Change the world while you surf

In 2010, former Limewire lead engineer Adam Fisk observed that many of the networking techniques used for P2P filesharing could be applied to help people living under internet censorship, and he founded the project that would eventually become Lantern. The first version of Lantern was released shortly thereafter as open source software. Early development was supported by the Open Technology Fund, a U.S. nonprofit which has also backed The Tor Project and Signal, among other internet freedom technologies.

By 2016, Lantern had amassed over two million monthly active users in China. Many users discovered that Lantern was particularly effective for bypassing China's "Great Firewall" internet censorship regime. Lantern had become so popular with local internet freedom activists that they referred to it by a nickname – 蓝灯, meaning "Blue Light."

Over the years, the team at Lantern pioneered a number of techniques now considered fundamental to internet censorship circumvention, including domain fronting and TLS Masquerade. Lantern engineers have co-authored research with contributors from the University of California, Berkeley and Psiphon (Citizen Lab), among other institutions.

Lantern has provided critical internet access during many of the most perilous human rights crises of the decade. In 2022, amid widespread internet disruptions by the Iranian government in response to the “Women, Life, Freedom” protest movement, Lantern provided 13% of the total available internet bandwidth in Iran.

In 2026, Lantern launched Lantern VPN – the product you're reading about right now. Lantern VPN provides Western users with the same privacy and security properties that activists in high-risk circumstances have relied on for over a decade – and, via its peer-to-peer volunteer computing technology known as Action Mode, makes it possible for anyone to join the fight against digital repression around the world.

When you can be jailed by the government for using a VPN, privacy isn’t just a principle – it’s a requirement. Lantern VPN does not log or otherwise generate records of user activity. Our regularly published transparency report makes public all of our responses to legally binding requests from international law enforcement. And Lantern is built atop an open source technology stack that’s continuously audited by a number of independent organizations.

Lantern is not funded by venture capital and never will be. The technology which powers Lantern is maintained by Brave New Software, a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Our mission is not to maximize financial returns for investors – it’s to protect our users and to preserve access to the internet as a fundamental human right.

All VPNs work the same way: your internet requests are sent from your computer to a server on the internet, and that server makes the requests on your behalf, hiding your true identity.

But if that server cannot be trusted, then you haven’t meaningfully enhanced your privacy – you’ve simply shifted the privacy problem from your ISP to your VPN provider. Unfortunately, many VPN providers secretly exploit this to sell your data and browsing history – thus defeating the purpose of using a VPN in the first place.

Lantern VPN’s self-hosting feature allows you to bring your own server, giving you maximum control over the most privacy-critical component of the VPN.

It’s easy to enable. Our one-click setup automatically deploys and links a private server using one of the popular cloud VPS providers (currently supporting Digital Ocean, with more providers coming soon). For power users, self-hosting can also be configured manually: just install Lantern Server Manager on the hardware of your choice, and link it with your Lantern VPN client by scanning a QR code.

Many VPNs provide a split tunneling feature which allows users to selectively exclude certain traffic from the VPN tunnel. This gives you “the best of both worlds”: sensitive requests are tunneled for privacy, while less sensitive requests can be egressed directly to maximize speed. Lantern VPN includes a split tunneling feature for this purpose.

But for some users, configuring routing rules for split tunneling can be confusing and overwhelming. Smart Routing is Lantern’s solution to this problem. It’s a one-click, zero hassle split tunneling configuration with defaults that work well for most people. Performance-critical requests are sent directly from your computer, but requests to unknown or potentially malicious destinations are tunneled over the VPN for your protection. Just like our split tunneling feature, you can enable and disable Smart Routing at any time.

Smart Routing is included free with Lantern VPN.

Lantern’s codebase has been audited by NCC Group – a global cybersecurity and risk mitigation company headquartered in the United Kingdom – as well as Subgraph, an independent security auditor which specializes in critical tools used by activists, journalists, and human rights defenders. The Lantern Android app has received a MASA Level 2 audit from Leviathan Security Group. The findings of our audits are published here.