What's the Protocol Used By Hotspot Shield?

Catapult Hydra is a proprietary protocol developed by AnchorFree and it is used to power Hotspot Shield and the majority of large cybersecurity companies that offer VPN services from within their apps, such as McAfee, BitDefender, Cheetah Mobile and many others.

Many carriers such as Telefonica and KDDI also use Catapult Hydra to provide VPN services and Wi-Fi security to their customers, due to Hydra's superior performance and reliability. It is important to note that the proprietary protocol is focused only on the performance of the VPN data transport, while using standard encryption with perfect forward secrecy.