know that development is a rabbit hole in itself, ranging from software development to user experience, to web development, etc…

Some might even think of other areas such as Server Costs or Customer Support, but usually that is where we stop thinking about money. We rarely grasp what the true cost behind software is. And how could we? Few of us run a company and get a look behind-the-scenes. And let’s be honest: typical companies are not known for being transparent.

But being a co-founder myself, I want to share a short overview of areas which are just as big of a rabbit-hole as development: Marketing, Accessibility, Public Relations, Project Management, People Management, Accounting, Legal and Funding.

My point with this is: Software costs money. A lot of it. You gotta pay lawyers, pay accountants, pay employees, pay for marketing (hopefully ethical), etc, etc, etc…

Always Ask “Who Pays?”

But who pays for all of this? That is such a critical question to ask in order to understand where a company stands and where it is heading.

Things Start Simple But Get Expensive Fast

And before we move on, let me be clear: all of these costs do not have to be covered from the get-go. It usually starts out simple, that is also the beauty of it: one person developing a nifty piece of software used by a few people. But as soon as it gets bigger, things become more complicated and especially more expensive.

How To Evaluate A Healthy Privacy Company

Enjoy Podcasts? Privacy YouTuber "TheHatedOne" and I got together to discuss this topic in-depth.

First Ask: Who Finances the “Start-Up”?

The “Start-Up” is the period where you turn an idea into a working product. You still have tons of uncertainties: Prototypes will fail, iterations and pivots will occur, and then maybe it will work out. Or you might just fail as so many have before you.

To increase you odds in this challenging phase you need time (= money). When you can experiment for a longer period, chances of success will increase, but never guarantee it. Remember, every success story has survivorship bias attached to it.

Tackling Funding Is Not Fun, Especially For Developers

Being a developer myself, I know us creators just want to dive into code and do something we can see for real. Not “waste” our limited time on the boring topic of money.

The first nine months after quitting my job in order to co-found Safing was primarily spent on writing a business plan, applying for grants and creating a plan how we could personally finance ourselves for the next 2 years. God I’m happy that draining time is over. It was super boring and super exhausting.

So yes, I understand everybody who just wants to skip that process altogether, but that approach will often come back to bite you later. Which leads us to the most common way of funding startups nowadays:

Be Alarmed When Venture Capital Is Involved

Venture Capital. “Angel” Investors. Enabling the “next big thing”. You get money and guidance, all in turn for a few percent. Fun and great deal, right? But here is the sad truth:

Investors Do Not Care About Privacy Or Business Models

Investors care about multiplying their money. They do not care about your product, your users or their privacy. And they certainly do not care about your business model.

I love Jonas Downey’s words on the topic:

Any company that “doesn’t have a business model yet” actually has a business model — they just haven’t said it out loud. They’re gambling that they can give away a service for free, grow it to absurd usage numbers, and then turn on the money faucet later, through ads, acquisitions, or some other approach.
It’s the same story every time. Facebook did this. Twitter did it. Medium did it. And we all keep falling for it.

Investors have no incentive to make founders care about business models. “Care about it later, for now just grow”. This toxic structure is why most venture backed companies end up being acquired by Big Tech. This happened when Zoom acquired Keybase in 2020, and see for yourself how much they care for Keybase.

Even Minority Investors Can Force A Sell-Out

And there is another dark side to Venture Capital: If the founder(s) own 95% of the company and only have one minority investor of 5%, chances are still high that the investor can force them to sell the whole company when a buyer is found. This right is implemented via legal clauses when the investor gets on board. These clauses are wide-spread among Venture Capital, so be wary.

And yes, founders who sign such a document share the blame too, in the end, they also signed that document. But this often happens early-on, when founders still are inexperienced while the investor assures them everything is “standard procedure and just a safety precaution”.

I know there are positive sides to investors as well, but giving away this level of control is a non-option for true privacy companies.

Self-Financing Is Great For Privacy

When founders pocket the early stages themselves, this is amazing for users. It usually means they are in full control and do not have to bow to the whims of an investor. They can even do extra-ordinary things like Plausible, who gives back 5% of their revenue to open source and the environment. They are independent. They are in control.

Naturally, self-financing is not always an option as this requires some degree of privilege (next to the determination). Such as having savings, cutting down on spendings and/or having resourceful and generous friends & family. These different factors are often combined to make ends meet.

Donation Based Models Can Work, But Come With Their Limits

The concept behind it is great: Give away something for free and hope enough people are enthusiastic enough to donate or even make monthly pledges. This is good for privacy as the project depends on the people, so in turn it is incentivized to serve the people.

Sadly, I see projects aiming for this business model failing time and time again, because they cannot get enough people to care and pay. It is disheartening to see every time.

But on the other side it also works! As an example, a lot of privacy respecting operating systems - such as elementary OS, GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, … - finance themselves with this model.

Donations Do Not Scale Together With Users

But the limitation I see with donations as a business model is that it does not scale. It works well when many of your users are enthusiasts. But as the project reaches more and more adoption, the less enthusiastic the new users will be. To them, this is just an everyday tool which is taken for granted. This points towards the sad truth that the amount of donors does not scale with the amount of users. Even Tor, a big player in the scene, had to recently lay off more than a third of their team due to underfunding.

WikiPedia also has to remind their users regularly with big page banners, that their service needs to be financed somehow. And kudos to them for being in the business for so long!

Grants Work In Favor of Privacy Too, But Are A Gamble

When a company funds itself with grants, this is usually good for users too - the founders remain independent. But there are downsides too:

Applications Are Burdensome, Uncertain And Have Strings Attached

Every grant starts with a demanding application process. A lot of effort has to be put into the application, describing in a lot of detail what one plans to do with the money. After handing it in, you have to wait for months before receiving a result. And when a result finally comes in, it is very normal to get the grant denied without any explanation at all. You are left in the dark and can only guess what went wrong. And what do you do now? Invest another month to write applications for a chance at a grant?

And even if you get accepted, there are still plenty of strings attached. Next to completing the promised development you have to document everything in detail and hand in regular reports to update the granter of your process. Additionally, there often is no flexibility to change course and there are tight restrictions on how the money can and cannot be spent. With most grants you can solely fund development, but no marketing or back office activities. Or you might not even be able to pay salaries but only spend money on licensing or outsourcing.

I Encourage This Path, But Be Understanding When Folks Are Hesitant

This is the path we took and I do recommend wherever possible. I am super thankful grants enabled us to stay independent and fund our journey so far - but it does come with a cost of having additional, mundane work. We definitely were lucky too. If an evaluator got up on the wrong foot on the wrong day, things might have turned out very different. I fully understand every founder frustrated with having one application denied after the other - without meaningful feedback one can learn from.

Second Ask: How Will the Company Scale Financially?

If the project overcame this first obstacle of financing the “Start-Up” period and remained independent - big, big kudos to them! This is the perfect foundation to create the privacy respecting tech alternatives our societies so desperately need. We have had enough of Google, of Facebook, of Big Tech. But how can we users identify which project will remain user-serving and which might cave in to data exploitation?

Re-Inspect the Areas And Their Costs

We need to go back to the listed areas and have a look at what costs the company should expect when they 10x or 100x their user base. Which costs will explode alongside the user growth and which will remain kind of the same?

