The Perks of Being a Shadow Jumper

Let’s jump right into how to hop from one place to another – all the way into the shadows.
We’ll take a closer look at why multihop makes the likelihood of internet surveillance harder and puts you a jump closer to internet privacy.

A single hop is when you connect from your IP-address to a VPN service of your choice and only makes one jump to a specific country or city. With multihop routing, you can jump from any location (other than your own) and eventually land at the desired location (for example: by using a setting on our Mullvad VPN app). Shadowsocks (read more about it here) is the enabler of multihop routing. Automatically, it jumps for you. And in a couple of weeks, we will be launching an upgrade in our app that will make it possible for you to choose your own jump-locations.

Why? – It increases your privacy

Routing your traffic through two or more servers in separate jurisdictions gives you a higher level of privacy and security, even if one server were to be compromised. With multihop routing, correlated attacks become harder, simply because with the Shadowsocks multihopping tool your exit server will not have your own public IP, but instead the IP to the Shadowsocks IP server you have connected through.

The gritty list:

• Shadowsocks – the introduction

• How Shadowsocks work in the Mullvad App

• Multihop with Wireguard – the what, how and why

For the universal right to privacy,

Mullvad