The privacy value of all VPNs starts with the support for encryption technologies. NordVPN scores well here for its strong AES-256-GCM encryption and supports perfect forward secrecy to regularly change keys (this time using 4096-bit Diffie-Hellman), ensuring that even if an attacker manages to penetrate one session, they’ll be locked out of the next one.
Once you’re connected, NordVPN has other tricks it can employ to improve your privacy. These include Onion over VPN, which routes your traffic first through NordVPN’s own network, then directs it over the Onion network and on to its final destination.
This double layer of obfuscation slows the service down a little, but also makes it extremely difficult for anyone to trace an action back to you. Best of all, you don’t have to know or understand anything at all about Onion to make this work. There’s nothing to install or set up, just use your client to connect to one of NordVPN’s specialist Onion over VPN routers and the system will handle everything automatically.
NordVPN also offers a Double VPN system (on Windows, Mac, and Android) where your traffic goes to one VPN server, then is re-encrypted and sent to a second NordVPN server, before heading off to its destination. This isn’t going to be necessary, or even useful for most people, but it’s there if you can find a reason to use it, and the technology doesn’t slow you down as much as you might expect. A quick check on one system showed download speeds of 70Mbps when not connected, 55Mbps when using the best Double VPN connection for us (the UK to France).