Some Costs Will Stay Static

With software that runs locally, Development will remain rather fixed. A great example of this is uBlock Origin, which has multiplied its users over the years but still manages the day to day as before. In short, Gorhill serving Internet citizens with an amazing community.

There are many other areas that might remain static and hit a roof as well, but it greatly depends on the specific project. Also note, we personally have not reached that phase yet so I cannot speak from experience. Nevertheless, the more important thing is to identify the cost-intensive areas:

Identify Areas Where Costs Will Scale Too

So what if a product 100x their user base. A VPN Service will naturally need more servers. But also more employees in Development to handle the growing infrastructure. As a result, People Managament and Project Management must scale too. Support and Accounting will also need more attention. And so on. The nice thing with a VPN Service is, that they will 100x their revenue too, since it is very natural for users to pay for VPN services.

With other services only few costs scale together with the increased user base. Take an operating system, like GrapheneOS an example. The only costs that must scale is distribution (Server Costs). It will help if other areas scale too, but is not really necessary.

Does Their Business Model Scale Accordingly?

So after identifying the crucial cost points now comes the most important question: Is the business model set up to scale financially too? A business model that charges users scales very naturally. A business model built on grants, donations or your own funds, can work in cases like GrapheneOS, but not so well for others like Signal.

Case Study: Signal

A short disclaimer: Signal Messenger is amazing. It is open source, is a breeze to use, limits meta-data collection and has top-notch cryptography. I use it almost every day. Signal also responds firmly to jury subpoenas and has the balls to pick a fight with Cellebrite. I respect Signal a lot.
I am not here to take take away anything from all the amazing work they do, but I am here to highlight their business model which might become or already is a serious threat.

A Chain Breaks At Its Weakest Link - So Let’s Investigate Signal & Money

The Initial $50M Gave Signal the Freedom to Not Worry About Money

In the beginning of 2018, Signal Foundation (as well as Signal Messenger LLC) was formed with an initial $50 Million donation coated as a “loan” from Brian Acton, who got his capital from creating and scaling WhatsApp which was later sold to Facebook. This funding increased to around 100M dollars by the end of 2018. This points out how expensive such an undertaking is.

In Turn, They Could Focus On Rock-Solid Technology

This is an amazing situation to be in. Signal could immediately self-pocket the “Start-Up” phase. They could hire skillful employees to get the privacy, cryptography, security and UX aspects of their modern messenger right. On that frontier, Signal is top notch.

But This Freedom Also Fosters Negligence

The other side to this amazing, worry-free environment is that it allows project leaders to be negligent. Just as in venture capital, they can focus on the “fun” technical parts while procrastinating the money to “later”.

Their Official Business Model Does Not Seem to Work Long-Term

So how does Signal fare when it comes to Financial Scalability? Officially, Signal’s business model is “Donations and Grants”. A recent mention of this was by Brian Acton on Indian Television. (at ~7:00 he talks about business models).

But there are serious hints towards that not being the full story. My impression is that Signal is not equipped to finance their next 5 years of expected growth on donations alone.

Their Bandwidth Costs Are Immense And Were Multiplied With Video Features

In his recent TV interview, Brian Acton compares Signal’s model to WikiPedia - and true, they also run on donations. But from a technical cost perspective he is comparing apples and oranges. While WikiPedia has to host static content which only changes semi-regularly; Signal has to cover the bandwidth of all their users sharing images with their friends, as well as regular video or even group video calls. From a cost perspective, hosting video calls is multiple leagues above serving and caching static content.

We Have No Insight Into Their Donations

This alone does not automatically mean Signal’s business model does not work. I am certain quite a few people will donate to Signal regularly. But as of today, there is no way of knowing how many donations they actually receive, let alone who the large donors are which Brian mentions they are cultivating.
Transparency is key, and here Signal sadly is not open about their current state.

MobileCoin Hints Towards A Lack of Funding Too

Earlier this year, Signal announced plans to implement cryptocurrency payments into its messenger via MobileCoin. This stirred a lot of worry and uncertainty within the community.

Privacy YouTuber "TheHatedOne" and I talk extensively about the MobileCoin situation. Tune into that episode for more details

The short summary is: Joshua Goldbard, the CEO of MobileCoin, mentions that he started MobileCoin to fund Signal. Moxie Marlinspike, co-founder and CTO of Signal is their MobileCoin’s advisor. This hints towards him feeling the same way; that Signal needs an additional financial path to stay afloat.

Everybody Makes Mistakes, But Since The Cat Is Out of The Bag Things Remain Unclear

The additional worry comes from Signal’s secrecy around this initiative. Both before, but especially after the community found out. Goldbard has been dodging valid questions and a lot of things remain unclear: What are the financial affiliations between Marlinspike and MobileCoin? How will MobileCoin and Signal tackle the heavy regulatory requirements when implementing such a feature? Why does Signal need this in the first place?

In Summary, I Am Disappointed, But Doom Is Not Set In Stone

To wrap up Signal’s financial situation: Signal successfully and independently overcame the “Start-Up” phase and is currently a great alternative to big-tech messengers; enabling users around the globe to enjoy privacy in their day to day communications.

However, the financial longevity of Signal is highly unclear. We are not doomed yet, they can still adapt and pivot to a sustainable model. But in one way or the other, Signal has the responsibility to monetize their messenger. We cannot do that for them. But we can carry on having these conversations.

Continue Evaluating Privacy Services In All Aspects

The privacy and tech community has immense power. We are the early adopters, we are the ones who ask the hard questions and we are the ones who accelerate a service by recommending it to our friends and family.

We Already Hold Companies Accountable

We have intense discussions on the security, cryptography or privacy of a product. We inspect meta-data collection and advocate for trustless designs. We urge companies to remove themselves from the trust equation, so they do not build a kingdom where the current or next king has the power to become an evil dictator. We also care about jurisdiction and take a look at applicable law.

We Have the Power To Change

I am not claiming that we carry the full burden, since founders and project leaders have a lot of responsibility too. But us asking all these questions is powerful. Our demand for something to be open source is so impactful that most privacy services start out open or follow suit like Threema did.

Add Business Model Questions to Your Interrogation Toolkit

This is my closing ask: that we as a community talk more about how companies fund themselves. Where does the money come from? What is the business model? Who pays? Bombard project owners with these questions. Hold them accountable.

By having these conversations we can create an environment where it becomes just as natural for a privacy project to be open about their money, as it is to be open source.

#009 - Progress Update March

David — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Pitching Safing and Privacy on National Television

david — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It Started With An Invitation From the Austrian Version of Shark Tank

Back in September 2020 we received an email asking if we wanted to be part of the TV show “2 Minuten 2 Millionen” - which is kinda the Austrian version of “Shark Tank”. Most of you will not have seen it, but since we were on air we think it is important to talk about.

First let us look at what this is about: in these type of shows, start-up founders pitch their company to a board of investors. At the end of the pitch the founder offers parts of the company in return for investment money. Some negotiation can occur, and naturally both sides can say no. But if everyone agrees to the terms, a deal is made directly in the show and then further discussed after to “turn the handshake into a legal contract”.

