Powerful Unblocking

Advanced censorship-circumvention

Lantern combines smart routing, open-source protocols, and a distributed network to help you overcome even the most advanced censorship.

Smarter connections, automatically

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Dynamic protocol selection

Lantern draws on a diverse set of censorship-resistant protocols, automatically testing and switching between them to maintain reliable access even when censorship methods change.

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Region-based adaptation

Countries block traffic in different ways. Lantern tailors its circumvention strategy based on where you are, using region-specific rules and protocol preferences to help you connect and stay connected.

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Adaptive routing

Lantern uses a variant of the multi-armed bandit algorithm to learn which protocols and paths work best on your network. Working paths get more traffic. Failing paths get less. A portion always goes to untested routes, so alternatives are ready before they're needed.

More protocols than any other VPN

Core protocols supported by Lantern

Lantern supports more censorship-resistant protocols than any other VPN, allowing it to adapt in real time to some of the world's most aggressive network restrictions. These protocols are designed to make your traffic look ordinary, or completely unrecognizable to filtering systems, bypassing firewalls, DPI (deep packet inspection), and other censorship tools.

After more than a decade helping users stay connected, we know that no single method works everywhere or all the time. That’s why Lantern integrates and maintains such a wide range of proven, open-source protocols, and dynamically selects the best one for your connection as conditions change.

AnyTLS

A TLS proxy protocol designed to mitigate the "TLS in TLS" fingerprinting problem. Uses session multiplexing and configurable padding to make proxy traffic blend in with normal TLS connections, resisting detection by deep packet inspection.

Hysteria 2

A rewrite of Hysteria with improved efficiency and stronger protocol-level evasion, supporting QUIC and advanced shaping techniques for better stealth.

VLess

A stateless, lightweight transport protocol designed to replace VMess, often used with Xray for better obfuscation and faster handshake performance.

Kindling

Developed by Lantern

A bootstrapping library that uses multiple redundant techniques to reliably deliver configuration data through censoring firewalls. Combines domain fronting, proxyless dialing, DNS tunneling, and AMP caching to ensure circumvention tools can get online even when most paths are blocked.

WATER

WebAssembly Transport Executables Runtime - allows rapid deployment of pluggable transports via WebAssembly modules that can be dynamically updated over the network.

Algeneva

Designed to mimic common traffic patterns while maintaining flexibility for rapid circumvention updates.

Proxyless

Lantern’s proxyless integration uses technologies from the Outline team at Google, including DNS over HTTPS, DNS over TLS, TLS record fragmentation, TCP packet splitting, and TCP packet reordering to bypass DNS-based and SNI-based censorship.

Unbounded

Developed by Lantern

Unbounded uses WebRTC to traverse NATs and firewalls to allow anyone to easily contribute their IP address, bandwidth, and computing power to a global crowdsourced network dedicated to keeping users in censored countries online.

Shadowsocks

A lightweight encrypted proxy protocol originally designed to bypass the Great Firewall of China. Widely adopted and continuously maintained by the open-source community.

WireGuard

A general-purpose VPN protocol known for simplicity, speed, and strong encryption. Lantern uses it in combination with other protocols for transport-level privacy.

Tor (Pluggable Transports)

Integrates some of Tor’s pluggable transports to disguise traffic using methods like obfs4 and meek, blending in with common web traffic.

Trojan

Disguises traffic as standard HTTPS by using real TLS certificates, helping it evade detection by appearing identical to typical web traffic.

VMess

Originally designed for the V2Ray project. VMess supports end-to-end encryption, traffic shaping, and routing flexibility.

Hysteria

Uses UDP for transport with built-in congestion control and optional obfuscation, designed for high-speed, high-reliability performance in unstable networks.

ShadowTLS

Hides proxy traffic behind legitimate TLS handshakes, making it indistinguishable from regular HTTPS to defeat active probing and deep packet inspection.

NaïveProxy

Leverages Chromium’s network stack to tunnel traffic through HTTPS in a highly undetectable way.

TUIC

A QUIC-based protocol that prioritizes performance and obfuscation, providing fast and secure communication that's difficult to fingerprint.

Amnezia WireGuard

Wraps WireGuard traffic in an obfuscation layer, enabling stealth transport through DPI-resistant encoding.

SSH Tunneling

A fallback method that uses the SSH protocol to encrypt and route traffic securely. Useful in restrictive but SSH-permissive networks.

QUIC

A foundational transport protocol used under the hood in Hysteria, TUIC, and others to improve speed and reliability.

Connect freely. Help others do the same.

Get started with Lantern's powerful anti-censorship technology.

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Apps and sites people access with Lantern

Access your favorite apps and sites

People use Lantern to reach the tools and platforms they rely on every day. Here are some of the most popular.

ChatGPT

Claude

Gemini

TikTok

Instagram

YouTube

Facebook

Snapchat

Signal

Facetime

Messenger

Discord

Google

Steam

Google Play

Google Scholar

Internet Archive

Wikipedia

+ many more

Access any site

Proven under pressure

Lantern has helped millions stay connected during some of the most significant human rights crises of the decade. Everything we’ve learned from working in high-censorship environments has made Lantern faster, smarter, and more reliable, whether you’re bypassing restrictions or just need a better VPN.

Hong Kong, 2019

During widespread protests, as internet surveillance and content filtering intensified, Lantern provided reliable, uncensored access when traditional tools were disrupted or blocked.

Iran, 2022

During the Women, Life, Freedom protests, Lantern connected millions of users. At the height of the shutdown, we estimate that 13% of all internet traffic in Iran was flowing through Lantern.

Russia, 2022

After the invasion of Ukraine, censorship in Russia spiked. As users sought access to blocked news and platforms, Lantern’s monthly active users in Russia grew by over 300%.

Circumvention FAQ

A protocol is a set of rules that devices use to communicate over the internet. It defines how data is formatted, transmitted, and received, so your messages, videos, and websites load correctly across different networks and systems.

In the context of VPNs and censorship circumvention, protocols also help disguise or reroute your traffic to avoid blocks and surveillance. Different protocols take different approaches; some make your traffic look like regular HTTPS, others use obfuscation or tunneling to slip past firewalls. Using multiple protocols makes it possible to adapt to a wide range of restrictions.

Lantern automatically tests and selects the best-performing protocol based on your region, network conditions, and what’s currently blocked. You don’t have to configure anything.

Because no single technique works everywhere. Censorship is constantly evolving, so Lantern maintains a broad set of tools to stay one step ahead and keep people connected.

Unbounded is a crowdsourced routing project that lets people who volunteer in uncensored regions become part of a network that helps others connect. When you turn it on, your device becomes a digital bridge, allowing someone in a censored country to route their traffic through you securely. This increases the diversity and unpredictability of available IPs, which makes censorship harder to enforce.

Your browser helps facilitate these connections by securely routing traffic through Lantern servers, which act as the final endpoint. That means your IP address is never tied to the content accessed, and no one can see what is being accessed on your end.

Lantern doesn’t rely on a single technique. It supports a wide range of protocols, uses smart routing, and updates automatically to stay ahead of censors. Even if one method is blocked, Lantern can try another in real time.