Announcing Circle of Trust

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR

Obscura is starting Circle of Trust, a network of independent privacy-focused companies
Ente Photos is the first member of Circle of Trust, with users of each product getting a special offer for the other

Trust matters for every company. For a privacy company, it matters more (though at Obscura we minimize trust with technology as much as possible).

A lot of that trust has been burned by the big companies many of us rely on. Some of us look for alternatives, but these alternatives aren’t under the same brand; they are operating independently, focusing on doing their thing better than the rest. This is good if you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket for privacy reasons, but it means you need to discover and vet many different companies which can add time, effort, and cost some of us don’t have.

We’re introducing Circle of Trust to make this a little easier. It’s a network of independent companies that gives you a head start on where to look.

Ente Photos

We’re joining the Ente friends network and adding them as the first member of Circle of Trust. This means Obscura users will get an individual offer to use Ente, and Ente users will receive their own specific offer for Obscura.

For those who aren’t familiar, Ente Photos is a safe, private home for your photos and videos, built to preserve your memories for generations.

Your photos and their metadata are end-to-end encrypted, its apps are open source, and Ente’s business model is built around subscriptions rather than advertising or monetizing user data.

How to redeem your code for Ente Photos

For Ente Photos (available to paid Obscura accounts):

Get your Ente code from your Account
Go to the payment flow on either the website or open the Android App
1. For Web,
  1. go to Account → Manage Subscription
  2. Choose your plan
  3. Enter the code in the payment link that opens
  4. Complete your purchase
2. For Android, open the Android app
  1. Go to Account → Manage Subscription
  2. Choose your plan
  3. Add your personal code
  4. Complete the checkout

Introducing Obscura VPN for Windows

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Obscura is now available as a native app on Windows 10 and 11

Introducing Obscura VPN for Android

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Obscura is now available as a native app on Android

Obscura's First Independent Audit by Cure53

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

We have completed the first independent audit of our macOS app, network extension and protocol conducted by Cure53

Trust, 2-Party Relays, and QUIC

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR

2-Party Relays largely resolve the trust and privacy problem inherent in existing consumer VPNs
QUIC-based VPN protocols blend in with HTTP/3 traffic, bypassing network filters while avoiding the TCP-over-TCP slowdown
We built a new VPN named Obscura based on these two insights, partnering with Mullvad as our exit hop

Consumer VPNs and Trust

The consumer VPN industry has been under growing scrutiny lately – even from government agencies – and for good reason. VPN companies have flooded YouTube with exaggerated claims and scare tactics while also using predatory pricing mechanics. Behind the scenes, these companies are often many-headed hydras with questionable ownership, employing astro-turfing tactics to be top-ranked on “top X VPN of 2025” lists.

Fundamentally, the biggest flaw of existing VPN companies is that they act as your primary man-in-the-middle – seeing both your personal info (connecting IP, email, billing address, etc.) and your browsing history (thanks to TLS’s SNI extension).

Loading graph...

flowchart LR
    user["User"]
    vpn["Traditional VPN"]
    internet["Internet"]
    user -->|knows who you are| vpn -->|...and sees your traffic| internet

As a result, users must rely on their provider’s pinky-promise that none of their data is logged. Yet even a provider that keeps true to its promise can suffer a security breach and be compromised. This is partly why many privacy-conscious folks will tell you not to use a VPN at all (HN discussion).

The 2-Party Relay Solution

What if we can do away with this reliance on trust?

In 2022, Apple’s iCloud Relay team proposed a neat solution (albeit currently limited to just Safari): using a 2-party relay architecture¹.

Loading graph...

flowchart LR
    user["User"]
    firsthop["1st hop"]
    exithop["2nd (exit) Hop"]
    internet["Internet"]
    user -->|knows who you are<br>but never your traffic| firsthop --> exithop -->|sees your traffic<br/>but never who you are| internet

With 2 independent relay hops in sequence, and by end-to-end encrypting your traffic to the 2nd (exit) hop, this design ensures that:

The 1st hop only sees your connecting IP, but can’t decrypt your traffic. It forwards the still-encrypted traffic to the 2nd hop, effectively NAT-ing your connection and masking your IP address from the 2nd hop.
The 2nd (exit) hop connects you to the internet, but never sees your personal info or IP address since it only knows that the connection is coming from the 1st hop.

This splits “who you are” from “what you do”, meaning neither party can tie your identity to your browsing.

This simple yet effective design caught on among those in-the-know. At the IETF, the MASQUE working group² was formed to standardize a version of this design atop HTTP/3³.

Collateral Freedom via Obfuscation

Though VPN companies often tout their “military-grade encryption”⁴, even the strongest encryption won’t help you if your VPN protocol is easily identified and blocked. At worst, this paints a giant target on your back.

