Faster and further reaching — Nord VPN quietly brings its obfuscated servers to its in-house censorship-resistant protocol | Tech Radar

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Faster and further reaching — Nord VPN quietly brings its obfuscated servers to its in-house censorship-resistant protocol

The switch drops Open VPN in favour of Nord Whisper, promising quicker connections and a wider spread of locations for anyone battling a restrictive network

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Nord VPN moved obfuscation from Open VPN to the Nord Whisper protocol

The move promises faster connections and a wider range of locations

The change is already live on i OS, with the rest of the apps set to follow soon

Keeping ahead of network filters is now a permanent job for any provider hoping to rank among the best VPN services, and Nord VPN has just made a change that shows how quickly the ground is shifting.

Tucked away in the release notes of a fresh i OS app update, the provider has revealed that its obfuscated servers no longer run on Open VPN. Instead, they are now powered by Nord Whisper, the censorship-resistant protocol Nord VPN built in-house and launched at the start of 2025.

The reason for the change, according to Nord VPN, is simple: better speed and more places to connect from.

Marijus Briedis, CTO at Nord VPN, also told Tech Radar that Nord Whisper is designed to work just as well, if not better than Open VPN for overcoming restrictive networks. "In many cases, users should see improvements thanks to better speeds and a wider range of available server locations," he added.

The update is rolling out gradually, so not every user will see it straight away. Vriedis confirms that while the change is already live on the i OS VPN app, the team plans to roll it out to Android, Windows, and mac OS within the following weeks.

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Obfuscated servers are a specialty category designed to hide the fact that you are using a VPN at all, letting your traffic slip past firewalls and deep packet inspection on networks that would otherwise block it. For years, connecting to them meant switching your protocol to Open VPN, since obfuscation was tied to Open VPN's TCP and UDP variants.

That is the part Nord VPN has reworked. The obfuscated server category now runs on Nord Whisper under the hood, and this is only the newest step in a busy stretch for the provider.

The biggest benefit for users is speed. Obfuscated Open VPN connections carry extra overhead because the VPN traffic is wrapped in an additional disguising layer, which tends to drag performance down. Nord Whisper was designed from the ground up to blend in with normal web traffic, so shifting obfuscation onto it should ease that penalty and deliver a smoother connection.

The second benefit is reach. Nord VPN's obfuscated server pool has historically been limited to a modest list of countries, far smaller than its full fleet. Moving obfuscation onto Nord Whisper opens the door to a broader set of locations, which is exactly what censored and heavily filtered users need most.

Crucially, none of this comes at the expense of security. Nord Whisper follows the same encryption and privacy standards as Nord VPN's other protocols, so users get the stealth without giving anything up in terms of protection.

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Nord Whisper is Nord VPN's proprietary, censorship-resistant protocol, first launched in January 2025 as a response to the growing sophistication of network filtering around the world.

Nord Whisper uses web tunnel technology to disguise VPN traffic as ordinary internet activity, which makes it far harder for filters and deep packet inspection to single out and block.

The protocol is best suited to networks that actively block VPNs, such as some workplaces, schools, public Wi-Fi, and heavily censored regions. On open, unrestricted networks, faster options like Nord Lynx remain the better everyday pick.

Nord VPN has also signalled where it wants to take the technology next, moving Nord Whisper toward a fully TLS-based design and exploring the QUIC protocol to stay ahead of increasingly capable censorship tools. It is a direction the company frames as "the future" of VPN protocols.

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Monica is a tech journalist with over a decade of experience. She writes about the latest developments in computing, which means anything from computer chips made out of paper to cutting-edge desktop processors.

GPUs are her main area of interest, and nothing thrills her quite like that time every couple of years when new graphics cards hit the market.

She built her first PC nearly 20 years ago, and dozens of builds later, she’s always planning out her next build (or helping her friends with theirs). During her career, Monica has written for many tech-centric outlets, including Digital Trends, Slash Gear, We PC, and Tom’s Hardware.

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