- Jan 24, 2011
- 9,378
Two days ago Opera announced a new version of their browser that featured abuilt-in VPN service that users could turn on to safeguard their online activity from prying eyes. A Czech developer begs to differ and claims that Opera's VPN is nothing more than a proxy server.
Michal Špacek, a PHP developer, was alerted by the small text under Opera's VPN settings section that read "Secure proxy provided by SurfEasy Inc., an Opera company based in Canada."
Surprised by the "proxy" mention, Mr. Špacek fired up his developer tools and debugged how Opera's VPN actually worked. He documented his findings in a technical write-up he posted on GitHub.
"This Opera 'VPN' is just a preconfigured HTTP/S proxy protecting just the traffic between Opera and the proxy, nothing else. It's not a VPN," Mr. Špacek wrote. "They even call it Secure proxy (besides calling it VPN, sure) in Opera settings."
The difference between a secure proxy and a VPN is that a secure proxy safeguards the traffic between the browser and the proxy server, while a VPN secures all traffic, regardless of protocol.
Read more: Opera's VPN Is Just a Proxy, Developer Says
How the “VPN” works
Once the user enables the feature in settings, Opera VPN sends API requests to https://api.surfeasy. com to obtain credentials and proxy IPs. The browser then talks to a proxy like de0.opera-proxy.net, and its IP address can only be resolved from within Opera when the VPN feature is turned on. It’s an HTTP/S proxy that requires authentication.
When the Opera browser with enabled VPN loads a page, it sends many requests to de0.opera-proxy.net with a Proxy-Authorization request header.
The Proxy-Authorization header decoded:
CC68FE24C34B5B2414FB1DC116342EADA7D5C46B:9B9BE3FAE67
4A33D1820315F4CC94372926C8210B6AEC0B662EC7CAD611D86A3
Since we’re talking about a proxy, these credentials can be used withde0.opera-proxy.net even when connecting from a different machine. 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.
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