These servers, by construction, see all your data unencrypted. Moreover, a VPN must hook itself in the OS network subsystem, which will require some non-trivial privileges, so the point is moot.Īssuming that the TunnelBear's application is not malicious, then the VPN, being a VPN, protects data only in transit, between your machine and the VPN exit point, on TunnelBear's servers. All OS have local privilege escalation holes.

However, this is not a reasonable foundation, because no practical OS succeeded at enforcing such an isolation. Theoretically, if you run the code as a non-privileged user, and your operating system ensures perfect isolation against non-privileged local users, then you might recover from running malicious code without reformatting your complete hard drive. If that code is hostile, then you have lost: as soon as you run malicious code on your own machine, that malicious code can more or less hijack your whole machine.

The application which you 'install' to use the VPN service is local code.

Tunnelbear vpn