Guardian Firewall Blog

The Role of a Kill Switch in Preventing DNS Leaks

Louis Adebajo — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When we talk about VPN security, most people think about encryption and hiding their IP address. But there’s another critical element that often goes overlooked: DNS leaks. These leaks can quietly reveal what websites you visit, sometimes even when you are using a VPN.

One of the most recommended features to avoid DNS leaks is a Kill Switch. To understand the importance of a Kill Switch, it is essential to understand what a DNS leak is and why it’s a potential security risk.

VPN Encryption and Transport Protocols

Louis Adebajo — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) offer private browsing by encrypting your internet traffic and routing it through secure servers. But behind every VPN connection lies a crucial component: the transport protocol. These protocols determine how encrypted data travels across networks, influencing speed, reliability, and security. Hence, choosing the right one can significantly impact your overall internet experience. In this post, we’ll break down how VPN encryption works and explore the different VPN transport protocols, highlighting their strengths and ideal use cases.

The Role of VPNs in Remote Work Security

Louis Adebajo — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Remote work has transformed how we connect and collaborate. However, it has also introduced new vulnerabilities through public networks. Whether you are working from a cafe, traveling, or home, your data is constantly exposed to trackers, hackers, and surveillance. Hence, making use of a VPN is essential.

VPNs address this vulnerability by encrypting internet traffic, creating secure tunnels between the user and company servers. By masking a user’s IP address and routing traffic through a remote server, VPNs provide anonymity. This prevents sensitive information from getting exposed to hackers, third-party trackers or even your ISP.

Guardian App Now Available On AndroidTV and Chromebook

Louis Adebajo — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We are thrilled to announce that Guardian Firewall is fully available on Android TV and ChromeOS. As part of our commitment to delivering comprehensive user privacy and providing seamless, secure internet access across your digital life, we are expanding our reach to bring Guardian’s trusted protection to additional platforms.

Whether you are streaming on the big screen or working from a lightweight ChromeOS device, Guardian now provides the same robust protection and simple design that users have come to trust on iOS, macOS, Windows, and Android platforms. Protect your privacy online with Guardian today.

Independent Security Audit 2025 Report

Valentz Nicolas — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’re pleased to announce the successful completion of our 2025 security audit with Assured.se. This rigorous review marks our second consecutive year of thoroughly testing every aspect of our service to demonstrate our dedication to security, while also reaffirming our commitment to providing you with the most transparent and secure service as possible.

This year’s report shows that we successfully prevented any regressions, and also highlights Assured’s comprehensive dedication to working with their customers to secure every component of their services. This is by design and is the result of a deliberate, methodical process designed to ensure that every update, new feature, or enhancement is seamlessly integrated without compromising the stability or performance of the existing system. It speaks to a deep respect for the reliability our users depend on.

Guardian Firewall for Windows (beta)

Constantin Jacob — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

While it has been a long time in the works, our team is really excited to announce that Guardian Firewall for Windows is here! Our team has embarked on the adventure to fully support Windows and the time has finally come for us to publicly announce that we have started a public beta test phase for our native Windows app!

Downloads are available for

ARM64 Intel (x64)

This project started a few years ago during our partnership with Brave in order to offer the Firewall + VPN service to their Windows desktop customers as well. Windows has been shipping with a decent built-in IKEv2 daemon for many years at this point, and we’re very happy to be able to leverage it in the first iteration of our desktop application as well. This is just the beginning with many more features already in the pipeline.

Independent Security Audit Report: Phase Two

Constantin Jacob — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

After working through phase one of the security audit with Assured.se, we are very happy to report that phase two of the audit has been completed. This marks the end of the full audit of our services. We are planning to complete these kinds of audits on a semi-regular basis to ensure that we are providing the most secure service possible while continuing to provide transparency to our customers.

The entire team at Assured has continued to be outstanding to work with and have really dug into every last detail to ensure that nothing remained untouched. Phase two focused on hardening the entire service internally to simulate what would happen given the assumption that our infrastructure had already been breached one way or another, after all nothing is perfectly secure. We wanted to ensure that we could implement damage control measures prior to ever having been breached, which is accurate as far as we know right now.

Mullvad VPN Android DNS Leak Report

Constantin Jacob — Mon, 06 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR; there are bugs in Android that lead to the device leaking DNS requests which may be triggered by certain VPN profile setting combinations. Neither Guardian Connect partners nor the Guardian Firewall for Android app is impacted by these problems as far as we can tell right now.

Thanks to the fine folks at Mullvad publishing this PSA for their customers as well as other developers, we have been made aware of potential security & privacy concerns in the Android OS. We’re hoping that Google will report back very soon with a concrete plan to harden the internal OS APIs to plug these holes for all Android users. We would like to thank the team at Mullvad for shining a bright light onto the issue in all the correct channels to ensure that the privacy of all Android users is improved, not just their own customers.

