UPDATE: Saturday, 23 April, 05:56 AM PT – The head engineer of Opera for computers Krystian Kolondra reached out to us with a comment. While Opera may have done this little tweak of definitions with the best intentions, end users should understand that this free service by Opera is nowhere near the security provided by a real VPN solution,” Per Thorsheim, founder of PasswordsCon, commented. A VPN is usually an encrypted tunnel for all services going out of our computer to a remote host, before it gets decrypted and then forwarded to its final destination. A proxy is a proxy, usually for one specific service. “I am a bit surprised by Opera in this case.
This means that if you use the proxy on a computer with no Opera installed, you’ll get the same IP as when using Opera’s VPN. Since we’re talking about a proxy, these credentials can be used with even when connecting from a different machine. When the Opera browser with enabled VPN loads a page, it sends many requests to with a Proxy-Authorization request header.ĬC68FE24C34B5B2414FB1DC116342EADA7D5C46B:9B9BE3FAE67ĤA33D1820315F4CC94372926C8210B6AEC0B662EC7CAD611D86A3 It’s an HTTP/S proxy that requires authentication. The browser then talks to a proxy like, and its IP address can only be resolved from within Opera when the VPN feature is turned on. Once the user enables the feature in settings, Opera VPN sends API requests to to obtain credentials and proxy IPs. This might be used for user tracking for whatever purpose,” Špaček added. “There’s also a potential privacy issue: when setting up the VPN, the browser requests something called device_id, this is subsequently sent in every request to the proxy and it survives browser restarts and reinstalls unless you also delete your user data when uninstalling.
Other tools you use, including for example email clients like Outlook, won’t use this ‘VPN’,” Špaček told Help Net Security. You still need a full VPN if privacy is what you care about (and you should care about your privacy). Michal Špaček, a web developer and security engineer based in Prague, researched the way Opera’s VPN works and discovered there’s more marketing than security behind Opera’s claims. Yesterday, Opera announced they’ve added a free VPN client with unlimited data usage in the latest developer version of their browser.
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