IVPN announces V2Ray obfuscation on Android

IVPN recently announced that they now support V2Ray obfuscation on their Android client, meaning they now support it on all platforms where they offer a client.

V2Ray masks WireGuard connections as regular HTTPS or HTTP traffic in order to bypass network filters designed to block VPN traffic.

You can choose between V2Ray (VMESS/QUIC), which obfuscates your traffic as encrypted QUIC/TLS, and V2Ray (VMESS/TCP), which obfuscates your traffic as normal web browsing. Both protocols work with WireGuard connections in single hop and multihop.

IVPN also warns of the performance impact of enabling V2Ray:

Obfuscation introduces performance overhead. Beyond the latency of the additional proxy layer, wrapping WireGuard packets inside V2Ray headers increases packet size. This can lead to data fragmentation (MTU issues), resulting in lower throughput and occasional instability compared to a standard connection. We recommend enabling V2Ray only when necessary to bypass censorship.

With more and more countries seeking to censor the internet, obfuscation technologies like V2Ray are more vital than ever.

I’d like to see more development and standardization of other obfuscation technologies like Mullvad’s DAITA to combat the growing threat of AI traffic analysis as well.