We Were Cautious As Venture Capital Is Mostly Bad for Privacy

Naturally, we were careful with this invitation. We own 100% of Safing for a reason. We do not want anybody to gain influence to the company who does not or might not stand behind our values in the future.

Venture Capital in particular is not known for being privacy friendly. Investors are no charity, they want to get back more money than they spent. And the easiest way for them to achieve this is when a major player just buys out the company. Like when Facebook bought WhatsApp, they bought out all shares of the early investors too, which made big bank that day.

But what is not always so obvious, a change of ownership also means a change of ethics. And in the age of surveillance capitalism this mostly means worse ethics. Back to the Facebook example, of course they kept none of their promises and have exploited privacy of WhatsApp users ever since.

So the main goal of Venture Capital is not to make a business profitable or to respect user privacy, it is to sell the company to a big player to get a juicy return of investment. This path is often legally enforced with contracts signed by the founders early-on. When they realize all of the strings attached, it is usually too late, they are forced to sell out.

There Was No Commitment Required, So We Saw the Opportunity to Present Safing and Privacy

With all of that in the back of our head, we acted carefully. First off, we were up-front with the involved team. We told them that we were really not that interested in selling parts of our company. They were not bothered by this and still wanted us to be on the show.

Having confirmed there were no strings attached, we went ahead and evaluated the positive sides of the gig: First, this would be a good opportunity to train our presentation skills. And more importantly, this would also expose the viewers to privacy and its importance. Even though raising awareness is not our main focus - which remains software development - it is part of the formula to reach a better future.

It Also Extends Our Networking Reach In Austria

As a company you have a set amount of tools you can work with. This is the same for every company, at least for those who obey the law. How to hire, how to manage, how to do business, all these are skills required to run a company successfully. Connecting with other founders and companies to exchange experiences is important. So even though we choose not to use the Venture Capital tool, there are many other areas where we can and want to learn from others.

Being on such a prestigious TV show - even though simple or even irrational - adds more credibility to our company in the eyes of other entrepreneurs in Austria. It already was a door opener to get advice from a bigger company. Specifically they also have experience with FFG fundings and gave great input on that. And we are counting on this networking benefit to continue.

We Said Yes and Pitched to the TV Viewers, Not to the Investors

Adding all of these factors together we decided to be part of the show. Our next step was to decide who should go and do the pitch. We initially wanted to have all founders represent Safing, but being located in Sweden, David was quickly ruled out due to the required travel - which was really not worth it during COVID. And with Daniel we concluded his time was too crucially needed to continue development. Still, we were happy to send Raphael solo and were confident he would do a great job.

So on we went to write the pitch, which had the hard requirement to be under two minutes. David and Raphael worked back and forth and got a nice result, with its communication being clearly directed towards the viewers and not so much the investors.

And then the tricky part. How should we end the pitch with a serious offer, which respects the investors but also does not compromise our integrity? Turns out we could use a simple trick.

The Investors Got An Offer They Could Not Accept

To create a thoughtful offer, we got some external help to evaluate Safing’s current worth, which turned out to be around 2.5M €. With this as a baseline we could genuinely make an offer of 4% for 100.000€.

With this, we already knew that it was unlikely for them to accept. Due to the legal situation (at least as we understand it in Austria) any investor who owns below 5% is a legal minority and has no say. 5% is one hurdle and 25% is another big one where an investor gets a lot of rights.

We Rejected Their Counter-Offer

It came to no surprise that they declined our initial offer, but it did not end there. Some of the investors were genuinely interested in our business and made a counter: They wanted to acquire 25.1%. Naturally, as explained above we do not want external parties to gain influence so we thanked them for the offer and said no.

In the End It Was A Fun Experience

Looking back at the shoot in October and watching it now, we did enjoy the experience. We were encouraged to see the film crew having genuine interest in what we do and what we stand for. They were all ears as Raphael was on-set in the waiting area and talked about Safing. Another fun thing to experience was how TV shows are run. Product placement is a thing and even some censorship was part of the mix: we were not allowed to mention that the Portmaster blocks ads or talk about ad blocking in general.

Anyway, we hope to have raised a bit of awareness and know we learned stuff along the way. Now back to what matters: developing great privacy tools for the masses with no-one coming in between!

Broad SPN Access Postponed to Q3 - Here Is Why

david — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In August 2020 We Decided to Shift Our Attention to the Portmaster

Back in August 2020, we re-evaluated our approach and decided to focus on Portmaster development. There were multiple factors to this:

1. the SPN is tightly integrated into the Portmaster.

The SPN builds on one of the main Portmaster features, intercepting network connections. The SPN relies on this working as much as the Portmaster does. And back then, this aspect was far less mature. So it did not matter how far we would come with the SPN since clients could not reliably connect to the Safing Privacy Network.

2. the User Experience depends on the Portmaster too

It is kinda crazy to see where we were at. Remember this?

Our previous User Interface was ok - coming from techy developers - but for broader adoption it was clear we needed something simpler and nicer. You can see how that huge work package progressed over the months in the update blogs of August, September, October and November.

3. Marketing the SPN with a ugly and buggy Portmaster was very challenging

On the marketing front, we were fighting an almost impossible battle. Get people to try our software or even pre-order a product which was really not that great. Only the toughest of Early Adopters stayed around - big shoutout to you all! But to truly progress, we simply needed more users to understand and improve the product.

In Retrospect We Are Happy About This Decision

Looking back, we believe this was the right call. The Portmaster has become more mature from a technical perspective which in return benefits the SPN mid-term too. Also, the new Portmaster UI let us present the software on our website and has made the software more accessible.

Since 2021 Our Development Focus Returned to the SPN

With the new year we re-shifted our technical development towards the SPN. The main thing we had to do in Q1 was to evaluate anomaly detection algorithms. Due to funding from the ESA-BIC we were contractually required to wrap that project up. This was successful and will come in handy down the road.

Dedicating Q2 to SPN, A Lot Will Happen There

Anyway, we are happy that all this work “for the future” is wrapped up, allowing us to focus on things the SPN needs today in order to stabilize the network and ultimately let more users join. Overall, we can now fully dedicate our technical attention to developing the SPN, while the Portmaster will only receive bug fixes and minor updates. We are sure you will notice the impact of this in the coming months.

We Are Sorry For This Delay

Again, we are sorry for the caused delay and take full responsibility. If you are already using the Portmaster and/or were excited for the SPN let us know how you feel about all of this. We always appreciate hearing from you.

And as always, you can follow all the progress on the next page.

Attributing DNS Requests on Windows

daniel — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

For an application firewall it is crucial to know which processes query which domains. This sounds like an easy thing to achieve, but in practice it turns out to be a rather complicated problem. Especially on Windows.

Applications Resolve DNS via the DNS-Client Windows Service

When we first looked into how to find this vital piece of information on Windows 10, we found that for some reason all DNS requests are sent from the “DNS-Client” Windows service. There were no DNS requests to that service on the wire, just from it. Upon further investigation we found that Windows applications use the dnsapi.dll for taking care of DNS requests: So whenever an application needs to resolve a dns query, for example in order to load a website, this .dll is loaded into the application and takes care of all the DNS details. It then communicates directly with the DNS-Client via an internal IPC mechanism and does not even send a common DNS packet on the wire, which the Portmaster or any other firewall could see.

