Privacy that’s
more than a promise

Meet Obscura: the first VPN that can’t log your activity
and outsmarts internet censorship.

Download for macOS
Screenshot of the Obscura application

VPNs know more about you than they should.
So we made one that doesn’t.

Even “no-log” VPNs can track you, since they see both who you are and what you do. Obscura is built such that we can’t see your traffic in the first place.

Traditional VPNs see your identity
and your browsing history

Traditional VPN
Jacob Williams

96.96.216.135

Visited tumblr.com just now


jacobwilliams@gmail.com
7961 Kulas Estate, Danville USA
•••• •••• •••• 3241
Jacob Williams

96.96.216.135

Visited pinterest.com just now


jacobwilliams@gmail.com
7961 Kulas Estate, Danville USA
•••• •••• •••• 3241
Jacob Williams

96.96.216.135

Visited apple.com just now


jacobwilliams@gmail.com
7961 Kulas Estate, Danville USA
•••• •••• •••• 3241
Jacob Williams

96.96.216.135

Visited microsoft.com just now


jacobwilliams@gmail.com
7961 Kulas Estate, Danville USA
•••• •••• •••• 3241
Jacob Williams

96.96.216.135

Visited ebay.com just now


jacobwilliams@gmail.com
7961 Kulas Estate, Danville USA
•••• •••• •••• 3241

Obscura only sees your IP address and
never your browsing history

Obscura
Account OBS-20848919

96.96.216.135

Encrypted web traffic

Exit Node
Anonymous
Obscura’s IP

Visited tumblr.com just now

Anonymous
Obscura’s IP

Visited pinterest.com just now

Anonymous
Obscura’s IP

Visited apple.com just now

Anonymous
Obscura’s IP

Visited microsoft.com just now

Anonymous
Obscura’s IP

Visited ebay.com just now

It’s simple:

We can’t leak what we don’t have.

Logs? Not possible.

Obscura VPN doesn’t log your IP address and can’t see your internet traffic, ever. It’s impossible by design.

Emails? Not necessary.

Log in with just a randomized account number. No names, no emails, no phone numbers necessary.

Credit card info? Not required.

Easily pay using Bitcoin’s Lightning Network for better privacy, instant payments, and lower transaction fees.

More than Privacy

Outsmart Internet Restrictions

By blending in with regular internet traffic, Obscura avoids being detected by network filters – keeping your internet access unrestricted. More details.

How it Works

Private by Design:
Our Two-Party VPN Protocol

By using a fully-independent exit hop, Obscura keeps who you are and what you do separate. More technical details here.

Obscura never sees your traffic

Obscura’s servers relay your connection to exit servers but can never decrypt your traffic.

Your traffic is always end-to-end encrypted via WireGuard® to the exit server.

Exit hops never see who you are

Exit servers (run by Mullvad) connect you to the internet but never see your personal info.

Obscura masks your real IP address when relaying to the exit server.

FAQs

Questions? We’re here to help.

Here are the most common questions we’re asked, but if we haven’t covered yours, don’t hesitate to reach out via one of our handles.

What makes Obscura different from existing VPNs?

Unlike VPNs with a “no-logs” policy, Obscura is provably private by design.

Even “no-logs” VPNs see both your identity and your internet activity, meaning you have to blindly trust their pinky-promise for privacy. This is exactly why some privacy-conscious folks will tell you not to use a VPN at all.

Obscura is different – we never see your decrypted internet packets. It’s simply impossible for us to log your internet activity, even if we were compelled to, or if our servers were compromised. You can even verify this yourself.

Obscura’s stealth protocol is much harder to block.

Our unique stealth protocol is designed to blend in with regular internet traffic. It does so by leveraging QUIC – the same technology that powers HTTP/3 – making it far harder for censors or network filters to detect or block.

Want more technical details? See here.

What user data can Obscura see?

Obscura only sees your connecting IP address and necessary payment info – never your actual internet traffic.

We physically can’t decrypt your internet traffic (see how) and never log your connecting IP address.

For even more privacy, we actively support private payment methods like Bitcoin over Lightning. Learn more about accepted payment methods here.

How do I know Obscura does what it claims?

