David Miller

I Test VPNs the Way Attackers Do

My name is David Miller. I am a network security engineer and VPN infrastructure specialist based in Austin, Texas, with over 20 years of experience in encryption protocols, traffic analysis, and privacy architecture. I did not come to this field through marketing or product reviews. I came through forensics — learning how networks get compromised, how data gets intercepted, and how easily a "secure" connection can be quietly undermined without the user ever knowing.

That forensic background is what I bring to every piece I write at Trust My IP. When I evaluate a VPN, I am not reading their website copy. I am running packet captures, testing kill switch behavior under simulated drops, auditing their DNS handling, and checking whether their "Zero-Log" policy holds up under actual traffic analysis — not just their word.

What My Work Actually Looks Like

As Senior Privacy & VPN Architect at Trust My IP, my job is to get past the surface layer of every security claim and tell you what is actually happening on the wire. My core areas of focus:

• Encryption Protocol Analysis: Hands-on testing of AES-256-GCM, ChaCha20-Poly1305, and WireGuard implementations — including how each performs under real-world network conditions versus controlled benchmarks.
• VPN Leak Detection: Systematic testing for DNS leaks, IPv6 exposure, WebRTC conflicts, and traffic correlation attacks that most "leak test" tools do not catch.
• Infrastructure Auditing: Verifying RAM-only server claims, reviewing third-party audit reports for what they actually tested (and what they deliberately left out), and evaluating jurisdiction risk under Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, and regional data retention laws.
• ISP Throttling & Deep Packet Inspection: Identifying when your ISP is shaping your traffic and which VPN protocols survive DPI-based blocking in high-censorship environments.
• Privacy Law & Compliance: Translating the real-world impact of GDPR, CCPA, and cross-border data sharing agreements into plain language — so you understand what your VPN provider is legally allowed to hand over, regardless of what their privacy policy says.

Why I Write What I Write

Most VPN content online is affiliate-driven. The "best VPN" list you find on page one of Google was almost certainly written by someone who gets paid when you click and subscribe — not by someone who has actually run a network audit. I have no interest in that model. My goal at Trust My IP is to give you the technical truth, even when that truth is inconvenient for a popular product.

In 2026, your IP address is one of the most revealing data points about you — it can expose your location, your ISP, your browsing patterns, and in some jurisdictions, your identity. Understanding how to actually protect it, not just feel like you are protecting it, is something I take seriously. That is the difference between my guides and most of what you will find elsewhere.

My Standard Before I Publish

I do not publish a guide until I have personally tested the core claim. If I am writing about WireGuard speed, I have benchmarked it. If I am writing about a VPN's no-log policy, I have read the full audit report — not the summary press release. If something I previously recommended changes, I update the article and I say what changed and why. That is the baseline I hold myself to.

Outside the Lab

When I am not running packet captures or going through VPN audit documentation, I am usually somewhere on the trails of the Texas Hill Country, or deep in a hardware project — currently building a self-hosted network monitoring setup that I keep telling myself is almost finished. I have been saying that for eight months. Austin is a good city for people who like to keep building things, and I have never run out of things to build.