Civilsphere AI VPN: v0.1.0-beta release

Civil society organizations, activists, journalists and human rights defenders rely on digital devices to do their jobs, and are often in the field without the protection of firewalls, IDS, or any other advanced threat protection more commonly available to corporate users. How can these individuals identify if their devices are at risk while working in the field?

Since 2018, our Emergency VPN service has been leveraging VPN technologies to provide users with a security assessment of their devices’ network traffic tailored to identify digital threats. Our new AI VPN aims to take this work even further.

The AI VPN is a free software tool that provides users with an automatic network security assessment of their network traffic. Users can request a new OpenVPN or WireGuard VPN profile via email or Telegram, connect to it for a predefined amount of time (hours to days), and receive a full report after their VPN profile expires. 

The AI VPN aims to enable organizations to deploy their own instance without the need to rely on third-parties with their data.

AI VPN v0.1.0-beta release

This beta release features the following functionality: 

  • Automatic management of VPN accounts

  • Support for multiple VPN technologies, including Wireguard, OpenVPN and a NoVPN, a special configuration of OpenVPN without encryption to be used in countries where the use of encryption or VPNs may be illegal or endanger users.

  • Automatic network traffic captures and analysis per session. 

  • Support for multiple methods to request a new VPN profile, including Email and Telegram.

  • Integration with Slips, the Stratosphere Linux IPS, a free software intrusion detection system that uses machine learning to automatically detect threats.

  • Slips leverages dozens of threat intelligence feeds of known threats, plus has special modules tailored for the AI VPN such as the new Leak Detection module.

  • Integration with Pi-Hole to provide protection against trackers while using the AI VPN service.

  • Support for launching the service using Nix Arion for NixOS users.

The beta version release notes are available on GitHub. This version was tested using Docker v20.10.6 and docker-compose v1.28.5.

The AI VPN is the New Emergency VPN Service Engine

Since late November, users of our Emergency VPN service can already experience the new AI VPN technology. Our Emergency VPN was enhanced and is now powered by the AI VPN, giving it more stability, speed, and reliability. We hope our users will enjoy the changes and help us improve even more this new tool. Get started using the Emergency VPN.

Acknowledgements

This project was funded through the NGI0 PET Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 825310.

This project was developed by the Stratosphere Laboratory, Artificial Intelligence Centre, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague (2020-2021).

The AI VPN threat detection is provided by the Stratosphere Linux IPS developed at the Stratosphere Laboratory.

We would like to give a special thank you to the individuals who helped us get to this release, specially Sebastian Garcia, Maria Rigaki, Joaquin Bogado and Alya Gomaa.

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