Get Windscribe
What Is Stealth Protocol?
Igor MechtcheriakovNov 28, 2022
Divider
Help
>About

Stealth protocol is an OpenVPN tunnel masked to look like HTTPS traffic. This protocol is very helpful on restrictive networks.

Some networks can enable tools to more accurately determine the kind of traffic being sent over the network, and this includes detecting VPN tunnels using OpenVPN. Stealth is our way to try and get around this.

Stealth protocol uses Stunnel, an open-source library, to wrap your regular VPN connection within a layer of SSL encryption. By doing this, the connection ends up looking like any other secure web traffic in the case anyone were to analyze it. To block this traffic would mean blocking all secure web browsing on that network. It also connects on 11 different ports making it fairly versatile when it comes to getting around network VPN blocks. 

Keep in mind though, the extra layer of encryption and decryption that comes with Stealth can impact the VPN performance so internet speeds might slow down. We recommend using Stealth only when you can't use any of the other protocols to connect to the VPN. 

The Stealth protocol can be enabled across all desktop and mobile versions of our application by going to Preferences > Connection and setting the Connection Mode to Manual. Then select Stealth as the Protocol, and you're set.


Get in touch

r/Windscribe

Find solutions, discuss ideas and share your feelings on our subreddit.

Contact Support

Feeling completely lost? Contact Support.
Windscribe
Company
forground_icon
© 2024 Windscribe Limited