As a result, we realized that we would not be able to attribute DNS requests to processes out of the box.

For A Long Time, Deactivating the DNS-Client Had No Real Impact - So We Did That

Windows provides the option and official documentation on how to deactivate the DNS-Client. When this is the case, the dnsapi.dll falls back to sending DNS requests on the wire, where the Portmaster can pick them up and handle them.

While researching this issue we found that disabling the DNS-Client actually seemed to be a rather much requested action and quite common for Windows users. That is why we decided to follow this easy route and just disable the DNS-Client upon installation, because it is only a caching stub resolver with no other functionality, right? Right? No.

As it turns out, the DNS-Client is much more than “just” a caching stub resolver.

In retrospect, maybe it should have been a stronger hint to us that Microsoft removed the ability to directly stop the DNS-Client from the service manager. We had to manually set the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\Dnscache -> Start from 2 to 4 and then reboot the system. However, the official Windows docs do not mention anything about there being more to the DNS-Client. They imply that you can stop the DNS-Client from the service manager without side effects, when in reality the DNS-Client has to be disabled manually and has become a critical and central part of Windows not to be tinkered with.

Turns Out: Deactivating the DNS-Client Causes Lots of Issues For Users

The first reports we received that made us aware that there is much more to this service were those of VPN clients not working correctly. Some of these clients wanted to change the configured DNS server in Windows, which is a good thing - it prevents DNS leaking. But as it turns out, the responsible Windows service for handling these changes is … the DNS-Client! With every report of another broken application that we could trace back to the disabled DNS-Client service, we started to realize that we were on the wrong path and needed a better solution.

Hijacking dnsapi.dll Was Ditched Because it Is Malware-ish

We went back to researching possibilities to somehow find out which processes query which domains. We found some “interesting” ways:

There actually is a way to force the dnsapi.dll to fall back to sending DNS requests over the wire. Applications can specify the flag DNS_QUERY_WIRE_ONLY to the .dll, but forcing this globally would mean we would have to hijack the dnsapi.dll. While some of you might find that this is a viable solution, hijacking - as the name suggests - is definitely edgy and something that malware commonly does; and the Portmaster is no malware.

Replicating Windows Functionality Would Be a Nightmare

Something similar would be possible on the other end: We could just replace the full DNS-Client by disabling it and taking its place with a custom built replica. While this is potentially a cleaner solution than hijacking, we already have had enough headaches from working with documented Windows APIs. Touching undocumented Windows stuff is pretty much nightmare material for engineers at this point.

No per-App Settings Is Not an Option Either

With no other options available to directly get the needed information, we were only left with one option: embrace the DNS-Client as it is, not deactivating it and accepting we get no process attribution via that route. But how could we then still be an effective Application Firewall?

The simplest way around the problem would be to ditch DNS request to process attribution altogether. So instead of caring which process sent the query and acting upon the per-app setting, one can solely act upon global settings. The drawback is obvious: no more per-app settings. So you could not browse facebook.com on your browser while blocking their nasty trackers everywhere else. The world becomes pretty binary.

Even though we would be able to keep our tight grip on the system, we want to empower users with all their nuanced needs. This was not a solution we ever really considered. Instead, we continued our research to find a better balance between system control and per-app configurability.

The Solution: Intervene Later - When Network Connections Are Initiated

In order to best protect user privacy, we need to know where applications are connecting to as early as possible.

The ideal and earliest place would have been the DNS request, which turned out not to be feasible anymore. We now return a valid answer to most DNS requests coming from the DNS-Client.

The most notable exception to this is the Portmaster’s Bypass Protection, which will continue to directly block DNS requests if it needs to, no matter where they come from. We think it is good to be strict in this case.

The next possible place to intervene is when a process initiates a network connection (think TCP). At this point, no data has left your device and we only know about the IPs, the ports and the originating process. In most cases, we do not yet know which (Layer 5) protocol will be used over the connection, or which domain is the target.

But what we can do here, is collect more information. So whenever the Portmaster returns a valid DNS answer to a request - even if we do not know the real process behind it - we remember which IPs this domain resolved to. We scope this information into app-specific scopes or, when we do not know which app is really behind a DNS request, into a global scope. In addition we also remember which resolver handled the request for us, so we have more information to work with later on.

The Application Firewall Still Acts Before Any Data Leaves Your Device

Now, back to our process that is initiating a new connection: We can now look up the remote IP address and see which domain we know of that resolves to the remote IP of the connection. With this and all other attached information we can now attribute the connection to the domain and make an accurate decision about it. And this all happens before even a single bit of data leaves your device - we did it! Well, almost… As it turns out, there are some edge cases which might lead to side effects. Always expect to deal with side effects, especially on Windows.

Side Effect: Wrong Attribution Is A Little More Likely

Since remembered DNS requests which go through the DNS-Client are now pooled together in a global scope, this can sometimes lead to a wrong attribution of a domain to a connection.

For example, if two processes use two different domains but both of them point to the same IP address, it could happen that the Portmaster thinks that the first process is connecting to the domain of the second process and vice-versa. Especially if requests are done in parallel or connections are re-established without querying for the domain again. This could also have happened before, when a single process sent its DNS requests directly to the Portmaster, but was less likely.

As a remediation to this, we will start looking at HTTP headers and TLS handshakes in the future. With information gathered directly from the connection, the attribution will be more accurate.

But even that will not solve all our problems:

Applications can fake exposed domain information with a method called “Domain Fronting”.
TLS 1.3 introduces Encrypted Client Hello messages, which will partially hide this information again.

As you see, the rabbit hole is endless, for now we are cutting it here. But no worries - we are looking forward to solving these challenges in the future.

The Solution Also Benefits Linux Integration

Not only Windows has an internal DNS server to take care of DNS requests. Linux distributions are starting to activate the DBus interface of systemd-resolved, which in turn also hides DNS requests from the Portmaster. The workaround presented in this post also successfully deals with this.

Similar systems are known to exist and are expected in other operating systems as well, so this change will better brace us for the next systems we plan to support as well.

In addition to that, we now also have more information available on network connections, which will make future features, such as the connection history, even more powerful.

Portmaster Changelog Summary

Here is a full list of changes that this workaround brings:

Domains may be wrongly attributed to connections a bit more often than before.
The Portmaster will activate the DNS-Client Windows Service, which it previously disabled during installation.
The DNS-Client in Windows and Linux’ systemd-resolved are now categorized as a special “System DNS Client” app in the Portmaster.
If you want to disable bypass prevention for a specific app, you might also need to disable bypass prevention in the “System DNS Client” App in the Portmaster.

These changes are live with Portmaster v0.6.7.

#008 - Progress Update February

David — Sat, 06 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

#007 - Progress Update January

David — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

#006 - Progress Update December

David — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

#005 - Progress Update November

David — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

#004 - Progress Update October

David — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

#003 - Progress Update September

David — Fri, 02 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

AMA - Ask Us Anything

Raphael — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Update: the AMA concluded. Thanks to everyone who joined, thanks to PrivacyTools for hosting and thanks for all your amazing questions! In case you missed it, be sure to check it out and as always, if you have any questions, just drop us a mail via hello@safing.io.

