Tools

Anonymising overlay network built around garlic routing, distinct from Tor in design — used for peer-to-peer anonymous services rather than mainly anonymising exit traffic to the clear web.

Privacy-focused commercial VPN that accepts cash/crypto and assigns an account number instead of requiring an email or identity, with an audited no-logs policy and a scriptable CLI.

mullvad connect

Slack's open-source mesh overlay networking tool combining certificate-based identity with WireGuard-style tunnels — an alternative to Tailscale/ZeroTier for building your own private mesh.

nebula -config config.yml

Long-standing SSL/TLS-based VPN daemon and protocol — still the default self-hosted option on countless routers/appliances even as WireGuard-based tools take over new deployments.

openvpn --config client.ovpn

Jigsaw (Google)'s self-hosted Shadowsocks-based VPN server and client apps, packaged to make running your own private VPN endpoint on a VPS straightforward for non-experts.

Forces an arbitrary dynamically-linked program's TCP connections through a chain of SOCKS/HTTP proxies via LD_PRELOAD — the standard way to route tools that have no built-in proxy support.

proxychains4 curl https://example.com

Lightweight encrypted SOCKS5 proxy protocol originally designed to blend in with normal traffic and evade deep packet inspection/censorship, rather than to anonymise like Tor.

ss-local -s server_ip -p 8388 -k password -m aes-256-gcm -l 1080

Zero-config mesh VPN built on WireGuard — commonly used in security work to build a private, NAT-traversing network between lab/attack boxes without hand-managing keys or port forwards.

tailscale up --ssh

Modern, minimal-codebase VPN protocol/implementation built into the Linux kernel — the underlying tunnel tech behind most current commercial and self-hosted VPN setups.

wg-quick up wg0