How to reliably bind NymVPN to qBittorrent or other BitTorrent clients?

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Pretty self-explanatory. I tried to go the usual “select your VPN’s network interface” route, but what confused me is that NymVPN creates tun0 and tun1 network interfaces. Tun1 was the one that worked, and I selected it. It worked as expected. However, when I looked into why there are two interfaces to begin with, I discovered that they make up a TunTun mode for managing 2-hop communication and figured that using tun1 directly could be wrong. So I’d like some clarity on that: Is it OK to use tun1 for torrenting? Does it negatively affect anything - for example, breaking proper onion routing with traffic not being re-encrypted properly for one node? And what is the proper way to bind NymVPN to torrenting applications such as qBittorrent so that, if I disconnect, their traffic is cut off before it can leak?

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Would also be curious to hear more on this! There’s still a lot of torrenting going on (of Linux ISOs), so this would be something it’d be very useful to have working smoothly

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I tried the proxy and, although it kind of worked, it performed poorly and behaved oddly with IP addresses. I think the best solution would be to create an additional separate, for example, “nym” network interface that gives access only to the NymVPN tunnel. That would be incredibly useful (especially until a proper kill switch/lockdown mode is available) for BitTorrent and beyond, where leak prevention is critical.

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The reason proxy worked poorly is because it uses the 5 hop mixnet mode, so there is higher latency and lower speeds - not ideal for big downloads. There’s already a killswitch and using tun1 should be fine. Let me also get some more information regarding this from our devs. Sorry to keep you waiting!

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Hi @Numbless, adding a few new notes regarding your request below:

  • tun1 is exit server only - so routing via that interface means you’ll essentially be using a 1-hop VPN
  • The reason tun0 doesn’t work is because it’s the entry-only
  • Routing will do the right thing, so leaving any network interface to “any” would be the best idea
  • Your suggestion about adding a 3rd tunnel device sounds great! The reason we haven’t implemented it is because it can’t be implemented on iOS and Android builds, but we might conisder it in the future.
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