Published on: February 10, 2025 Updated 2 times since publishing
SafetyDetectives recently interviewed Aleksandr Litvinenko, founder and CEO of DockOvpn. His journey began in Russia, where he developed a passion for network topologies and routing mechanisms. After studying Economic Cybernetics in Ukraine, he delved deeper into the intricacies of internet protocols and security. His extensive travels across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the USA exposed him to the varying digital landscapes and content restrictions worldwide. This experience inspired him to create a solution that allows users to virtually position themselves anywhere globally while maintaining full privacy and anonymity. In 2019, he developed a lightweight, easy-to-deploy VPN server, which laid the foundation for DockOvpn. By 2022, he established DockOvpn as a company, aiming to offer advanced functionality and premium features to users seeking enhanced internet privacy and security.
Can you tell us about your background and what inspired you to create DockOvpn?
I was born and raised in the southern province of Russia, in a small town near Krasnodar, where I finished high school and journalism courses in 2003. At the age of 16 I traveled to Ukraine to study Economic Cybernetics at the Ukrainian Academy of Banking of National Bank of Ukraine. While studying, I quickly fell in love with computer networks: I spent hours on the campus learning about network topologies, routing mechanisms and OSI layers.
After graduating in 2006, I returned to Russia and began working remotely as a freelance software engineer. At that time I landed my first remote job with a US-based company. The house we were living in didn’t have a phone land line, so I had to use the EDGE/EGPRS modem of my Sony Ericsson T230 mobile phone. There was a lot of fun and challenges as I often had to input modem instructions manually to update firmware or squeeze out more bandwidth from my mobile internet. Despite all the funny challenges I had with EDGE/EGPRS, the connection speed was terrible and SVN checkouts and commits were taking hours, which led me into thinking about having ADSL, but as I’ve already mentioned I didn’t have a phone land line, which was a prerequisite. Having this phone cable became my idea-fix and I began saving money and negotiating the project with the telecom company.
Looking back at those activities it resembled The Hummingbird Project (2018 movie): negotiating with the phone company, planning the excavation works with the construction workers, explaining things to my neighbors who were totally flabbergasted seeing construction workers digging a trench through lawns and flowerbeds in the front of their houses. When I think about it, I feel nostalgia and it makes me smile. Eventually, I got what I wanted – a fast and reliable ADSL internet. It allowed me to work harder, get better remote opportunities and save more money.
In 2009 I moved to Moscow where I worked as a Senior and Lead engineer in several positions. As a person who’s passionate about internet protocols, I several times implemented binary communication protocols between client and server.
In 2015 I moved to Europe, where I kept honing my knowledge and skills. I traveled all over Europe, Asia, Africa and USA and noted that different countries have different content available on digital streaming platforms, different prices on the same goods, …etc.
I was wondering if it was possible to virtually place my digital avatar anywhere in the world while maintaining full privacy and anonymity. All the existing solutions didn’t satisfy my strict requirements, so I decided to develop my own lightweight, easy to deploy and use VPN server. I began my work on the project in 2019 and by the mid of the year I had a minimalistic, fully functional dockerized server, which anyone could easily deploy on any device capable of running Docker.
The project quickly grew in popularity, by now it has almost 1300 stars on GitHub and keeps growing. The project was used by different kinds of users: from people seeking internet privacy to companies wanting to protect their internal resources and organize remote access to their employees. I got tons of feedback and feature requests which led me into thinking about starting a company to offer advanced functionality and premium features for profit. I started the DockOvpn company in 2022 and began fulfilling the ambitious goal of becoming the best computer network company in the world.
What makes DockOvpn different from traditional VPN solutions, and how does it address the challenges of VPN deployment?
I think our main difference is that we’re not focusing on the consumer VPN segment only, our goal is to develop an innovative software defined networks (SDN) controller, which is rather a VPN kit, which allows both individuals and companies alike build their protected networks without hassle and securely connect to them.
We understand that deployment is a crucial part of building these protected networks hence we’re building advanced tools, which include container images, Kubernetes operators, and various Custom Resources for Kubernetes. These tools should make the deployment process of SDN as seamless as possible and the user should be able to start using their new networks within seconds after initial deployment.
DockOvpn is designed for fast, stateless VPN deployment via Docker. How does this approach improve security and performance compared to conventional VPN setups?
Everything is a container these days. Every app, database, and other pieces of software is shipped by most vendors as a container image. By shipping our software as a container image we also add an extra layer of security and resilience as, firstly, Docker and Kubernetes have embedded mechanisms that ensure app’s stability and resilience, for instance, if an app crashes, a new copy is instantiated right off the bat. Secondly, everything that happens in the container, remains in the container: all traces, logs, if any, are purged when the container stops. It’s very hard to get anything out of our containers, we’re currently experimenting with an encrypted in-memory file system, which adds an additional layer of security.
To make an app truly secure and resilient, it should be designed in such a way that it remains stateless for its entire life cycle. If we’re speaking about a distributed network, any node of this network can be stopped, deleted or replaced with a new node and none of these actions affect network performance and safety. The network remains fully functional when there’s at least one node left. We base our security protocol on blockchain: it’s impossible to intercept messages between nodes without changing their signature. If a message’s signature is tempered with, other nodes exclude this compromised node from the message exchange.
As an open-source solution, DockOvpn allows for transparency and community contributions. What are the biggest advantages and challenges of maintaining an open-source VPN project?
The biggest advantage of maintaining an open-source VPN project is that we constantly get reviews and contributions from cybersecurity experts from all over the world. This makes it impossible to overlook something important like a security breach or bug. We’re engaged with the open-source community and get insights and ideas from it. It poses some challenges too. One of which is that we have to persistently devote time and efforts to engage with the community.
Secondly, for us it’s not always possible to implement all the features community members want, even when their prepared carefully crafted merge-requests. Some of the features we reserve for premium products, some users might feel resentful about this, but we’re a for-profit company after all. Sometimes community suggestions don’t go along with our agenda and we have to reject some contributions. The other thing is that as we aim to stay open-source it creates some risks of our intellectual property being stolen from us or copied. In my opinion a possible solution to this situation would be a better engagement with the community to ensure constant growth of adopters. Sure thing, competitors could copy the code, but they can’t copy the community.
Additionally, we plan to have a balanced separation between core open-source products and some closed-source bits of secret souse (infrastructure solutions, integrations with 3rd party providers), which nicely integrates with their open-source counterpart.
Many businesses and individual users are concerned about VPN security and trust. What steps does DockOvpn take to ensure privacy and data protection?
Our strategy is to provide the best possible privacy and safety. To achieve this goal we made our core products open-source and give customers a choice to deploy and run these projects themselves on their infrastructure. We even provide tolls that ease the deployment, running and monitoring process. We also aim to provide code sources of our closed-source products to our paying customers AKA business-source model. Additionally, we give consultations to our clients regarding privacy best practices.
What’s next for DockOvpn? Are there any upcoming features or enhancements that users should look forward to?
We are on a constant lookout for new features that will make our existing users happier or let us onboard new users and customers. First of all, we aim to release client applications for all platforms (iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, Linux), which nicely integrate with our infrastructure solutions and core products. Secondly, we aim to double down on infrastructure solutions emphasizing on the self-hosting paradigm.