Proton AG, the company behind the ProtonMail service which protects the life of activists, journalists and other individuals, has has recently launched ProtonVPN, its VPN service. To further cement their role on protecting Internet users from abusive practices, they offer a free tier available to everyone.

If you don’t feel like rolling your own VPN server using OpenVPN or IPsec (e.g. via Algo), then you may want to consider a commercial alternative like this one. Just remember that ProtonVPN may be secure but it’s not bulletproof - you’re effectively exchanging the trust from your ISP to this company and everything becomes a little bit more complicated if your country has a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty with Switzerland.

The free version does not allow access to their Secure Core infrastructure, which re-routes traffic between servers based on countries with restrictive privacy laws before sending your traffic to its final destination. If you’d like to take advantage of this feature, you will have to upgrade to a paid subscription. By doing so, you are also contributing to this fight against user privacy abuses and Internet censorship.

ProtonVPN is built on top of OpenVPN, so it’s quite easy to configure a client on macOS and iOS. The following configuration provides access to all free UDP servers as well as their TCP counterpart.

iOS

  1. Download the OpenVPN Connect app and install it on your iOS device.
  2. Download the free Apple Configurator 2 in your Mac device to deploy the mobile profile.
  3. Download the pre-configured ProtonVPN mobile profile.
  4. Open the ProtonVPN.mobileconfig file and under Custom Data, double click where it says <username>.

  1. Enter your OpenVPN Username (not the ProtoVPN VPN Login!) under your ProtonVPN Account settings followed by \n and then your OpenVPN Password. If you username is foo and your password bar, the string value would be foo\nbar.
  2. Save the device profile.
  3. Connect your iOS Device to your Mac and double-click on the device image on Apple Configurator 2.
  4. On the sidebar, select Profiles and drag-and-drop the just-saved ProtonVPN.mobileconfig.
  5. Follow the on-screen security questions on your iOS device to complete the profile installation.
  6. To connect, open the OpenVPN Connect app and click on the connect toggle.
  7. Check who you are on the internet and done!

macOS

  1. Download Tunnelblick or Viscosity.
  2. Download ProtonVPN.visz if you’re using Viscosity or openvpn.conf if you’re using Tunnelblick.
  3. Double-click the download file to import it.
  4. When asked for the username/password, enter your OpenVPN credentials from your ProtonVPN Account settings.
  5. Check who you are on the internet and done!