On Thu, 11 Jun 2026 14:17:19 +0000 gfp <[email protected]> wrote: > Is there a possibility to combine browsing with the Tor browser like > Nr. 1 and a VPN?
Having a VPN inside Tor will actually de-anoymize you, so there is not much interest in doing that. In normal operation the Tor Browser has limited isolation of Tabs, changes routes about every 10 minutes, has some protections against browser fingerprinting and Tor itself has some protections against linking traffic between several Tor nodes (that's called traffic confirmation if I recall well). As far as I know doesn't add random padding for instance as that would make connections much slower. And the problem is also that for someone like me, it's hard to know how effective all that is because the state of the art of de-anonymization is probably nonfree (tracking companies) or not public (states), but the Tor Browser is also the best we've got, and it works for many websites, but not all of them, and they also take both threat models into account in their documentation, so all I have to do is to read that documentation and maybe read it again in case of updates. But as soon as you do precisely what they advise you not to do, it exposes you to some class of attacks like browser fingerprinting for instance. And it's also hard to know the full extent of the damage, because (not many) people tried to do public research on these things (The Tor Browser is backed by a community of researchers who audit it, try to break it, try to find new protections, etc, but I'm unsure if they try to break strange setup with VPN and Tor). There is also an alternative which consists in a VPN + Mullvad Browser, and the latter is also in Guix and that is also supported by the Tor Project but with way less guarantees of anonymity, so that might be your best bet if you want to accept a reduction of anonymity in exchange for potentially not being blocked (though some websites also block VPNs). Basically with a VPN, all your traffic or all the traffic of your browser in the case of the Mullvad Browser goes in one place, so you really need to trust the VPN provider, and in the past that trust has often been breached (adds companies buying VPN companies to get hold of all the traffic, etc). The big advantage of Mullvad Browser + VPN over custom solutions is that the browser is based on the Tor Browser, with the help from the Tor project, so it has the same anti-fingerprinting system, the releases happen more or less together, etc. And it is made for that so that is easier to use. The downside is that there are probably many attacks possible, like traffic confirmation, etc. If all is routed in the same VPN, it might also be a good idea to only do one thing at once with that setup (like not login to your bank and read some news at the same time) and the Tor project already advise to not do that anyway (maybe because different websites can have the same tracker somehow, and it might be possible for them to understand that they run in the same browser, and so link two different browsing profile at a given point). Denis.
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