What Is Proton VPN Secure Core?

This page is part of the Proton VPN FAQ Hub.

How does Proton VPN Secure Core work?

Proton VPN Secure Core routes your connection through two servers rather than one. You connect first to a Secure Core server in Switzerland, Iceland or Sweden, the traffic then crosses Proton’s own network to the exit server in whichever country you selected, and only then reaches the open internet. A standard VPN connection has one hop and one server that knows both who you are and where you are going. Secure Core splits that knowledge in half.

The three entry countries were chosen for their privacy legislation and their distance from the more aggressive intelligence-sharing arrangements. Proton hardens the sites physically too: the Icelandic servers sit on a former military base and the Swedish ones in an underground data centre. Whether concrete matters more than jurisdiction is arguable, but the legal position of Switzerland, Iceland and Sweden is the substantive part of the claim.

What threat does it actually defend against?

The specific scenario is a compromised or hostile exit server. If somebody is monitoring the network around a VPN server in a high-risk country, or has taken the hardware, they can attempt timing and correlation attacks: watch what goes in, watch what comes out, match the two. With a single hop, what goes in is you. With Secure Core, what goes in is a Proton server in Switzerland, and the trail stops there.

This matters if your exit country is one you have reason to distrust, or if you are operating from somewhere with broad interception powers. It matters considerably less if you are connecting from a quiet flat in Manchester to a Dutch server to watch football. Be honest about which of those describes you, because the speed penalty is not trivial.

How much speed do you lose?

Proton does not publish a single figure for how much Proton VPN slows a connection, and any site quoting you one precise percentage is guessing. The mechanism is simple enough: your packets travel a longer physical route through an extra machine, so latency rises and throughput falls. A drop of roughly a third to a half of your usual speed is common, with the worst results when entry and exit sit far apart, Iceland into Singapore being the sort of route that hurts.

For browsing, email, messaging and general work this is barely noticeable. For 4K streaming, large downloads or anything latency-sensitive it is painful, and gaming over Secure Core is not worth attempting. The sensible pattern is to leave it off by default and switch it on for the sessions that warrant it.

Who actually needs Secure Core?

Most subscribers do not, and Proton is reasonably candid that Proton VPN Secure Core is built for raised threat models rather than left on as a default. The people it was built for have a specific reason to assume somebody is interested in their traffic.

If you are not on that list, the feature is still there when you want it, which is the point. Turning it on for an hour costs nothing but throughput, and there is no penalty for using it occasionally rather than permanently.

• Journalists and their sources working in or through countries with broad surveillance powers
• Activists, researchers and NGO staff whose exit country is actively hostile
• Anyone needing an IP address in a jurisdiction they would rather not route their identity through
• People handling material where a successful correlation attack would carry real consequences
• Anybody who simply prefers the smaller attack surface and can live with the speed cost

How do you switch it on?

Secure Core appears as a toggle in the country list of the desktop and mobile apps. Turn it on and the available server list narrows, because not every exit country has a Secure Core route into it, and some apps let you choose which of the three entry countries to use. If the country you wanted vanishes when you enable the toggle, that route is simply not offered.

Choosing Proton VPN Plus with Secure Core also brings NetShield, Tor over VPN and P2P support in the same subscription, which is the practical reason most people end up on that plan rather than the free tier. Subscriptions bought through BAIZAAR include the full feature set, Secure Core amongst them.

What Secure Core does not do

It does not make you anonymous, and you can still be tracked using Proton VPN in all the usual ways. Log into an account that knows your name and everything after that is attributed to you regardless of how many hops your packets took. It does nothing about browser fingerprinting, cookies, malware already on your machine, or the metadata your own behaviour generates. Multi-hop routing solves a network-level problem and only that problem.

It is also no substitute for Tor. Tor’s protection comes from spreading trust across independently operated relays, whereas both Secure Core hops belong to Proton. That is a reasonable trade if you trust Proton and want usable speeds, but if your threat model genuinely requires that no single organisation can observe both ends, use Tor Browser. Proton’s separate Tor over VPN feature exists for precisely that combination.

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