| Protect your privacy, and access blocked content with F-Secure Freedome VPN | |
| Date added: | January, 11th 2017 |
| Author: | F-Secure Corporation |
| File size: / License: | 39 MB / Trial |
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F-Secure’s Freedome VPN is a solid, secure service based around an attractive and easy-to-use client.
Features
First established in 1988 under the name Data Fellows, F-Secure is a venerable provider in the area of online security and is based in Finland. As well as the Freedome VPN, they offer a range of products for personal and business customers, including anti-virus and a password manager.
As for the VPN itself, it gives access to servers in 16 countries including Hong Kong, Australia and the USA. Simultaneous connections from different devices are permitted according to subscription chosen as above.
Security & Privacy
F-Secure uses OpenVPN for its Windows, Mac and Android clients, though it takes some digging to find this out – the relevant section of the knowledge base omits to mention it. Encryption is AES-128 for data, with SHA-1 for data authentication and 2048-bit RSA for handshaking: this is a slight step up from OpenVPN’s default, and acceptable security for most users. They keep no personally-identifiable logs of users or their activities and are not subject to EU Data Retention laws. Use of BitTorrent is allowed on some servers, but automatically blocked on others including the UK, Netherlands and Singapore.
The iOS app, meanwhile, uses IPsec AES-128 for data encryption, AES-256 for key exchange, and SHA-1 for data authentication. Though generally we’d recommend OpenVPN when you can get it, it’s less common to see it on the iOS platform and IPsec is a decent alternative.
The F-Secure Windows VPN client
Using the F-Secure Freedome Windows client is a beautiful experience from start to finish. From the moment you start installation, you’re presented with a slick, attractive and professional-looking interface which is easy to use and works very well. The main screen has a large button to turn protection on and off, with a summary of time left on the user’s trial or subscription as well as some other information, and there’s a large friendly button to tell you what country you’re connecting to; clicking this brings up a lovely clean menu of possible locations, complete with spinning globe animation when you change to a new country.
Along the left-hand side are tabs for managing your subscription, settings for making the client run with Windows or automatically connecting to the VPN, and some ancillary features of the service. There’s one for browser protection, which when turned on prevents the user accessing sites deemed harmful (for, e.g., hosting malware) and one for tracking protection, as well as for F-Secure’s private search page complete with instructions on how to use it to prevent third parties tracking your search history (though we were amused to see it was powered by google).
As we never experienced any DNS leaks while using F-Secure’s VPN, we assume the client has built-in protection for both IPv4 and IPv6 – more on this below.
Performance (Speed, DNS and IP Test)
As you can see from the graphs below, F-Secure Freedome’s connection speeds compared very favourably to the control results from our unshielded test connection. We had particularly good results to the Amsterdam server, and though performance to the London server was noticeably worse, speeds were still very usable and not far below our control. In general we found F-Secure’s connection speeds to be more than adequate both for general Internet use and for video streaming. Reliability was also good.
Download F-Secure Freedome VPN
What’s new in this version:
– Change log not available for this version
