Private Internet Access


Private Internet Access is an open source personal virtual private network service. It supports multiple VPN technologies such as PPTP, L2TP/IPsec, SOCKS5, WireGuard and OpenVPN. In 2018, former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpelès was named chief technology officer of PIA's parent company, London Trust Media.
In November 2019, Private Internet Access was acquired by Kape Technologies.

Company

The CEO of Private Internet Access is Ted Kim. The company was founded by the American-born Andrew Lee, who has been named the official successor to the throne of the House of Yi, the ruling former house of the Joseon dynasty. Lee, who dropped out of college before graduating, started his own online business which eventually became Private Internet Access. London Trust Media also owns the Freenode IRC network.
On November 18, 2019, Private Internet Access announced that it would be merged into Kape Technologies, which operates two competing VPN services, Cyberghost and Zenmate. Some users objected to the acquisition, as Kape previously developed browser toolbars bundled with potentially unwanted programs.

Technical info

PIA offers several features, including DNS leak protection and IPv6 leak protection. It includes a connection kill switch to prevent traffic going elsewhere when VPN gets disconnected. It is possible to access services via UDP and TCP. PIA offers also unlimited bandwidth and Port forwarding. They operate VPN gateways in 54 regions across 33 countries.

Encryption

Private Internet Access supports the AES specifications, SHA1 and SHA256 authentication, and RSA or elliptic curve cryptography handshakes; however, the default settings are AES-128, SHA1, RSA-2048.