It has been more than 20 years since the first release of OpenVPN and it has been developed consistently to provide a secure environment for users who care about security and privacy when browsing the web.

The creator of OpenVPN, James Yonan, got the idea to create the software after his personal experience where he had to use an insecure network during a trip. It is written in C language and distributed for public under the open source license which means that everyone has the right to audit the codes whenever they have the time to do so.

Features and Highlights

OpenVPN allows a computer to communicate with other computers through a secure tunnel. The data that goes back and forth in the tunnel is safe from prying eyes because the tunnel is encrypted. OpenVPN utilizes AES 256, which is a secure algorithm that uses a 256-bit key length.

The data will only be decrypted at the VPN server before it is forwarded to the final destination. If the destination sends a response, the VPN server will deliver it through the encrypted tunnel to the computer that you use where it will be decrypted.

The advantage of using OpenVPN, in addition to the encrypted data, is an improved privacy. When you send a request to a website through a VPN tunnel, the website doesn’t know that the request is originally coming from you because the request is delivered by the VPN server that acts as a middleman.

When you install OpenVPN, you will be presented with a list of components which you can choose to include or exclude from the installation, or you can just install everything. Shortly after the installation is done, OpenVPN’s icon shows up in the tray area. If the icon is not visible, it is probably hidden automatically by the system in the overflow menu, so you have to drag it off the menu and drop it somewhere in the tray to make it visible all the time.

You can configure OpenVPN by right-clicking on the tray icon and select Settings. In the Settings window, there are a bunch of options that you can enable or disable according to your need. For example, put a check mark on “Launch on user logon” if you want OpenVPN to run automatically at startup, or change the default language to the one that you are familiar with. In addition to English, the software also supports Italian, Finnish, Koeran, Japanese, French, Spanish, Turkish, Swedish, and a few more.

The other available options lets you adjust the proxy, enable the silent connection, always use the interactive service, change the location where the configuration files are stored, and more.

OpenVPN Free Download for Windows

OpenVPN is a good solution for both privacy and security. While your internet speed will probably get affected, it is a worthy trade-off as long as the speed doesn’t drop too much, especially if you have to remotely access your data from an unsecured network when you travel abroad. You can click the link below to download OpenVPN for Windows: