How to Bind your VPN to qBittorrent or BiglyBT to Prevent Leaks

Sometimes VPN killswitches may not be enough, as with any software, they can fail; binding your torrent client to the VPN interfaces nullifies this risk and reduces the probability of any leaks to near zero. It’s the ultimate backup to a killswitch, and we recommend it.

Two torrent clients of note support binding very well, qBittorrent and BiglyBT.

The instructions below are for qBittorrent on Mac OS:

First, connect to your VPN and open your terminal app; browse the Application folder on Mac OS –> Utilities –> Terminal.

Run the following command:

ifconfig

Here you will see a list of interfaces on your device; you will see something similar to this:

The VPN interface used here is utun10 – this may be numbered differently on your system.

Note: The utun interface may change if you reboot, reconnect, or install another VPN client.

Now navigate to Preferences –> Advanced –> Network Interface, select the interface from the menu, then click OK and restart the torrent client.

Your binding should now be active.

The instructions below are for BiglyBT on Mac OS:

As we established above, the VPN interface on this device is utun10; browse to preferences –> mode and check “Advanced” to activate the advanced settings.

Then navigate to Connection –> Advanced Network Settings in the submenu.

In the option “Bind to local IP address or interface“, enter: utun10

Scroll down and check the option name “Enforce IP bindings even when interfaces are not available, prevents any connections if none of the specified interfaces are available”

Also, check the sub-option “Pause downloads on loss of binding and resume once binding restored”.

Now click Save.

Remember that if your VPN interface changes during a reboot, protocol change or new software installation, then downloads will stop; you must locate the new VPN interface and re-enter it into the torrent client binding settings.

Test It:

You can download the official Ubuntu torrent and open it in qBittorrent or BiglyBT. The download will only start if the VPN is connected if the binding is set correctly. If you disconnect, the download will stop.

Notes:

The windows command for locating the VPN interface is below:

ipconfig /all

The command in Linux is the same as Mac OS, but in newer distributions, you may need to use the IP command, for example:

ip a