Exit IP fingerprinting between VPN servers
Mullvad users have encountered a fingerprinting issue when switching between VPN servers. This issue allows websites to potentially link user activity across different servers without revealing their identity. Mullvad is working on a solution to prevent this linking by changing how exit IP addresses are assigned.
- ▪The fingerprinting issue affects users who switch from one VPN server to another.
- ▪When users connect to different servers with the same internal tunnel address, they may be assigned similar exit addresses.
- ▪Mullvad recommends logging out and back in to regenerate the WireGuard key when switching servers.
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Record
| Original publisher | Mullvad VPN |
| Canonical URL | https://mullvad.net/en/blog/exit-ip-fingerprinting-between-vpn-servers |
| Publication time | Mon, 25 May 2026 17:44:51 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-25T18:07:39.397Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-25T18:07:39.397Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 3TJDvGXcnPv9 · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Exit IP fingerprinting between VPN servers May 20, 2026 News Privacy On Friday the 15th of May, we became aware of a fingerprinting issue affecting Mullvad users. When a user switches from one VPN server to another, this sometimes makes it possible for services such as websites to confidently guess that the same user that connected from the new VPN server is the one that connected from the previous VPN server. This does not reveal the identity of the user. It can however reveal the fact that someone that previously connected from one VPN server has now connected from another VPN server. Fingerprinting is telling devices apart by looking at properties that make them unique or close to it. Fingerprinting is a problem in many domains.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Mullvad VPN.
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