Hey everyone,

We’re proud to announce that the long-awaited “Stealth” connection protocol is now available in beta for Linux!

📎 To try it, make sure your Proton VPN app is on version 4.17.1, and follow this guide.

If you are on a supported distro (more on this later), please help us by giving it a try and providing us with as much feedback as possible; the more feedback and bugs we can squash, the faster we can roll this feature out of beta

What Stealth does

Most VPN protocols produce traffic that's identifiable as VPN traffic. Networks running deep packet inspection can spot it and block or throttle the connection, which is why VPNs stop working on some school and workplace networks, and why they get blocked entirely in censored regions.

Stealth disguises your VPN traffic to look like ordinary encrypted web traffic. Instead of "this person is using a VPN," the network sees traffic that resembles a normal HTTPS connection. That makes it significantly harder to detect and block.

You'll want Stealth if you're on a network that blocks or throttles VPNs, connecting from a region with heavy censorship, or you'd simply rather your network operator not know you're using a VPN. For everyday use where nothing is being blocked, WireGuard will still be faster, while Stealth trades some speed for undetectability.

This is a beta

Expect instability and bugs. Stealth on Linux is built on our new WireGuard codebase, and this early release is specifically so we can find problems before general release.

If you hit issues, please tell us: your distro and version, what you were doing, and what went wrong.

Please note that this feature is only available for distros that are directly installed via our repos (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora), and versions such as the Snap store app, or other distros such as Arch will be available by the end of summer.

Lastly, it may take some time before this feature becomes available, even if you are on the latest version of the app. We’re rolling this out live, so it may take a day or two before the feature becomes visible on your end.

Stay safe,
Proton Team