Is IPVanish Safe?

IPVanish is a VPN provider that has been consistently providing its users with the highest levels of online security ever since its inception in 1999. We were nothing short of impressed with its service while exploring the VPN’s security setup in great detail.  

The one concern for VPN users might lie in the fact that IPVanish is based in the US. This is far from ideal given the widespread surveillance practices of the US government and its agencies. Gag orders and warrants are a looming privacy threat and they put constant pressure on US companies. As such, we don’t usually recommend going with VPNs registered in the US, but IPVanish is such an excellent VPN provider that we had to make an exception this one time.  

Is IPVanish Safe

Logging Policy

IPVanish adheres to its strict no-logging policy, meaning it will not record and store any connection or metadata logs.  

Having said that, the company is based in the US, as we already mentioned. This means that IPVanish is under obligation to store a certain amount of user data under the law. It also has to hand that data over to the authorities whenever requested. Bottom line, the company will never use your data or disclose it to any third parties, but it’ll have to give it to the government agencies if they ask for it. If you’re not doing anything illegal, this is not a major cause for concern, though.   

Encryption

IPVanish Encryption

IPVanish supports all the major encryption protocols you would expect (OpenVPN, PPTP, and L2TP/IPSec). We never fail to recommend OpenVPN as a far superior option to all the other protocols.  

The service encrypts your traffic with military grade AES-256 cipher, using SHA-256 data authentication with RSA-2048 handshake. This is an extremely solid security configuration and it’s unbreakable by currently known technologies. IPVanish doesn’t feature forward secrecy.  

Many VPN companies that offer OpenVPN have a very poor setup that can be cracked by pretty much any hacker worthy of the name. This is by no means the case with IPVanish, so you don’t have to worry about hack-attacks or malicious eavesdroppers on your connection. On top of all that, IPVanish also offers shared IPs used by hundreds of clients simultaneously, offering more anonymity to all the users involved.  

P2P

IPVanish allows P2P file sharing and torrenting but it does ask its users to respect the law at all times. However, the company doesn’t really have a mechanism for identifying clients who don’t. Since it keeps no relevant logs, IPVanish can’t even know if the law is broken in the first place. Bottom line, IPVanish is a very torrent-friendly VPN service.  

DNS Leaks

DNS leaks are one of the most common ways VPN services accidentally give away user information. IPVanish has solid DNS protection and we didn’t discover any DNS leaks during our testing circuit. The service also comes with a kill switch, preventing you from leaking any traffic to your ISP.  

 

Want to find out even more about IPVanish? Make sure to check out our IPVanish Review for detailed information about this VPN provider.