We’re Doing an AMA

What good is a privacy company if it is hiding certain aspects of its business? As we see it, not much really. A (privacy) chain breaks at its weakest link.

That is why you can Ask Us Anything in the upcoming AMA event! Ask us things you would not dare to ask other companies and see how we manage various delicate matters. Or drop by to give us your input and suggestions - so we can learn and discuss how to best create privacy products that provide actual value. Props to the folks over at r/PrivacytoolsIO for hosting the event!

Learn more about why we do what we do in the first place, what we are up to and what problems we have to face being a privacy first company.

Visit the AMA

Friday, September 18 at 14:00 UTC

is when we will be kicking this off on the r/PrivacytoolsIO Subreddit. Don’t be disappointed if you won’t be able to make it to the start, as it will run for a whole week through September 25.

If you want a reminder, you can subscribe to our newsletter, follow us on Twitter, or join our Subreddit.
We will send out reminders when it launches.

If you’re late to the party, don’t fret. We always love to read an email from you, just send it to hello@safing.io.

#002 - Progress Update August

David — Mon, 31 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

#001 - Progress Update July

David — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We Are Updating Portmaster's Default DNS Servers

daniel — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

TLDR

On Monday, the 13th of July 2020, we will be changing the default DNS resolvers of the Portmaster to AdGuard, Applied Privacy, Cloudflare and Quad9 (sorted alphabetically). This will affect all users who have NOT configured their own DNS servers. If you have set your own preference the Portmaster will never use something else until you make changes again.

Future provider changes will always be communicated widely & with a heads-up.

Changes of their order will happen from time to time and only be communicated in our Github update logs. We need this flexibility to adapt to ever-changing environments, both in organizational and technical terms.

How the Portmaster Uses DNS Servers

At release of this post the default DNS providers is set to:

Quad9
Cloudflare

This means the primary resolver is Quad9 (1). Only when issues arise with Quad9, will the Portmaster fall back to Cloudflare (2). The same applies when a third, fourth, etc., provider is configured.

You Can Set Your Own Preference

A lot of information is shared with DNS providers, which is why trust and empowerment are so important. We know one shoe does not fit all, which is why you can set your own DNS providers of choice, overruling all current and future Portmaster defaults in the process. So the Portmaster will never use anything else until you make changes again (for global DNS queries). We set up a guide to help you in this process.

The Current Default Impacts Performance

Quad9’s performance is in a good range for normal DNS queries, but there are performance problems with our DNS-over-TLS client and their DNS-over-TLS server implementation. We are in contact with Quad9 to troubleshoot and resolve this problem. Unfortunately, this process is taking longer than expected, and we do not want to sacrifice DNS query encryption by falling back to plain old DNS. But because these issues frequently have a serious impact on the functionality of the Portmaster, we will need to do something about it. So we went on to explore more alternatives, and may eventually switch back to Quad9 as our primary (1) default resolver.

But instead just switching to our fallback Cloudflare (2) to solve our problems, we wanted to bring transparency into our selection of DNS providers and make sure you really know where your data flows. We also plan on adding the currently used DNS resolver to the Portmaster dashboard, so you know at a glance who you’re sending data to. Because after all, it is you who we want to empower.

New Resolvers Are Carefully Chosen and Define a “Working Set”

Instead of just choosing one or two new providers, we chose to select a pool of vetted DNS providers as a working set in order to quickly react to future changes in this landscape.

The new set of DNS Providers (sorted alphabetically) will be:

AdGuard
Applied Privacy
Cloudflare
Quad9

All of these each excel in a different combinations of wanted attributes. Read this blog post for an in-depth insight into how we select DNS providers.

For the moment, we will be using Cloudflare as our primary default (1), because - quite frankly - its unrivaled speed makes up for some performance issues we have in the Portmaster. Addressing these issues is on our roadmap, but will require lots of time and resources, which we currently lack.

We would highly appreciate any feedback you have on this selection of providers. If you want to set the DNS provider yourself, here is how you do it. If you do this, the Portmaster will never use anything else until you make changes again (for global DNS queries).

We Thoroughly Communicate New Resolvers

Changing the default DNS provider is a big change of trust and potentially privacy. This is why we want to take the time to communicate this change on all possible channels and gather your feedback in the process.

Future provider changes will always be communicated widely & with a heads-up.

Changes Will Go in Effect next Monday (13.07.2020)

The new working set of DNS providers will go into production with a Portmaster Core update on 13.07.2020.

Future Improvements

Near-term

Right now, selecting a custom dns provider is a bit cumbersome, as it requires understand a little syntax and/or copying seemingly obscure and long strings into your settings. We will provide a one-click interface to switch between multiple options near-term. We will also show the currently used DNS on the Portmaster dashboard, so you know at a glance who is resolving your DNS queries.

Mid-term

We want all our users to know where their data flows to. We make no assumptions that all Portmaster users will read this blog post. Instead, we will invest in informing our users about important default settings and updates directly in the Portmaster App mid-term.

Long-term

No matter what DNS provider we choose as a default, there will always be the possibility of a provider abusing this trust. There just is no way for a provider to technically guarantee their promises. The only way around this is to mask our users from the provider. We are evaluating options to provide a free SPN tier that will provide free access to the SPN for DNS queries only in the long-term. Again, this is not certain and if it comes, will take at least two or three years to arrive.

How Safing Selects its Default DNS Providers

daniel — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Encrypt Your Core Communication

The domain name system (DNS) sits at the core of almost any communication on the Internet and plays a critical part in regaining privacy on the Interblag.

If you are not familiar with what DNS is and why you use it practically every time you access the Internet, read on here.

The past few years have brought a welcoming change to the DNS ecosystem: The rise of encrypted connections between clients and recursive resolvers using either DNS-over-TLS or DNS-over-HTTPS. (DNSCrypt already exists a lot longer, but never took off.)

This new trend further restrains abusive third parties from logging and exploiting your personal information simply because it is out there in the open.

Since the Portmaster already takes over the role of the local DNS resolver (“stub”), we of course want to provide all our users with encrypted DNS queries. Since we started working on the Portmaster in 2017, more and more operating systems, but also browsers directly, started encrypting DNS queries. Even if a system provides this natively, we will still take care of this part separately, because managing DNS queries is important to provide all our other privacy features.

Default DNS Is A Sensitive Subject

One thing that has also sparked controversy with all these new encrypted DNS clients is the selection of the resolver. While Mozilla’s Firefox will default to Cloudflare (in the US, for now), Google’s Chrome will only encrypt DNS queries if it knows of a secure version to the system’s configured resolver. Forcing users onto a different resolver than configured will cause further centralization and Mozilla was rightfully criticized for that.

But now we have the same decision to make. How can we choose a default DNS provider that all our users are at least OK with? How can we do that while abiding to our high standards of privacy and transparency? One of the answers is this blog post. Another is to listen carefully what our users tell us.

How We Rate DNS Providers

We have identified three basic criteria for selecting DNS providers:

Privacy to us is the most important factor in choosing a provider. We would love to find someone with the same dedication to privacy and transparency as we have ourselves.
Freedom is about not interfering with queries. Additional blocking of Ads, trackers and Malware is okay, but there is zero tolerance for censorship.
Technical Quality is a mixture of query performance, stability and global coverage. The default resolver should work well for everyone, no matter where they live or travel.

