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What is the Stealth protocol?

The Stealth protocol is an OpenVPN tunnel masked to look like HTTPS traffic. This protocol is very helpful on restrictive networks.

Some networks can enable tools to more accurately determine the kind of traffic being sent over the network, and this includes detecting VPN tunnels using OpenVPN. Stealth is our way to try and get around this.

The Stealth protocol uses Stunnel, an open-source library, to wrap your regular VPN connection within a layer of SSL encryption. By doing this, the connection ends up looking like any other secure web traffic in the case anyone were to analyze it. To block this traffic would mean blocking all secure web browsing on that network. It also connects on 11 different ports making it fairly versatile when it comes to getting around network VPN blocks. 

Keep in mind though, the extra layer of encryption and decryption that comes with Stealth can impact the VPN performance so internet speeds might slow down. We recommend using Stealth only when you can't use any of the other protocols to connect to the VPN. 

The Stealth protocol can be enabled in the Windows, Mac and Android Windscribe applications by going to Preferences > Connection and setting the Connection Mode to Manual. Then choose Stealth as the Protocol.

Unfortunately, due to restrictions from Apple, the Stealth protocol cannot be implemented on iOS at this time.

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