SaferVPN Review

Ease of Use

SaferVPN offers custom apps for Windows, Mac OS, iOS, and Android. The mobile apps use OpenVPN with the same encryption settings as the desktop apps. SaferVPN also provides good manual setup guides for Linux, Blackberry phones, Windows phones, numerous routers, and various media streaming platforms.

The SaferVPN Windows VPN client

The SaferVPN client is quite simple, but gets the job done.

It is not clear which protocol is used when the default “Automatic” is selected. Support was unable to tell me this, either.

The SaferVPN Windows client has a kill switch. I tested this by force-closing the app in Windows Task Manager, but found myself still connected to the internet. 

This means that the kill switch is reactive – it shuts down the internet when it detects that the VPN has disconnected. It does not work, for example, if the VPN client itself suffers a crash. A firewall-based kill switch that prevents any connections outside the VPN would be better, but any kill switch is preferable to none.

I did notice that the client connects to VPN servers very quickly, which is nice. As we shall see, though, the client does not include any DNS leak protection.

Android App

I own an Android phone, so I downloaded the Android app from the Play Store.

SaferVPN has greatly reduced the number of permissions its app requires. The above list is now very reasonable.

The app also looks good, and I detected no IP leaks while using it.

Chrome and Firefox Extensions

SaferVPN offers browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. I was told that (and I assume this also applies to the Firefox add-on):

“We do not explicitly use the encryption within our Chrome extension. The Chrome itself (internally) use SSL as security layer on top on http protocol to secure a user session data from being stolen by “bad” people.”

I think this means it uses HTTPS, but am far from sure. If you want an encrypted connection then stick with using the full VPN client.

Customer Service

Other than the setup guides, support is primarily via 24/7 live chat. A ticketed email system is also in place. When I contacted SaferVPN’s support via live chat, responses were almost instant, and very friendly.

I do not consider it fair to expect front-line support staff to have in-depth technical knowledge, but I was a little annoyed to be repeatedly given “I can assure you that we use the best possible encryption” answers when asking for details.

More importantly, when my queries were escalated via ticketed email for attention by more knowledgeable staff members, I found the answers rather unsatisfactory. Good examples of this are when I asked about Chrome extension security, and when I unable to discover if perfect forward secrecy is deployed.

Privacy and Security

Jurisdiction

SaferVPN (and therefore Perimeter 81) is based in Israel, which has strong data protection laws that strictly and specifically limit the government’s ability to spy on personal data.

On the other hand, Mossad is a close ally of the NSA, and Israel is known for the robustness of its cyberdefense operations and for its cooperation with the NSA in its mass surveillance operations. On balance, though, Israel’s strong data protection laws make it a fairly privacy-friendly location.

Logs

On its home page, SaferVPN says,

“No Logging Policy! We value and respect your privacy — in and out of the web. We never log or monitor your VPN network traffic.”

Drilling down a bit more, SaferVPN does not keep any usage logs. It also does not  log your IP address when you make connections, or but it does keep a fair amount of other connection (metadata) information:

"•    date and time on which the Session began, date and time on which the Session ended,

•    the amount of data transmitted during each Session,

•    to which location (eg. USA East) (We do not hold servers’ IP addresses),

•    and from which country you connected from (We do not hold IP addresses)."

Technical security

SaferVPN uses the following OpenVPN encryption: AES-256 for data channel cipher, RSA-2048 for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) handshake, and SHA-256 for control channel hash authentication.

Support was unable to tell me any more details, so I will guess that SaferVPN uses SHA-1 is for the data channel handshake (which is fine). SaferVPN has now confirmed that it does use perfect forward secrecy (PFS) for all OpenVPN and IKEv2 connections.

This is a strong OpenVPN setup. The SaferVPN Windows and macOS apps also include DNS leak protection and a kill switch, but as we have seen, these are not always effective. SaferVPN's Android and iOS apps include a kill switch, which remains a very useful, if all too unusual, feature.