TunnelBear’s most recent audit, published in November 2019, found a dozen security-related items of note – two that were listed as “critical” and four that were highly vulnerable – but all of which TunnelBear says it has since addressed. One byproduct of the annual report, the penetration testing company notes, is that with each passing year TunnelBear appears to have gotten more secure. TunnelBear defaults to AES 265-bit encryption, which is the strongest you can get, and promises to not log any user browsing data or personal information. It also has a “vigilant mode” designed to block all unsecured web traffic if its service somehow gets disconnected. TunnelBear was tested, along with its competitors, by gaging the service’s performance in both the afternoon and evening. The testing was conducted on an iMac running TunnelBear’s MacOS client, measuring not only the machine’s download and upload speeds while using the VPN, but also its responsiveness by pinging various games’ servers while it was engaged. Finally, we put TunnelBear to the test by playing the games with the VPN as well as streaming content over Netflix to see how well the video renders.īoth in the afternoon and evening, TunnelBear performed much more slowly than competing VPNs, a consistent result for the service. On average, TunnelBear’s download speeds were about 70% slower than speeds without using a VPN in the afternoon, and almost 75% slower in the evenings. In the afternoon, upload speeds were around 75% slower while using TunnelBear, and they were around 40% slower, on average, in the evening. Measuring TunnelBear’s responsiveness using online game servers proved to be similarly underwhelming. In the afternoon, TunnelBear’s pings from Fortnite, League of Legends, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive were 71 milliseconds, 6 milliseconds, and 108milliseconds slower, respectively. In the evening the results were worse: 70 milliseconds, 56 milliseconds, and 189 milliseconds slower, respectively, than connecting without a VPN.ĭespite TunnelBear’s speed deficiencies, the service worked fine streaming Netflix. Connecting through a Switzerland-based TunnelBear server from the U.S., the streaming service functioned as well as could be expected, displaying the fast-moving action scenes from Extraction with limited motion artifacts or pixelation. TunnelBear’s pricing may be attractive to users who want VPN protection, but don’t want to pay a lot for it. As mentioned above, the service offers a freemium plan that can give you a bit of privacy without having to pay. But in addition to plans for single users, the TunnelBear sells “Teams” plans that cost $5.75 per user, per month. A one-month subscription to TunnelBear costs $9.99. Paying for a year of TunnelBear costs $51.51, but it brings the monthly rate down to $4.29. The best value is a three-year subscription which costs $3.33 per month, or $120 upfront.Last summer, we discussed new ways the TunnelBear team is helping the internet freedom community’s fight against online censorship, like Encrypted SNI, which allows us to tackle a privacy loophole within HTTPS. Today, we’re announcing our latest breakthrough: OpenVPN3 with Pluggable Transports. This update tackles the third stage of censorship, by making connections to a VPN more reliable. By advancing obfuscation technology and making it easier for Pluggable Transports to work seamlessly with OpenVPN, TunnelBear is better able to ensure that our users can connect to a VPN server without censor interference. We’ve open sourced our work so others in the internet freedom space can benefit from our implementation.
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