Our Selection

Quite foreseeably, we started by taking a look at the secure resolvers that were already vetted by the PrivacyTools Community: https://www.privacytools.io/providers/dns/

Instead of just choosing one or two providers, we chose to select a pool of DNS providers as a working set in order to quickly react to changes in this landscape (sorted alphabetically):

AdGuard (Website)

4/5 Privacy AdGuard is registered in Cyprus, but is developed by Russians. They value privacy and transparency and develop a wide range of ad blocking software, which usually need to be paid for. Their DNS service is free to use.
➖ For-profit company.

4/5 Freedom AdGuards optionally blocks Ads and Trackers (duh!) and also provides a “Family protection” variant. There are no known (to us) incidents regarding censorship.
➖ Censorship (mishaps) possible through false positives.

4/5 Technical Quality AdGuard operates about a dozen servers, focusing on North America, Europe and South East Asia. Their coverage can be improved, but their query performance is pretty good.
➖ Lacking Coverage.

Foundation for Applied Privacy (Website)

5/5 Privacy The Foundation for Applied Privacy is a nonprofit privacy infrastructure provider based in Austria (which is also where we are). This is the only selected provider that is fully stationed and operated within the EU.

5/5 Freedom There is no filtering in place at all, which means there is no possibility to screw it up. There are also no known (to us) incidents regarding censorship.

3/5 Technical Quality While their query performance is really good, they are only present in one country and only run one resolver, making them prone to outages.
➖➖ Lacking Coverage.

Cloudflare (Website)

3/5 Privacy Cloudflare is one of the biggest traffic handlers on the Internet and is a publicly traded company based in the US. Although one of the goals of their DNS service is to improve online privacy of users, their sheer size creates a centralization that hurts privacy.
➖ For-profit company.
➖ Size drives centralization.

3/5 Freedom Cloudflare provides both malware and family filtering options. While, as far as we know, their DNS service has not been subject to censorship, but other services of theirs were: (1) A US court ordered Cloudflare to take down one of their customers for a short period of time. (2) They voluntarily kicked one of their (more controversial) customers off their platform, making it more difficult to argue against censorship in the future, as stated by their CEO Matthew Prince.
➖ Some censorship incidents.
➖ Censorship (mishaps) possible through false positives.

5/5 Technical Quality Cloudflare’s DNS service easily sets the bar with their unsurpassed query performance and global coverage.

Quad9 (Website)

4/5 Privacy Quad9 is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in the US. Although they value privacy, there is criticism about the influence Quad9 potentially has from its founding organizations.
➖ Unclear influences.

4/5 Freedom Quad9 blocks malicious domains reported by their partners, which in return are provided with the amount of resulting blocks. They have strict rules which domains may be blocked and there are no known (to us) incidents regarding censorship.
➖ Censorship (mishaps) possible through false positives.

4/5 Technical Quality While Quad9 is operated in locations where PCH is also present, through which they gain a remarkable global presence. On the other side, there are reports with their performance, and we have also experienced technical issues with their service. To be fair, one must note that they operate on a shoestring budget and definitely punch above their weight.
➖ Lacking Query Performance.

You can find the exact configuration for each provider here.

Our Primary Default

While we use a working set of DNS providers, only one will be active at a time. If we configure multiple providers in the default settings, additional providers will act as a fallback in case the Portmaster has any issues with the primary resolver.

Which provider we selected as the primary depends on the current situation. Each of the selected providers (sorted alphabetically) has a distinct combination of desirable attributes:

AdGuard: Privacy and Performance.
Applied Privacy: Privacy and Freedom.
Cloudflare: Performance and Global Coverage.
Quad9: Privacy and Global Coverage.

Be reminded that this is not the order in which we rate these providers, but each of them fulfills a different role. We will use them according to their strengths in order to provide all Portmaster users with the highest available privacy and quality we can.

Not all changes between providers in the defined working set will be communicated separately. Be assured that we will thoroughly communicate any changes to this working set of providers.

We would highly appreciate any feedback you have on this selection of providers. If you want to set the DNS provider yourself, here is how you do it. By doing so, the Portmaster will never use anything else until you make changes again (for global DNS queries).

Conclusion

Selecting a default DNS provider is really hard. There is no provider that fulfills all our wishes, yet we have to choose. We hope to have given you a better understanding of this process with this blog post and ask you to please provide feedback if you either do not understand the conclusions we come to or feel uncomfortable with how we are going about this. We listen to what you have to say.

#000 - Progress Update June

David — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Note: not every update needs to be a podcast or a video, thought I’d mix things up with a written update - let me know if you like this.

We are focusing on the SPN

As mentioned in the most recent video update the last few weeks we went full heads-on into progressing the Safing Privacy Network. It is kinda exciting knowing this is the last big, unreleased module before we achieve our big milestone: “completing” the Safing machinery as planned. Of course, the work won’t stop there since we will improve, scale and polish every aspect of our software, but having every cog in place for the first time will be a thrilling moment.

The SPN is making progress

Core-Improvements
Many things go into making the SPN a reality. But having the Portmaster as a base is helping out a lot. Thank you for all your reported issues! It helped us fix bugs and improve overall performance. All this work will immediately benefit the SPN once it goes live.

Successful Test-Network
We also successfully deployed a test-network, so servers are already up and communicating with each other. This only applies to an internal test, but it is good progress!

Accout Server API
To gain access to the SPN you need a Safing account. For this we are building an API which the Portmaster client will call over a proxy server. There are a lot of technical details going into this, of which we will give you a more detailed update later. But safe to say: lots of progress on that front.

We still need a few weeks

But in the end, the network is not ready yet. We still need a few weeks to get ready to finish setting everything up and letting all the Marvins & Visionary backers into the network. The current target is by the end of July, and then we’ll see how to scale it up from there. Be assured: our goal is to give access to you all as soon as possible.

We’re thankful for all your trust and support and I hope we are keeping you in the loop sufficiently - if not let me know!

Completed lots of Reporting & Planning

Currently we are mainly funded through grants & loans - and hence, the grantee often requires regular reporting regarding the current state of affairs. We fully understand its need, still this is often very time intensive work. We had to conclude several major reports this month.

Another aspect that easily gets overlooked is planning. Getting all the bits and pieces to work together so the momentum can keep going takes a lot of effort. We are happy to have made progress in both of these areas.

A Podcast on Deadlines, Design & Tailwind

Something very enjoyable this week was being back in the podcasting game and recording next weeks episode. I got together with Luke - the mastermind behind the new website - and we talked about deadlines, high-pressure environments, different CSS frameworks, his designs & company identity. Dropping next Monday.

Anyway, that’s all for this update, see you around!

The Two Steps it Takes

David — Tue, 04 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

There’s no such thing as an overnight success. Successful companies do not suddenly appear, we just notice them suddenly.

Even with the rise of the Internet, it still takes years until a company becomes established. First, they need to create a product, then they have to market it. Usually we only notice them long after they have successfully gone through both stages.

This is that story. And the story of shortcuts.

