"All of them claim to be the best": Multi-perspective study of VPN users and VPN providers
Reethika Ramesh, Anjali Vyas, Roya Ensafi

TL;DR
This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the VPN ecosystem from both user and provider perspectives, revealing trust issues, misconceptions, and misalignments that impact VPN effectiveness and user security.
Contribution
It is the first to compare VPN user and provider perspectives through surveys and interviews, uncovering key insights and misalignments in trust, mental models, and motivations.
Findings
Users trust review sites motivated by money
Users have flawed mental models of VPN protection
Significant misalignment between user trust and provider transparency
Abstract
As more users adopt VPNs for a variety of reasons, it is important to develop empirical knowledge of their needs and mental models of what a VPN offers. Moreover, studying VPN users alone is not enough because, by using a VPN, a user essentially transfers trust, say from their network provider, onto the VPN provider. To that end, we are the first to study the VPN ecosystem from both the users' and the providers' perspectives. In this paper, we conduct a quantitative survey of 1,252 VPN users in the U.S. and qualitative interviews of nine providers to answer several research questions regarding the motivations, needs, threat model, and mental model of users, and the key challenges and insights from VPN providers. We create novel insights by augmenting our multi-perspective results, and highlight cases where the user and provider perspectives are misaligned. Alarmingly, we find that users…
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Taxonomy
TopicsInformation and Cyber Security · Privacy, Security, and Data Protection · Cybersecurity and Cyber Warfare Studies
