Port forwarding solves this problem by routing incoming connections you want through the firewall and directing them to an available (open) port on your computer. This performs a similar job to your router firewall, blocking suspicious incoming connections before they can enter your device through the VPN tunnel.īy default, our firewall also blocks incoming connections that you might want or need. To protect our customers, Proton VPN therefore implements our own firewall on the VPN server. Your router has a built-in firewall, a piece of software that helps protect you from intrusion attempts by monitoring incoming and outgoing internet traffic and blocks access to any ports that have not been earmarked for legitimate use. Because ports are endpoints that connect the internet to your computer, they can be exploited by hackers and other malicious actors. Many ports have a specific function assigned to them: port 443, for example, is used for HTTPS traffic, while port 6889 is used for BitTorrent traffic. These are endpoints designated by your operating system to handle incoming and outgoing connections and are identified by a number. Internet traffic enters and exits your computer through ports. Port forwarding routes incoming connections through the firewall that Proton VPN uses to protect our customers. VPN firewalls without port forwarding also make the entire P2P network less efficient for everyone, an issue that is becoming increasingly important as more and more filesharers use VPNs such as Proton VPN to protect themselves while downloading. This can impact your overall upload speeds.Īs long as other peers sharing the same content are not behind firewalls with no port forwarding, you can still torrent those files, but your download speeds may be slower. However, if that peer is behind their own VPN firewall without port forwarding, you will not be able to initiate a connection or share files with them. Since this is an outgoing connection, our firewall will not block it. Your P2P client will be alerted that an incoming connection has been blocked and will attempt to initiate its own connection back to the peer instead. This is not a problem if the peer trying to initiate a connection is not using a VPN or is using a VPN with port forwarding. It is likely these incoming connections from the internet will be blocked by the firewall we use on our VPN server. When you seed content, other P2P users will attempt to initiate a connection with your P2P client. So the more you seed, the faster you can download content. P2P protocols were designed to encourage sharing by tying download speeds to upload speeds. If you don’t share (seed) your own content with others (your peers), then no content will be available for anyone.

Peer-to-peer file-sharing protocols such as BitTorrent are used to download and upload files using a program called a P2P client. Upgrade Why do I need port forwarding when using P2P? If you are on our free plan, upgrade now to start benefiting from it. Port forwarding is available for every Proton VPN user with a paid plan. It can also help performance on online gaming platforms. Now available for our Windows VPN app, port forwarding is a new feature that dramatically improves download speeds when using peer-to-peer (P2P) software. Following months of hard work by our engineering team, we are excited to announce a feature that you, our passionate and highly engaged community, have been clamoring for: port forwarding.

Openvpn port forwarding