11mo ago

Why Proton VPN doesn’t use RAM-only VPN servers | Proton

Proton VPN doesn't use RAM-only VPN servers because we believe them to be marketing hype. In this article, we explain why.

Proton VPN doesn't use RAM-only servers, arguing they offer no additional security over full-disk encryption on hard drives.
Full-disk encryption ensures data on hard drives is secure and inaccessible without proper authentication, even when servers are powered off.
Proton VPN prioritizes a strict no-logs policy, independent audits, and operating servers in privacy-friendly jurisdictions to protect user privacy.

3 comments

Very unconvincing. The only point they bring up which actually precludes RAM-only servers is hard drive encryption, which they only need to do because they store data on a hard drive. The whole article reads like them trying to justify a choice they've already made rather than a legitimate comparison RAM-only versus hard drives.
Their first point is literally that RAM-only doesn't help when the power's on. That's like saying you shouldn't wear a seatbelt because it doesn't protect against someone smashing your window. That's just not what it's for.
- I largely agree. The title and opening words are misleading. The rest of the article is much more clear that they are defending their position of using VPN software that relies on storage and securing it with full disk encryption.
  Also, full disk encryption doesn’t solve everything. If an attacker has access to the running server, the disk is unencrypted. At that point, reading files is much easier than reading RAM from a running process.

While I'm not particularly invested in their choice, I will say that I've got some counters to the points given as to why not:
Logging for diagnostics: probably the closest point, but you can either centralize such logs where local disk does not matter, or leave log in ram with aggressive rotation out.
Ability to update without rebooting. The diskless systems I work with can be updated live too. However live updates do eat more memory in my case due to reasons that will be clear soon. Besides, a rolling reboot should be fairly non disruptive to "bake" the live updates into the efficient form. Other Diskless situations just live in tmpfs, in which case live updates are no problem at all, though it is a lot of ram to do this.
Diskless uses too much RAM: At least with the setups I work with, the Diskless ram usage is small, as the root filesystem is downloaded on demand with a write overlay in zram to compress all writes. Effectively like a livecd generally boots, but replace cd with a network filesystem.