Step 1: Creating a Product

Grind it out with R & D

There’s one question that every company answers before starting out: “What problem are you trying to solve?”

Then you go to the drafting board, you research deep into the issue, you think through tons of ways how to tackle the problem and in the end you conceptualize and create solutions - often by remixing current solutions and technology into something better.

This process is called Research & Development. Nothing novel out there ‘just happened’, instead, an idea was cultivated and progressed through plenty of trials and errors until it matured into a workable solution.

The Shortcut: Just Copy Work

But what if you do not have the time for all that? It’s rather easy actually, you just copy a current solution. Or you only slightly add functionality to an existing product. The devil’s advocate would call this stealing, the marketer would simply describe it as rebranding.

I in no way condemn companies taking this approach, there is still another mountain to climb to become successful. I simply ask them not to claim their copied solution is something novel.

Conclusion

With a novel or rebranded product, you’re ready to move ahead. But nothing is gained yet. You are still far away from actually being a success.

Step 2: Marketing and Growth

Listen and Put in Honest Work

If you have the perfect solution to a problem but nobody knows about it, was the problem really solved? Was your solution really any good? Honestly, no. This is the reason why marketing is necessary.

And yes, nobody likes salespeople using marketing gimmicks or straight up lies to trick people into buying their products, but that does not mean all marketing is evil.

But talking to your market has become difficult. In today’s information overflow it is way harder to get people’s attention than before. Nevertheless, you need their attention and trust for them to become customers.

For generic growth, there is no way around listening to your audience, being honest and open, and ultimately building a relationship with your customers. Only time, genuine effort and persistence will get you there.

The Shortcut: Just Buy Attention

Oh yeah, there is a way around this too. Instead of putting in the work, just buy yourself into the game: With todays ad industry, you can simply spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy people’s attention and hopefully convert enough of them into customers.

The catch with this however is that you normally have to turn to venture capital, which focuses more on the investor’s profit than your customers. There’s this vicious cycle going on that, ultimately, forces so many companies to sell out on their customers. Avoid this at all cost.

Conclusion

Marketing is the act of talking and promoting your product to the market. As a result, growth is only possible through good marketing. The ethics behind it all is another story, but I assume you can guess my stance on that topic ;)

Failing One Step Results in Overall Failure

Think about different companies and their approach in both these steps. What about those who chose to copy old technology but market it in an honest way? What about those that took the shortcut in both cases? What about the geniuses who researched a break-through solution but failed to present and market it to the world?

The truth is, any company failing in either one of the steps will fail as a whole.

Remarkable companies excel in mastering both. They invent new products and are experts at story-telling, captivating their followers and customers alike.

As a final question, how do you think Safing performs these steps? Share your thoughts on our reddit.

How the SPN compares to Tor

safing — Wed, 22 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Tor’s Mission is Broad, Safing Focuses on Ease of Use

Tor’s mission statement (from https://www.torproject.org/ - in the footer), declares:

To advance human rights and freedoms by creating and deploying free and open source anonymity and privacy technologies, supporting their unrestricted availability and use, and furthering their scientific and popular understanding.

We wholeheartedly agree and appreciate Tor’s work and outlined broader mission, but our focus is on a specific sub-area of theirs:

We believe that freedom can only flourish when privacy is the default. And privacy will only be broadly adopted if it is easy to use. So “Easy to use” is our focus: we want my mom and your mom to be able to conveniently withstand mass surveillance without having to venture deep into tech. This is what drives us. This is our mission.

The SPN Protects Your Whole Computer

The Tor browser has great coverage, supporting all major operating systems. It protects the browser habits of its users and is a breeze to set up. When one additionally wants to safeguard the whole computer via the Tor network one has to use the operating system tails, which is great at what it does, but hard and technical to set up and use.

This is one key difference to the SPN. With it, it’s a simple plug and play. You download the open source app and then it takes care of all your connections, not only those of the browser. Currently, we support Windows and Linux. Mac and Mobile are planned but not yet available.

Another detail is that Tor does not transport everything, notably UDP traffic. The SPN supports TCP and UDP (+ variants).

Tor Is Maturer

Tor was released in 2002, while the SPN launched in August 2020. It goes without saying that Tor is the far maturer project of the two. The SPN is still in its early days.

The SPN Minimizes Travel through the Open Web

Both Tor and the SPN provide privacy by decoupling the person (ip-address) from the destination. This prevents your Internet Service Provider and everyone else from logging your Internet activities. When no other identification is provided you even arrive at the destination anonymously, meaning the visited server cannot know who you are.

This is achieved by routing connections through a circuit. This splits the full route into sub-routes so no single server can both know the person and the destination.

When the connection arrives at the last server of the circuit it still has to travel to the desired website. With Tor, this may lead to a slower Internet experience. As an example, a person located in Europe loading a European website may receive a circuit exiting in the US. This means the connection has to cross the Atlantic twice (EU -> US -> EU). After a circuit with plain Tor is established all your other connection will use the same route. A circuit change normally occurs every 10 minutes.

With the SPN however, every connection is calculated individually and leaves the network as near to the destination as possible. This means:

your connections are spread across the globe, using a separate IP address per connection
visibility in the ‘open web’ is minimized
connections are not slowed down by having to go extra miles

Minor comments

The Dark Web Is a Non-Goal for Safing

Tor’s mission for anonymity also enables people to host content anonymously through onion domains. This is a non-goal for Safing.

SPN Enforces DoT and Blocks Ads/Trackers

As the open source Portmaster app, which hosts the SPN, sits at the kernel, it can incorporate additional privacy features. Current modules (free & optional) include a DNS Resolver which enforces all your DNS queries to use DNS over TLS (DoT) and a Privacy Filter which blocks malicious or unwanted connections.

The SPN Costs Money

Both the SPN and Tor are FOSS. But Tor is free to use while you have to subscribe to the SPN in order to use it. The SPN subscription also funds development of the free Portmaster application firewall.

Conclusion: It Depends on Your Threat Model

Tor is a great project which has pioneered privacy technology and is a firm player in the space while the SPN takes a different architectural approach and focuses on ease of use. Depending on your threat model, the SPN may be an alternative to Tor. Or it might not.

The next 5 Steps for Safing

David — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A Rough Estimate of What Might Happen in 2020

With our Kickstarter around the corner - launching on the 2nd of January 2020 - we thought this might be a good time to communicate what our next steps are going to be. These are no far fetched, crazy dreams, but instead executable plans. In 2020, we will surely finish several of these steps. And if the campaign goes well enough, we could gain sufficient resources to hire additional talent, helping us complete them all!

1. The Safing Privacy Network

First and foremost, our first step is going to be launching the SPN in June. It is a feature packed privacy network which protects your web connections from meta-data extraction as they travel through the Internet. With the SPN your ISP and the Wi-Fi operator of your local coffee shop cannot collect and sell your browsing habits. It protects the connections of your whole computer, not only you those of the browser. It also enforces DNS over TLS. We’re looking forward to completing this first step, but it’s just the beginning.

For more information, you can read more about our tech or the SPN whitepaper.

