Nym is more than a VPN

The first app that protects you from AI surveillance thanks to a noise-generating mixnet

November 26, 20242 mins Read

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) have been the go-to solution for securing online traffic for decades. They are used by millions of people across the world to protect their geolocation when doing things online. But the terms of the game are radically changing.

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) means, among many things, that surveillance capacities are becoming more sophisticated – and not just those of big companies and governments, but also smaller malicious actors. Centralized VPN infrastructures can now do little to protect our identities and patterns of communication online. What is needed is something more than a VPN.

Thankfully, the solution can be found in the field of AI itself. In its essence, AI is a process of discovering hidden patterns, even in what is seemingly random noise. This can have many beneficial uses, but can also be exploited, exposing patterns of behavior and human habits to malicious actors that can abuse this information. Nym takes this principle and simply reverses it: adding noise to online traffic patterns to protect what you do online from snooping strangers and algorithms.

In short, Nym is more than a VPN. It is a noise generating network that extends powerful new anti-surveillance technologies to ordinary people and businesses.

NymVPN is here to offer you more: more access, more control, more protection. In fact, Nym is more on many levels, from the architecture of the network to its community.

More than a VPN

NymVPN is a new way of protecting digital communications in the age of AI where all other VPNs fail. The app enables decentralized routing, advanced encryption and noise for your online traffic. Combined, these techniques secures not only the content of digital communications, but also the patterns and traces they leave through a network.

NymVPN is the first to include noise generating mixnet technology which does what no other VPN can: protect your metadata from tracking, which even the NSA publicly admits “tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata you don't really need content.”

What is metadata?

Where data is the content of a message you send, metadata are patterns of your messages: how often you are messaging someone, what time, from where, using which app and device, what size the messages are, etc.

Hear what Claudia Diaz, Nym's Chief Scientist, has to say about it:

Metadata is especially vulnerable to AI surveillance for many reasons:

Metadata is structured, making it easy for algorithms to do traffic analysis on your patterns of behavior online.
Metadata is not protected by end-to-end encryption, meaning it’s everywhere.
And metadata has no legal protections, which means anyone can gather and analyze it without any repercussions!

AI surveillance

In the age of AI, patterns of communication have become far more sensitive than content. Despite standardized encryption across the web, metadata can be analyzed by machine learning algorithms to reveal significant facts about your habits and ways of life, even things you don’t wish to share or of which you are not even conscious about yourself.

The harvesting, analysis, and commercialization of personal data is now a widespread and clandestine industry. Regulation has not been successful in safeguarding people’s personal information, with metadata entirely unprotected. It is simply impossible for regulation to provide adequate protection - instead, internet traffic should be secured by design, with anti-surveillance protections built in by default.

More than a proxy

The Nym network decentralizes user traffic and generates noise against surveillance. These are privacy protections far beyond simply masking your IP address with a proxy or centralized VPN.

NymVPN is decentralized by default, which means a minimum of 2 independent servers so that your identity can’t be linked to what you’re doing online. But this is not enough for highly sensitive traffic, so NymVPN offers something more: an Anonymous Mode with 5 hops and added network noise. So what is noise exactly, and why do you need it?

Introducing noise

All modern surveillance, whether by humans or AI, tries to find a “signal” in the noise of a network (things that don’t pertain to a target, like other people’s data). AI can succeed in this search exponentially where humans can’t. Adding excessive noise to a network, however, can make the work of AI surveillance close to impossible. The Nym mixnet uses four kinds of noise:

Anonymous data packets: Identically encrypted data packet sizes make it hard to trace a packet and correlate a user to what they are sending and which service they are using.
Cover traffic: “Dummy” or empty packets are sent out with your “real” data packets to make it hard to know what is real or fake traffic, and increase the overall anonymity of the network for everyone.
Data mixing: Nym mix nodes shuffle your packets with other people’s so that it becomes nearly impossible to trace your traffic flows through the network.
Timing obfuscation: Data mixing creates timing obfuscations so that the order and frequency of packets handled by a node are scrambled and cannot be analyzed to reveal the traffic patterns of users.

These techniques are bundled and produce "noise" which prevents AI surveillance and traffic analysis. With a noise-powered network, you can finally be both anonymous and in control of who knows what about you online. No more interference and snoopers.

More than privacy

Nym provides anonymity, control, community, and ultimately freedom online.

There is a public perception that being private online simply means hiding what we do as individuals. But this is only a small part of the picture of what has gone terribly wrong with the web: now everyone’s personal details are being systematically harvested and used under their noses.

Nym thus takes a more collective approach to the problem of online privacy: the noise your traffic contributes to the network becomes a cover for other people’s traffic too! Each new user of Nym thus increases the overall anonymity of the network for other users. The bigger the crowd of the network, the more anonymous everyone is: this is the principle of being private together.

More than a network

Nym is a community and a collective approach to one of today’s big social problems: the mass surveillance at the heart of the internet. So who makes up Nym exactly?

A pirate ship of sorts, Nym is a growing community of developers, operators, philosophers, and cryptographers who believe that there is both a moral imperative and economic opportunity in making privacy and anonymity the default for online communications.

For users, the Nym network is made possible by independent people all over the world who operate servers because they believe in the importance of online privacy. But unlike similar privacy networks which rely solely on volunteers, Nym operators are rewarded for their services through a novel form of tokenomics.

It may sound counterintuitive, as innovations sometimes do: with the right kind of network design, your traffic is actually safer and more anonymous in the hands of many strangers than it is in the single hands of a company, no matter their reputation. Decentralization takes the need to trust out of the equation.

Make some noise

NymVPN is much more than a VPN. It’s the first-of its kind noise-generating mixnet. It’s a decentralized solution to the risks of data centralization. It’s the only existing line of defense against metadata harvesting. It’s the beginning of digital freedom for millions. It’s a community working together to make it possible. It’s the doorway to a free and private internet. Are you ready to help open that door? Here’s the key.