I like the way you think! 😎

Don’t trust — verify. Our app’s entire source code is on GitHub for you to verify that we do what we say.

We also plan to provide reproducible builds of our app, meaning anyone can confirm that the app you download matches the code we publish.

Additionally, our app displays your current exit hop’s WireGuard public key on its “Location” page. You can check this key against what Mullvad publishes here to ensure that you’re connected via a genuine Mullvad exit hop!

How much does Obscura cost, what payment methods are accepted?

To celebrate our launch, Obscura is just $6/month (regularly $8/month).

You can top-up your account using:

  • Credit Card (via Stripe)
  • Bitcoin over Lightning (for more privacy)

For convenient renewals, you can also subscribe with your Credit Card (via Stripe). Note that Stripe may need your email for subscriptions, but Obscura never stores it.

How does Obscura differ from my VPN’s multihop option?

With a typical multihop VPN, the same provider controls every hop—so they can still link your identity to your traffic.

Obscura solves this by using a fully-independent exit hop (currently Mullvad). Ensuring that our servers never see your actual traffic, and the exit hop never sees your identity.

How does Obscura compare to Tor?

We have immense respect for the Tor project (and encourage you to support it), but its volunteer-run network can be slow and susceptible to DDoS issues, making it infeasible for everyday use.

Obscura uses two dedicated, high-performance hops for maximum speed and reliability – meaning you get many of Tor’s privacy benefits without sacrificing everyday usability.

What server locations are available?

We’re always working to add more exit locations. We currently have the follow:

North America

  • Toronto, Canada
  • Vancouver, Canada
  • Ashburn, VA
  • Chicago, IL
  • Dallas, TX
  • Denver, CO
  • Los Angeles, CA
  • Miami, FL
  • New York, NY
  • San Jose, CA
  • Seattle, WA

Europe

  • Paris, France
  • Frankfurt, Germany
  • Milan, Italy
  • Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • Madrid, Spain
  • Zurich, Switzerland
  • Kyiv, Ukraine
  • London, United Kingdom

Asia

  • Tokyo, Japan
  • Singapore
  • Istanbul, Turkey
How does the macOS app work? Does it have kernel-level access?

Our macOS app installs a Network Extension, which is a fully sandboxed process with no kernel-level access to your system.

You can verify this by looking at our source code.

Give me the technical details!

Obscura’s servers relay the WireGuard tunnel between your device and Mullvad’s servers. Essentially, WireGuard-over-QUIC.

This looks something like:

<user>  -->  Obscura Server  -->  Mullvad Server  -->  <internet>

This ensures that no single party has the information to leak or correlate your traffic and your identity, since:

  • Obscura’s servers are unable to decrypt the WireGuard packets it relays, since they are encrypted to a Mullvad server’s WireGuard pubkey.
  • Mullvad’s servers never see your connecting IP since Obscura’s servers are effectively doing NAT.

Your device connects to Obscura’s servers over QUIC, meaning:

Still curious? Read our blog post on Obscura’s design.

I’m Carl, head-janitor of Obscura 👋

Thanks for reaching the bottom — not everyone makes it.

I’m incredibly lucky to have the help of a crack(ed) team of privacy optimists to build Obscura.

Among us, we’ve served on the Nix RFC Steering Committee, implemented the 64bit random number generator for the Go standard library, fixed critical vulnerabilities for hardware security tokens, won bounties for Monero bugs, and contributed to Bitcoin for reproducible builds.

But while privacy and digital sovereignty in some worlds has made leaps and bounds, VPNs have been left behind; peddling privacy based on promises instead of privacy baked into the architecture.

So we’re taking our skills to build Obscura: a VPN you can depend on to get the most out of our glorious digital commons – the internet. It’s the VPN we’ve always wanted to use, and it’s the kind of privacy we believe everyone should have access to.

Thanks for reading – ping me at carl@obscura.net for any questions, and I’ll see you on the free and open internet. 🏄

Cheers,
Carl Dong
I fight for the users.

Team photograph
Our team learning laser-cutting at the NYC Resistor hackerspace

Internet freedom starts here.

Start using Obscura for macOS today, or join our waitlist for other platforms.

Download for macOS