Brave's R&D team debuts privacy-preserving distributed VPN

Brave, the company behind the eponymous browser, presented the world's first distributed virtual private network.

The new form of VPN has no central authority and will function as a peer-to-peer network to preserve the privacy of its users.

The research and development team from Brave published a paper that will pave the way for a decentralized VPN network.

Brave said that VPN-0 will offer a traffic authorization and validation mechanism that will preserve users' privacy.

The company's VPN-0 tackles the problems dVPNs face around performance, privacy guarantees, and traffic accountability.

Brave's research and development team integrated VPN-0 with BitTorrent's DHT and ProtonVPN, a popular VPN provider, which demonstrated the feasibility of the next generation of VPNs.Zero-knowledge protection.

According to Brave, VPN-0 allows relay nodes to control which traffic they transmit, without learning what content it contains, unlike decentralized VPNs. This is done through a novel application of zero-knowledge proofs, a cryptographic technique that allows a prover to prove to a verifier that a certain statement is true without disclosing any information except the validity of the statement, the company explained.

The main problem Brave's team encountered was how a VPN-0 client can prove to a VPN-0 relay that the traffic it is sending is on the set of domains the relay is willing to carry traffic for.

The company said it believes the strong privacy guarantees offered by VPN-0 will encourage the development of more VPN solutions and protocols.

The company said it believes such a VPN system could be combined with a set of incentives around a utility token, such as its native BAT, which could be used to compensate users that carry traffic and enable subscriptions and services to be paid in BAT.Earn Basic Attention Token with Brave Web Browser Try Brave Browser Get $5 in free BAT to donate to the websites of your choice.