I’m planning a roadtrip in west USA.
I haven’t really booked or planned, thus I’m going to get online once I get out of the plane.
I did some basic research, and it seems my phone is not supported by US carriers.
The only other option for me is to rely on (public/hotel/unsecured) wifi networks.
Entering my credit card details on unsecured networks poses a big risk and I’m thinking about how to avoid these risks.
VPN with killswitch came to my mind.
One option is to subscribe a vpn service (paying for it is not an issue here), such as NordVPN, pia or something else. I don’t really care about tracking for now (if they do). My main concern is security.
Another one is own vpn - my raspberry pi finally found its use, running pivpn with 2048 bit encryption. Accessible via duckdns due to my dynamic public ip address.
Do you think that the pivpn is secure enough, or should I go for commercial vpn service.
Alternatively, could you recommend me how to get online in us? (perhaps, there is some carrier I do not know about )
I’ve run openvpn on a pi 3 before, and it’s plenty fast enough for udp & aes-256 (openvpn uses symmetric encryption for the actual data) for small number of users. The big issue with your pi idea, if the pi is not located in North America, would be the added latency of the round trip back to your pi. From a latency perspective, you would be better off subscribing to a more local service.
ProtonVPN works well for me. I run it Linux and Android as an always-on VPN and the uptime and convenience is really reassuring. Not familiar with NordVPN, but I’ve been seeing commercials on TV recently.
Heck yeah! They’ve got a crazy amount of servers in like 23 countries. Some allow TOR and P2P and have something called Secure Core, where they route traffic through Switzerland, Iceland or Sweden and the exit node is in a server and country of your choice so it hides the IP. I’ve never had issue with DNS leaks, but they don’t support IPv6 at the moment.
Thanks to everyone, who participated.
I kept the ProtonVPN as a backup, in case internet connection in house / electricity went out.
Just to let you know, that the piVPN was working quite reliably, and although the speeds weren’t high (about 2Mbps down, 1Mbps up), most of the time it was due to the Free Wifi limitations. In the end it was more than enough to book a hotel / trip with peace in my heart, that my credit card info didn’t went public.
The only gripe were hotels trying to create double-sided copy of my credit card for “security purposes”, but that’s another story…
Even when I couldn’t connect, I could verify with my family, that connection and my raspi were up, it was probably due to port blocking on particular wifis.
PureVPN can be a good option for you as it works great in multiple regions and its streaming speed is great, also they are offering one month free account on purchasing of any subscription.
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