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

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.

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.

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, allowing it to bypass 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.

Shadowsocks

A lightweight proxy protocol that encrypts traffic and disguises it to resemble ordinary TLS connections.

Algeneva

Developed by Lantern

Lantern’s own censorship-resistant protocol, designed to mimic common traffic patterns while maintaining flexibility for rapid circumvention updates.

VLess

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

ShadowTLS

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

TUIC

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

VMess

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

Hysteria 2

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

Hysteria

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

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.

WireGuard

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

SSH Tunneling

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

Trojan

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

Amnezia WireGuard

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

WATER

WATER is a WebAssembly (WASM)-based framework that allows censorship circumvention tools to dynamically load new WASM transports at runtime. This allows transports to be written in any WASM-compatible programming language and to be dynamically loaded without application updates.

NaïveProxy

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

QUIC

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

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.

Connect freely. Help others do the same.

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

Start Using Lantern

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 globally grew by over 300%.

Live Embed

Unbounded is a secure, optional feature in Lantern, and also available as a standalone browser extension, that lets you share your connection with people facing internet censorship. When you turn it on, your device becomes a secure “digital bridge,” helping others access the open internet.

Unbounded strengthens Lantern’s network by increasing the diversity and unpredictability of IP addresses, making censorship harder to enforce.

It’s part of our mission to make free and open access to the internet available to everyone, everywhere.

Learn more at unbounded.lantern.io →

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.