[Cryptography] Verified privacy and VPNs

[Andrew Lee]

> On Sep 8, 2025, at 4:15 PM, Mark Karpelès <mark at klb.jp> wrote:
> 
> What we’ve aimed for is to create a spark, an innovation in the world
> of privacy VPNs, of which many exist and yet all ask you to trust them
> not to be spying on you despite increasing pressure, to trust them not
> to ever get hacked by malicious third parties, to trust them not to
> put their own goals before you.
> 

The internet was never built for privacy.

From the beginning, packet origins and destinations were in the clear.

VPN technology was adopted as a patch, but all they accomplished was moving trust from the human ISP operator to the human VPN operator.

"Trust" does not belong in a private conversation, nor is it a security, cryptographic, or privacy primitive. Humans are neither deterministic nor verifiable.

What is different with this architecture is that deterministic and verifiable execution in hardware enclaves replaces the need to trust a human operator. You can compile the code, check the hash, and verify the attestation. The enclave runs exactly what it says it runs, nothing more.

This moment feels similar to the invention of Bitcoin. We had blockchains and proof of work, but until satoshi combined them, there was no working distributed ledger that eliminated the need to trust a central actor or any participant. The breakthrough came from assembling the parts into a whole system that worked.

The same is true here. Enclaves, encryption, and packet mixers have existed for years. Combined, they finally provide sufficient privacy guarantees for network communication, removing the need to trust any actor.

The privacy theater era is over.

- Andrew