104 MACWORLD OCTOBER 2019
WORKINGMACT
he fundamental features you
want in any VPN service are an
easy-to-use desktop application,
privacy protection, and speedy
connections. The latter two are harder to
determine. In the case of privacy, you have
to trust that your VPN is doing what it says
its doing. Speeds depend on your
location, equipment, and ISP.
Nevertheless, we do the best we can to
make informed decisions, and when it
comes to Hide.me VPN on Mac you get
almost everything you need.
HIDE.ME: SECURITY,
SOFTWARE, SERVERS,
AND SPEED
Hide.me by default on Mac uses
OpenVPN, but you can also specify IKEv2,
SoftEther, and SSTP protocols. For data
encryption on OpenVPN, Hide.me uses
DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384; data
authentication is over HMA SHA-256, and
the handshake uses RSA 8192-bit. If you
opt for IKEv2, Hide.me uses AES-
CBC-256 for data encryption, HMAC
SHA-512 for data authentication, andHide.me: Serviceable speeds
and simple to use
Hide.me is easy to use and has the right privacy promises, but we didn’t find
the speeds were as good as experienced on Windows.
BY IAN PAULIMAGE: HIDE.ME