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andrewstuartyesterday at 6:45 PM4 repliesview on HN

Do VPNs pay retail ISPs for exit points?


Replies

TkTechyesterday at 6:56 PM

No, not usually. Few ISPs are willing to risk blacklisting.

Just like scrapers (and a lot of VPNs are quietly using their custom VPN clients to sell your own IP [and data] to scrapers) it's mostly a "don't ask don't tell" situation for IP sourcing. You use a multitude of IP providers and if a scandal happens you just say "We didn't know!" and move on to the next. Almost always grey-market, very rarely through legitimate providers.

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joveiantoday at 4:08 AM

Mullvad in particular has a page that lists the ISPs they use (in a few cases their own servers at a datacenter), although they don't list the datacenters (sometimes you can get this info from the ISPs).

https://mullvad.net/en/servers

They also have a document that lists some of their practices around the servers, such as not using shared servers:

https://mullvad.net/en/help/server-list

I noticed that the website of one of the two providers they use near me was over a decade out of date :/. DAITA is Mullvad's anti-traffic analysis framework, without it a single hop can likely be easily deanonymized by logging by a single party (it isn't clear if multihop uses fixed packet sizes between their servers).

hnlmorgyesterday at 10:14 PM

Some VPN providers don't even have exit nodes in the country they're claiming. Instead they'll have their IPs registered to the respective countries in GeoIP databases.

This isn't a practice all VPN providers partake in. And from my own anecdotal experiences, Mullvad seem to be using services that are geo-located (I say this because I've tested latency between different endpoints in Mullvad). But it is something to be wary of with some of the less reputable providers.

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dtechyesterday at 6:57 PM

Not retail ISPs, but many extensions and free VPNs route VPN traffic through the connections of those who use them.

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