Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
view the rest of the comments
What is it that you're doing that is still not using some form of authenticated encryption? Almost everything is https, ssh, almost all mailservers have tls support, irc does have tls support.. What's left that needs to be encrypted by a VPN?
The addresses themselves that you're connecting to as one example. Also often DNS.
Strictly speaking, Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) paired with DNS Over HTTPS (DOH) can resolve this. But not many people have their systems setup this way, so it is still pretty niche.
That also doesn't resolve the carrier seeing which IPs you're connecting to, which can often be traced back to services or sites.
What's the threat model here? I can think of no DNS shennanigans that would not be detectable through the authentication mechainsms in TLS (chain-of-trust). Not having to trust network infrastructure is exactly what TLS is for.
Most DNS requests are clear text, which is why DOH was introduced to secure it such that no one can snoop on you looking up
something-embarrassing.com
. Also, the initial request, before you get the SSL certificate from the web server, you must tell the server at169.169.169.169
that you’re looking for the certificate forsomething-embarrassing.com
before they can get you the correct certificate. This is why ECH was introduced. Neither of which have became mainstream yet, and so there are still some basic leakage going on.