I personally experienced this while living in Shanghai, where the Great Firewall not only blocked sites like Wikipedia, Google, and YouTube, but also actively detected and shut down many VPN protocols. These DPI techniques eventually found their way into common networking appliances, which is why – even outside China – you’ll often find your VPN blocked in airports, hotels, or office networks.

Newer, more reliable tools and protocols like v2ray, meek, Shadowsocks, and hysteria2 had a common theme: Collateral Freedom via obfuscation.

The core insight here is that internet censors (and overzealous network admins) generally still want “permitted” traffic to pass through. So if, on the wire, your protocol can blend in with regular internet traffic (either by mimicking HTTP or via Domain Fronting), you’re far less likely to be flagged and blocked.

Obfuscation without TCP-over-TCP meltdown

“Stealth protocols” that obfuscate your traffic over TCP work better, but they suffer from the notorious TCP-over-TCP meltdown problem – leading to significant performance degradation.

Before QUIC (used by HTTP/3), “blending in” often meant tunneling your IP packets over TCP (used by HTTP/1 and HTTP/2). But as explained in “Why TCP Over TCP Is A Bad Idea” (HN discussion), layering TCP connections leads to conflicts in TCP’s retransmission mechanism, resulting in reduced goodput and stuttery performance⁵.

What TCP expects is that it be run over IP – an unreliable network.

This is where QUIC comes in: QUIC is UDP-based, with congestion control moved up the stack. This allows TCP connections to be tunneled via QUIC’s unreliable transmission⁶, avoiding retransmission conflicts altogether.

This was the unspoken insight behind MASQUE’s choice of transport – by using QUIC, tunneling protocols not only blend in with QUIC and HTTP/3 traffic, but also avoid TCP-over-TCP meltdown.

Obscura

These 2 recent advances – the 2-party relay architecture and QUIC’s unreliable transport – are the perfect ingredients for a new generation of VPN services. VPN services that don’t rely on trust for privacy, and that are hard to detect/block without sacrificing performance.

That is exactly what we’ve done with Obscura.

With our 2-party setup, Obscura operates the 1st hop, and we’re proud to partner with Mullvad⁷ who operates the 2nd (exit) hop. As the WireGuard packets are end-to-end encrypted to Mullvad’s servers⁸, we never see any parts of your packet in plaintext (not even SNI). In fact, you can check your connected server’s public key in the Obscura App against those listed on Mullvad’s server page!
For obfuscation, we use quinn-rs’s implementation of RFC 9221 to tunnel WireGuard packets over QUIC. With QUIC’s unreliable transport, we’ve made Obscura much harder to block without sacrificing performance.

As you may have gathered, we take your trust very seriously⁹. So of course our app’s entire source code is on GitHub for you to verify for yourself, and we plan to soon provide reproducible builds of our app¹⁰.

An open and private internet

The internet – our digital commons – deserves to be open and private.

While authoritarian politicians aim to erode our freedoms online, we have the duty as technologists to wield our skills and defend our rights in the digital space. As Eric Hughes wrote in A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto: “We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any.”

Obscura is our humble contribution to the cause. We hope you’ll check it out, and we’ll see you on the free and open internet. 🏄

Essentially Tor’s HiddenServiceSingleHopMode option ↩
A praise-worthy name! ↩
I was actually fortunate enough to attend the MASQUE working group in-person, where I met fellow nerds who shared tales of their battles with middleboxes and patiently listened to my ramblings about my own attempt at implementing RFC 9298. ↩
Personally, I’d find “djb-grade encryption” a more compelling pitch ↩
I previously wrote about this here ↩
Standardized as RFC 9221 ↩
who we consider one of the most trustworthy VPN providers ↩
Your locally-generated WireGuard pubkey is registered with Mullvad’s servers, and WireGuard’s regular Noise_IK handshake happens between you and the Mullvad exit server. ↩
and we actively work to eliminate the need for trust wherever we can ↩
I previously led the effort to revamp Bitcoin Core’s reproducible builds system to be bootstrappable, work that is referenced by the Tor project. ↩

Obscura Blog

Announcing Circle of Trust

TL;DR

Ente Photos

How to redeem your code for Ente Photos

Introducing Obscura VPN for Windows

Introducing Obscura VPN for Android

Obscura's First Independent Audit by Cure53

Trust, 2-Party Relays, and QUIC

TL;DR

Consumer VPNs and Trust

The 2-Party Relay Solution

Collateral Freedom via Obfuscation

Obfuscation without TCP-over-TCP meltdown

Obscura

An open and private internet

Footnotes