VPN service Mullvad makes its entire infrastructure RAM-only

Mullvad has moved its entire VPN infrastructure to RAM only. With this hard disk-less infrastructure, the service should become ‘more transparent and auditable’. Moreover, the VPN should become more stable and faster.

Vpn service Mullvad writes that it has successfully completed its migration to a full RAM-only infrastructure. Company this already started in 2022. That year and earlier this year, Mullvad had an audit carried out on the diskless infrastructure, but it can now be deployed fully operationally.

The company has created its own bootloader for the new infrastructure, stboot or System Transparency Bootloader. This downloads the operating system from a Mullvad server with every reboot. The OS is 200MB in size. The service also runs on a stripped-down version of the Linux kernel, of which Mullvad follows the mainline development industry to implement updates quickly.

Mullvad mentions several advantages of a hard disk-free environment. One is that stboot is more transparent in what happens on the server. Data is also automatically deleted from servers upon restart. In addition, Mullvad can respond more quickly to outdated packages on the system and there are fewer server components that can break. The company says that logging in RAM is still possible, but that it does not do so and that by going diskless there is less risk of incorrect information accidentally being left behind somewhere.