Alphabet's Cybersecurity Group Touts Its New Open Source Private VPN

An anonymous reader writes: Alphabet's cybersecurity division Jigsaw has designed a new open source private VPN aimed at journalists and the people sending them data. 'Their work makes them more vulnerable to attack,' said Santiago Andrigo, Jigsaw's product manager. 'It can get really scary when they're outed and you're passing over information.'

Unscrupulous VPN providers can steal your identity, peek in on your data, inject their own ads on non-secure pages, or analyze your browsing habits and sell that information to advertisers, says one Jigsaw official. And you can't know for sure whether you can trust them, no matter what they say in the app store. 'Journalists should be aware that their online activities might be subject to surveillance either by government agencies, their internet service providers or a hacker with malicious intent,' said Laura Tich, technical evangelist for Code for Africa, a resource for African journalists. 'As surveillance becomes ubiquitous in today's world, journalists face an increasing challenge in establishing secure communication in the digital space.'

The new private VPN, dubbed 'Outline', is specifically designed to be resistant to censorship — because it's harder to detect as a VPN (and therefore is less likely to be blocked). Outline uses an encrypted socks5 proxy that looks like normal internet traffic. Once the user chooses a server location, Outline spins up a DigitalOcean server on Ubuntu, installs Docker, and imports an image of the actual server.

It's been named Outline because in places where internet use may be restricted — it gives you a line out.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.