

Kill-Switch: Software feature to prevent your data or IP address from being leaked if the VPN connection fails.These are the industry-standard protocols for high-security encryption. We screen VPNs to ensure they follow security best-practices regarding their choice of protocols, encryption cipher implementation, and security architecture.Īll VPNs on this list offer either OpenVPN, WireGuard or IKEv2 protocols (many have all three). That said, encrypting your torrents is actually secondary to obscuring your IP address. The entire point of a VPN is to encrypt your traffic in-transit. Any VPN that records IP addresses was ruled out. How it affects our rankings: We prioritized VPN providers that don’t keep any logs whatsoever. So if your VPN provider keeps logs, even metadata connection logs with your IP address and connection timestamps, it’s theoretically possible to link you to your torrent traffic based on your torrent IP. The entire point of using a VPN for p2p traffic is to obscure the link between your public IP address and your real one. That’s because most torrent swarms are public, and your IP address is publicly visible. We believe a VPNs logging policy is the #1 most important criteria when choosing a torrent-friendly VPN. VPN Factors we evaluated for this article:

Torrenters in particular have specific needs, due to the public nature of the BitTorrent protocol, the level of scrutiny and possible risks involved. They’re carefully vetted for each specific use-case, and we balance multiple factors to determine the rankings. We don’t randomly select VPNs to recommend. Some past logging controversy keep them from a higher ranking.

But most importantly, your real IP address, location and identity will be hidden from your torrent peers. With a VPN, you’ll never have to worry about your favorite torrent site being blocked, or your ISP snooping on your downloads. 10 years later, that number has likely up 3x. In fact, we wouldn’t even consider downloading torrents from a public tracker without one.Ī 2011 study found that 15% of all file-sharers worldwide were using a VPN (or similar) service to hide their IP. These days, a reputable, logless VPN is almost a requirement for using BitTorrent.
