- Surfshark has deployed its own bespoke protocol, Dausos
- It promises to be 30% faster than other VPNs
- Quantum resistance cryptography further enhances security
Surfshark has just revealed its own custom VPN protocol, Dausos.
Surfshark’s new cutting-edge protocol promises to beat the best VPNs on the market by delivering record speeds up to 30% faster than competitors and a dedicated tunnel for each user.
Currently available for macOS users and soon on other platforms, the protocol – whose name means “heaven” in Lithuanian – also features new post-quantum encryption designed to make your digital life even happier.
How does Dausos work?
Unlike protocols like WireGuard and OpenVPN, which route all user traffic through a single digital tunnel, Dausos’ system provides each user with their own private, exclusive data channel.
By isolating each user’s data, it aims to effectively eliminate slowdowns caused by other users, especially during peak times, ensuring a smoother experience while protecting traveling data packets from external interference.
Additionally, the system adapts to network and device conditions, intelligently routing users’ data packets based on their network configuration for best results.
“This ensures optimized performance tailored to the user’s specific network configuration,” Surfshark explains.
The obvious victory? Less overall processing translates to faster connections, with Surfshark claiming its system is now almost a third faster than its competitors.
To make it even more enjoyable, Surfshark has also packed it with many innovative security features.
An integrated root certificate issuance system improves protection and authentication of user logins using the ML-DSA signature scheme. This innovative digital signature algorithm guarantees the authenticity of the sender and the shared data remains unchanged, positioning itself at the forefront in the adoption of post-quantum secure certificate systems.
To further increase its next-generation capabilities, the protocol has also introduced a hybrid key exchange mechanism (X25519MLKEM768), which combines the established X25519 cryptosystem with a newer NIST-approved quantum security algorithm, ML-KEM, improving the protection of user data against current and future quantum attacks.
This follows Surfshark’s January rollout of post-quantum encryption in WireGuard on macOS, Linux, and Android.
Session control: improved
The protocol also improves session control, specifically focusing on strengthening key management security. Thanks to the implementation of post-compromise security (PCS)the system protects users’ digital domains by always generating a new key each time a new connection is established.
This ensures that if a key is compromised, hackers cannot intercept other communications or decrypt future messages generated by that key.
Furthermore, a post-randomization technique takes security to new heights by establishing different port connections, unlike more traditional systems that connect to a fixed server.
“With Dausos, each session is connected via a random port address to a server, as if you were changing gates on each flight,” explains Karolis Kaciulis, lead systems engineer at Surfshark.
The protocol was recently audited by Cure53, a Berlin-based cybersecurity consultancy. The company examined the connection architecture and encryption features, concluding that there were no critical or serious vulnerabilities, paving the way for its wider adoption.
With the latest release, it seems clear that Surfshak is in the midst of a major development phase and intends to continue improving its product in terms of overall performance, having recently upgraded its network with industry-first 100 Gbps servers to potentially handle significantly more data capacity than today’s fastest VPNs.
Newly appointed CEO Dovydas Godelis told us a month ago that VPN’s mission remains “to become the revolution in cybersecurity.” Looking at the rollout of this cutting-edge new protocol, it appears he wasn’t kidding. Which leads us to wonder: what other surprises could the company have in store for us?
Follow TechRadar on Google News And add us as your favorite source to get our news, reviews and expert opinions in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!
