Surfshark's New Protocol Achieves Record Speeds in Consumer VPNs
Surfshark has revolutionized the consumer VPN industry with 'Dausos', a fully post-quantum secure proprietary protocol. It provides dedicated data tunnels per user, improving connection speeds by up to 30% while fortifying privacy and security against future quantum threats.
📋 Article Processing Timeline
- 📰 Published: April 14, 2026 at 16:30
- 🔍 Collected: April 14, 2026 at 08:01
- 🤖 AI Analyzed: April 19, 2026 at 19:12 (131h 10m after Collected)
The fully post-quantum secure Surfshark Dausos achieves up to a 30% speed increase compared to other industry standard protocols.
Surfshark, a leading VPN provider, is revolutionizing the consumer VPN industry with the announcement of its proprietary VPN protocol, 'Dausos'. While traditional VPNs consolidate all user traffic into a single digital tunnel (TUN network interface), Dausos is the first protocol designed to provide each user with a dedicated, private data tunnel. This achieves up to a 30% increase in speed compared to the fastest VPN protocols currently available, while simultaneously enhancing security and privacy.
Karolis Kaciulis, Lead System Engineer at Surfshark, explains: "With this new protocol, Surfshark improves three critical elements essential for VPN users. Dausos achieves a 30% communication speed increase over existing top-speed protocols, strengthens security through fully quantum-secure encryption, and guarantees smooth, uninterrupted connections by automatically configuring dedicated tunnels for data traffic."
The Uniqueness of Surfshark Dausos
The innovation of Dausos lies in its ability to dynamically adapt to network conditions and device capabilities by intelligently distributing user data packets and providing a dedicated tunnel for each user session. This allows for performance optimization tailored to a user's specific network configuration.
Kaciulis explains, "One of the key security features of this protocol is the isolation of user data traffic. While the risk of exposure between traffic in modern VPNs is extremely low, our proprietary protocol design implements further measures to ensure a clean, private, and secure path for each user's data. Furthermore, the unique design of this protocol avoids unnecessary and redundant checking of data packets, which not only improves connection performance but also eliminates even the theoretical possibility of mutual interference between data packets."
Complete Post-Quantum Security
While improving VPN performance was important, the engineering team placed heavy emphasis on further strengthening user security and achieving future-proofing for the quantum era.
Kaciulis states, "To maximize the security of the protocol, we have introduced numerous steps never before seen in VPN protocols. For instance, within this protocol, Surfshark built its own self-signed root certificate authority issuance system using the ML-DSA signature scheme, a new standard for post-quantum security in verifying and signing communication channels. A root certificate is a digital file used by a device to verify whether the websites, software, and connections a user utilizes are genuine. As the world rapidly advances toward the post-quantum era, providers will soon be forced to adopt post-quantum secure certificate schemes. We wanted to be at the forefront of this and adopt the technology as early as possible. We believed introducing our own proprietary protocol was the best way to accomplish this."
Karolis Kaciulis, Lead System Engineer at Surfshark, continues:
Dausos also uses the hybrid post-quantum secure key exchange ML-KEM*X25519 (X25519MLKEM768). This combines the trusted modern standard (X25519) with cutting-edge, NIST-approved defenses (ML-KEM) to realize a secure connection. By adopting this hybrid approach, Surfshark ensures that data is reliably protected not only from today's hackers but also from the quantum computers of tomorrow.
Security Surpassing Current Standards
Surfshark's new protocol also employs session control with post-compromise security. With every initiation of a new session and re-keying, the Dausos protocol generates a new key pair that has absolutely no relation to previous sessions, avoiding key repetition. Therefore, if one key is compromised...
Surfshark, a leading VPN provider, is revolutionizing the consumer VPN industry with the announcement of its proprietary VPN protocol, 'Dausos'. While traditional VPNs consolidate all user traffic into a single digital tunnel (TUN network interface), Dausos is the first protocol designed to provide each user with a dedicated, private data tunnel. This achieves up to a 30% increase in speed compared to the fastest VPN protocols currently available, while simultaneously enhancing security and privacy.
Karolis Kaciulis, Lead System Engineer at Surfshark, explains: "With this new protocol, Surfshark improves three critical elements essential for VPN users. Dausos achieves a 30% communication speed increase over existing top-speed protocols, strengthens security through fully quantum-secure encryption, and guarantees smooth, uninterrupted connections by automatically configuring dedicated tunnels for data traffic."
The Uniqueness of Surfshark Dausos
The innovation of Dausos lies in its ability to dynamically adapt to network conditions and device capabilities by intelligently distributing user data packets and providing a dedicated tunnel for each user session. This allows for performance optimization tailored to a user's specific network configuration.
Kaciulis explains, "One of the key security features of this protocol is the isolation of user data traffic. While the risk of exposure between traffic in modern VPNs is extremely low, our proprietary protocol design implements further measures to ensure a clean, private, and secure path for each user's data. Furthermore, the unique design of this protocol avoids unnecessary and redundant checking of data packets, which not only improves connection performance but also eliminates even the theoretical possibility of mutual interference between data packets."
Complete Post-Quantum Security
While improving VPN performance was important, the engineering team placed heavy emphasis on further strengthening user security and achieving future-proofing for the quantum era.
Kaciulis states, "To maximize the security of the protocol, we have introduced numerous steps never before seen in VPN protocols. For instance, within this protocol, Surfshark built its own self-signed root certificate authority issuance system using the ML-DSA signature scheme, a new standard for post-quantum security in verifying and signing communication channels. A root certificate is a digital file used by a device to verify whether the websites, software, and connections a user utilizes are genuine. As the world rapidly advances toward the post-quantum era, providers will soon be forced to adopt post-quantum secure certificate schemes. We wanted to be at the forefront of this and adopt the technology as early as possible. We believed introducing our own proprietary protocol was the best way to accomplish this."
Karolis Kaciulis, Lead System Engineer at Surfshark, continues:
Dausos also uses the hybrid post-quantum secure key exchange ML-KEM*X25519 (X25519MLKEM768). This combines the trusted modern standard (X25519) with cutting-edge, NIST-approved defenses (ML-KEM) to realize a secure connection. By adopting this hybrid approach, Surfshark ensures that data is reliably protected not only from today's hackers but also from the quantum computers of tomorrow.
Security Surpassing Current Standards
Surfshark's new protocol also employs session control with post-compromise security. With every initiation of a new session and re-keying, the Dausos protocol generates a new key pair that has absolutely no relation to previous sessions, avoiding key repetition. Therefore, if one key is compromised...