Popular VPN company, Mullvad VPN, has finished migrating to RAM-only servers, successfully removing all traces of disks being used in their infrastructure.
In case those words are new to you, RAM-only servers mean that after the VPN is turned off, all data is deleted. Provided it works correctly, there are no remnants of activity on any of their disks.
It also means their servers are more reliable, as they’re less prone to breaking, being disrupted by incompatibility issues, or facing hardware concerns. Not only that, but RAM-only servers make the operations faster. Ideally, this means Mullvad VPN will be faster, more secure, and unable to store data after a server turns off. Mullvad VPN is now in line with many of its top competitors that use the advanced security feature.
Note that it doesn’t make logging VPN activity impossible, it just makes it a lot harder and any data that gets logged will only be from your current session. That said, Mullvad VPN has a strict privacy history and no-logs policy.
“Our VPN infrastructure has since been audited with this configuration twice (2023, 2022), and all future audits of our VPN servers will focus solely on RAM-only deployments,” Mullvad says in a blog post. We are continuously striving to strengthen the trustworthiness of all aspects of our service. This is why our VPN apps have been open source since we started over 12 years ago.”
The work was done using Mullvad’s new stboot bootloader. While only two test servers were available at first, all of Mullvad VPN’s servers currently use RAM-only technology.
“All of our VPN servers continue to use our custom and extensively slimmed-down Linux kernel, where we follow the mainline branch of kernel development,” Mullvad explains. “This has allowed us to pull in the latest version so that we can stay up to date with new features and performance improvements, as well as tune and completely remove unnecessary bloat in the kernel.”