Mullvad—one of the best VPN services on the market—has announced a major new feature to its Android app, adding the ability to route traffic through two different servers.
Multihop is an important security and privacy feature, offering significant benefits over non-multihop options, as the company describes on its blog.
Our multihop feature allows you to route traffic through multiple servers, creating a tunnel within a tunnel. This means that your traffic passes through two servers—an entry server and an exit server—before reaching its final destination.
By selecting servers in different jurisdictions or hosting providers, you make it slightly harder for anyone to trace your data back to you. Please note that depending on the location of the two servers, this could potentially degrade your network performance.
The company underscores just how much more effective a multihop service can be.
Routing your traffic through multiple servers in separate jurisdictions gives you a higher level of privacy and security, even if one server were to be compromised. Adversaries would need to launch timing attacks against the traffic in multiple locations in order to analyze your online usage.
Mullvad is already WPN’s top VPN recommendation. The company is based in Sweden, which has strong legal protections for VPN providers, and engages in a strict no-logs policy, meaning its servers do not create or retain activity logs. This was put to the test when authorities tried to access one of the company’s servers, only to find there was no data on it.
The addition of multihop capabilities make an already great service even better, one we continue to wholeheartedly recommend.