2. Community Nodes

As we will start out with hosting all of the servers of this multi-hop network ourselves, this means your meta-data is spread across all of our servers. Even though we open sourced our code and made it very difficult, it is in theory still possible for us to extract your browsing habits. As this is not good enough for us, our primary focus will be adding community nodes to the system. Volunteers will be welcomed to join our cause, creating a decentralized network without a single point of trust. And the best thing about it, we will as a second step split our revenue with contributing community nodes, further encouraging this decentralized network.

Disclaimer: we would love to launch the community nodes and immediately pay them, but this requires additional development and would slow us down in becoming a trust-less system, which is why we decided to take one step first - then the other

3. Linux Support

We will initially be launching the SPN on Windows. Although there will be a Linux version as well, we will wait for the full support until a few months after the launch. This means we can bundle all our resources on polishing Windows. People will still be able to experiment with the Linux version, but non-crucial bug fixes and quality of life improvements will have to wait until the full support. This step will probably be achieved around the time as we also introduce the community nodes - so the wait will not be too long.

4. Mac Support

The first three steps are our main focus, but as soon as we complete them, we will fully dive into also supporting Mac OS - achieving full desktop support. This moment will be super exciting! I cannot wait for the day where every desktop user can come to our homepage and download the Safing app. We really do not want to exclude any users because of limited support.

5. Integrated Application Firewall

After achieving overall desktop support we will help your computer in becoming a privacy stealth machine. It is a great step to protect your meta-data on its way through the web, but what about all those nasty connections that should never have left your computer in the first place? Connections that are only here to track your behavior. Analytics trackers have infiltrated almost all software we currently use. It is the norm not asking you about it and simply uploading your every mouse move, or even your content to another persons computer - oh wait, right: “the cloud”.

As we already intercept your connections, why not enable you to block the faulty ones as well? We will do just that. Open source, naturally.

And the best it will be totally free to use. We totally get that not everyone will be able to pay for the SPN and its servers - but why not enable them to get stealthy privacy too? There is no reason not to!

Our Dream for Stage 1. and further Plans

That will complete the first stage of our plans. At this point we can finally give away an open source, powerful application firewall. Free for anyone to use, supporting all desktop operating systems. And those who like what we do and can afford it, can then pay for the SPN to support us. We truly cannot wait!

But of course, the mission will continue. We will want to support mobile too, and what about those people who do not know which connections the application firewall should block or not? We plan to ask a crowd of experts to decide for the everyday user. But this is all for the future.

Also, next week, me and Daniel will dive into all our future plans. Where do we see us in 5 years? Now that will be the day where we dream! ;)

Hiring a Designer from the Privacy Community

David — Sat, 30 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

First, We Applied for a Big Grant

Back in June we applied for our biggest grant so far. If it was successful, we would receive a grant of around 160.000€ with an additional 150.000€ loan which we would need to pay back in the next years. This meant - with over 300K to work with - we could hire our first employees, pay a code audit, pay our lawyer and even pay us founders our first salaries - which we’d see as a very welcome change indeed. So after weeks and months of preparation and work, on the 5th of June 2019 we sent off our application.

A Long and Uncertain Wait

So off it went, and even though finishing an application was relieving, we knew this did not mean much. It was only a chance of getting this money. And on top of that, we knew we would have to wait until September to get the notice. So we still had to count with a negative and it was with this mentality we went into the next few months.

We Decided to Gamble

Then August came around. We were invited to an official review of our application. This meant we made it to the second round - 🎉 (but still no certainty). In the application we already mentioned we would hire three employees, but only one of them we already had a candidate for. As a result, they told us if we received the grant, we would have to fill one of the positions until they would send us the first batch. Hiring is no easy feat, and we were beginners at that. Was it worth taking the risk of investing a lot of hours into hiring a person if we may not even get the grant in the end? We would waste our time and the time of applicants. We made a leap of faith and just went for it.

The Hiring Process Starts

The next days I worked on our job description. A big shoutout to ghost.org - their style and structure was great inspiration! After we distributed it through a few channels we for a responses. Raphael pre-filtered many of the applications and with a few we set up a video call. The grant was restricted to Austria 🇦🇹, so even though we are open for remote workers, this position needed to be filled anywhere in Austria.

It was fun getting to dive into this area from an employers perspective. So far we’ve only sat on the other side of the table. One thing I learned was that you really get much more interested if an application sticks out from standard, generic descriptions. And then in our situation you really stick out if you are already into privacy and burning for our mission. We had two applicants who restricted their work to only privacy projects. One of them could not move to Austria, which was a dealbreaker, and the other one was Luke.

Then Luke Appeared on the Scene

Listen to the accompanying podcast where Luke talks about his side of the story

From the very first email we received from Luke we learnt two things: he burns for privacy and he is outspoken. This was even more affirmed after Raphael and I got to know him via a video call (Luke’s from the United Kingdom).

The even crazier thing about this was, Luke found out about us and the job via The Hated One. I appeared on his channel twice, but would never have thought that this would end up helping us hiring our designer. HUGE shoutout to THO!!!

After plenty of interviews and rounds we had the two most promising candidates remaining. The other applicant lived nearby, so we could meet in person, but Luke we only meat digitally.

Flying Him In

Since it’s easy to pull off a show for a few hours online, we really wanted to get to know Luke in person before making our decision. We offered him to fly in over the weekend, which he accepted after some suspicion.

We booked the flight the day before we received the result about the grant, which increased the gamble, but hey: the next day we got it 🎉

His Weekend in Austria

The weekend was very fun! For me at least - I know Luke rather very nervous in the beginning. He arrived Friday evening, and all of us met on Saturday for lunch at a pizza place. Luke accidentally ordered a pizza, which turned out to be rather complicated to eat, which made him stress out even more. Imagine his situation: You’re going to an interview for a job you’re excited about. You know you and another candidate are the only ones left. And then all three founders and you go grab some lunch. All eyes on you - and then you’re having troubles eating your pizza.

Well, it surely was no easy situation for him, but as time went by everything loosened up a bit so things got more relaxed. We had some live designing, had some lengthy chats and then went to eat dinner to round tings off. Of course we covered all costs.

Luke had to be sure about this too, since it meant he would have to move to another country. So it was good we had plenty of time.

The next day we dropped him off at the airport. And that Sunday evening all involved knew: the big decision would be made the next day.

His Burning for Privacy Was the Dealbreaker

It is rather obvious by now that we decided to hire Luke. But both candidates were promising: both had strengths and weaknesses in different areas and both were outspoken. Being blunt turns out to be especially helpful when us founders are rather hardheaded. So what was the dealbreaker? Luke is burning for privacy. He has a personal privacy project which you should check out too.

Starting out in Austria

It took Luke a few weeks to pack up his things and move to Austria, but soon enough, at the beginning of October he became our lead designer. We are very grateful for his work so far and see him as a perfect fit for the job.

He made us reconsider our old designs and revamped everything to look more professional, while still being approachable.

Sidenote: Luke talks all about his side of the story in the podcast. Also, you can follow him on Twitter.

Wrap Up

Again, this would not have been possible without The Hated One! It was a pleasure talking to him and if you don’t know him already, check out his videos. They’re a great resource for privacy and related topics.

Also, if you like what we do, please consider following and supporting us whichever way works for you. We are really excited about the months ahead of us!

Safing

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