Martti Malmi, one of Bitcoin's earliest developers, just released a new version of Nostr VPN, an open-source mesh VPN that replaces the entire trust model of traditional VPN services. Traditional VPNs route all your traffic through a central server operated by a company you have to trust. They see your data. They require your email. They can log your activity. They can be subpoenaed, hacked, or shut down. Even modern mesh VPNs like Tailscale, which improved on this by sending data peer-to-peer, still require you to authenticate through a centralized coordination server using third-party accounts like Google or Microsoft. Nostr VPN eliminates the central server entirely. Your identity is a Nostr keypair, a self-generated cryptographic key pair with no registration, no email, no third-party account. The underlying transport layer is FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System), a self-organizing encrypted mesh network where nodes authenticate each other, route traffic for each other, and establish connections without any central authority or global topology knowledge. Each node's Nostr public key (npub) serves as its network address. The architecture uses two layers of encryption: hop-by-hop encryption between peers and independent end-to-end encryption between mesh endpoints with periodic rekeying for forward secrecy. When direct connections fail due to NAT issues, the system falls back to Nostr-based multihop routing through other FIPS nodes rather than relying on company-operated relay servers. Peer discovery and NAT traversal happen through public Nostr relays using encrypted gift-wrapped messages. The new release adds native desktop apps for macOS, Linux, and Windows, an Android app, Nostr-based multihop routing for when NAT holepunching fails, and improved network management. It supports UDP, TCP, Ethernet, Tor, and Bluetooth transports simultaneously on a single mesh. This is what happens when you apply Bitcoin's design philosophy, permissionless, self-sovereign, no trusted third parties, to networking infrastructure. Built by one of the people who helped Satoshi build Bitcoin in 2009. image

Replies (14)

Trainer Dan's avatar
Trainer Dan 2 months ago
Forgive me I am an incredibly non-technical person but I have heard that NOSTR relies on DNS. Could this be a way for privacy to leak even with a VPN?
Sugestor Ultra's avatar
Sugestor Ultra 2 months ago
Whoa, this is big. This the part which Nostr lacks right now and which could make it more resistant to takedowns. Currently, even onion relays are easy targets. The problem which I fear, is that any decentralised network i have ever seen, failed catastrophically at some point. Maybe it's possible to introduce "fake choke points" which would stand out as a decoy attack surface for whoever will try to censor or disrupt the network. God knows how to implement such idea, but maybe one day someone clever will come up with something. For example a dns blocking is such a "decoy control mechanism", it's there, it seems to work, but not really. I also encourage netadmins and sysadmins to move udp traffic to high ports (ephemeral ports), especially in companies, to stop a division of the internet into "low port - high port" and force adversaries to use a DPI to classify udp traffic which is a pretty high barrier, at least for now. We already allowed to somewhat divide the internet into "server address space" and "client address space" which should never happen, so maybe at least we can avoid it when it comes to udp port numbers.
ℹ️ | Os comparto Nostr VPN: Me apasiona el concepto de Nostr y todo lo que está por llegar me entusiasma aún más. Hoy mismo lo voy a probar. Si tú también lo pruebas y compartes tu experiencia, ¡me encantaría leerla y que lo comentasemos! ℹ️ | I'm passionate about the concept of Nostr, and everything that's coming excites me even more. I'm going to try it out today. If you try it too and share your experience, I'd love to read it and discuss it with you! View quoted note →