Independent Security Audit Report: Phase One

Constantin Jacob — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It has been a very long time in the making but we’ve finally done it! Thanks to the efforts of the fine folks at Assured.se, we were finally able to get started on a complete security audit conducted by an unbiased third party. The report published today is the conclusion of phase one of the audit which focused on client/server interactions as well as the complete public API surface of our infrastructure.

Black Friday to Cyber Monday Sale 2022

Constantin Jacob — Thu, 24 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Guardian’s Black Friday sale is back… starting on Thanksgiving this year!
Starting today until Cyber Monday 2022, we are offering three years of Guardian Firewall Pro service for only $299.99 instead of $374.97. That is a savings of 20% for three years of service, or about $75.00.
This offer is available to new customers as well as all of our existing Pro customers. Due to industry standard subscription length limitations we are not able to offer this as an easy upgrade to existing customers.

Black Friday to Cyber Monday Sale

Constantin Jacob — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Guardian’s Black Friday sale is here. Starting today until Cyber Monday 2021, we are offering three years of Guardian Firewall Pro service for only $299.99 instead of $374.97. That is a savings of 20% for three years of service, or about $75.00.
This offer is available to any new customers as well as all of our existing Pro customers. Due to industry standard subscription length limitations we are not able to offer this as an easy upgrade to existing customers.

Guardian for macOS (Beta)

Constantin Jacob — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Today, we are excited to announce Guardian Firewall for macOS as a beta release for our Guardian Pro subscribers. It has been a long road, and we have worked tirelessly to complete a fully native macOS application that feels right at home in your menu bar.

Our first release of Guardian has been laser focused on iOS. We continue to ship major upgrades, fix bugs, and enhance the user experience. We never slowed our pace of shipping industry leading features such as custom curated Blocklists and the Exceptions capability. Exceptions includes a dataset of nearly 15,000 apps with rules curated by us to allow you to customize which apps or websites you might want to exclude from being filtered by Guardian Firewall, resulting in a more seamless experience on your device. While staying busy with Guardian Firewall updates for iOS, we were able to begin our next implementation to expanding our platform support.

Grüezi, Buon Giorno, Bonjour, Bun Di Switzerland 🇨🇭

Constantin Jacob — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The European continent is a region with a reputation for being “difficult to support” in the world of building interconnected networks. From this viewpoint, it is important to understand that there are many different spoken languages in a fairly small geographical area which means having many servers to choose from, and in different regions, is very important. Planning out the many regions and effectively addressing the needs of our Swiss customers presents itself with a unique challenge. After all, there are four official languages, and many local dialects to consider.

Hola España 👋 🇪🇸

Constantin Jacob — Thu, 05 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We, at Guardian, are excited to announce that recently, Barcelona has joined the Guardian Firewall global network of servers. This new region, with plenty of bandwidth available, will serve as our first location, of many, planned for the beautiful Mediterranean area of Southern Europe.

We are excited to continue to expand our diversity and improve user experience for folks globally with the addition of more non-English speaking regions. As life gets back to allowing for safe travel, rest assured you’ll be able to protect your privacy through Europe with more locations to come.

Subscriber Credentials

Constantin Jacob — Sat, 23 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We don’t want to know who you are. We consider user attributable information to be a liability.

This moral foundation defines the core of every technology decision we make at Guardian. Rather than take my word for it, we encourage anyone, willing or interested, to use an intercepting proxy (such as Charles or Burp) to review traffic from our app being sent over the network. We’re going to go on a journey to break down what information is being sent, what it means for you, and how we maintain a high standard of user privacy and security for Guardian subscribers.

tvOS AirDrop Adventures

Kevin Bradley — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Time for another trip down memory lane, into forbidden territory on tvOS. While working on Chimera/Electra jailbreaks for tvOS, I was reminded of something I stumbled across over a year ago. If you hold down the Play/Pause & Volume down buttons on the Siri Remote for different intervals you will either get a stackshot or analytics to run on the device.

These actions appear as follows:

Once analytics is done running it will present you with an alert asking if you want to export the results, as pictured below. If you choose ‘Export’ you will get an instance of SFAirDropSharingViewControllerTV showing up and asking you where you would like to AirDrop the results.

Apple TV showcasing VPN feature via jailbroken tvOS

Kevin Bradley — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

While recently working on a new feature for Guardian Pro users, I had an epiphany moment that I could not pass up taking a moment to explore. The feature would grant the ability to generate extra VPN authentication credentials and share mobileconfig files from the iOS application (Guardian Firewall) to other platforms such as macOS. Of course, it got me thinking, why can’t this work on tvOS? For those of you that don’t know me, I have worked with and on multiple jailbreaks for the Apple TV platform for many years now. For a very long time, one of the most frequently requested features I’ve been asked to research is VPN functionality on tvOS. For no discernable reason, Apple has forbidden developers from providing VPN services to their Apple TV customers. However, those days will be coming to an end soon!