Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Why Your VPN May Not Be As Secure As It Claims (krebsonsecurity.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

22 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Virtual private networking (VPN) companies market their services as a way to prevent anyone from snooping on your Internet usage. But new research suggests this is a dangerous assumption when connecting to a VPN via an untrusted network, because attackers on the same network could force a target’s traffic off of the protection provided by their VPN without triggering any alerts to the user.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

You aren't wrong, per se, I think you just don't fully grasp the attack vector. This is related to DHCP option 121, which allows routes to be fed to the client when issuing the ip address required for VPN connectivity. Using this option, they can send you a preferred default route as part of the DHCP response that causes the client to route traffic out of the tunnel without them knowing.

E. It would likely only be select traffic routing out of the tunnel. I could, for example, send you routes so that all traffic destined for Chase Bank ip addresses comes back to me instead of traversing the tunnel. Much harder to detect.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Oh crap! That's concerning as hell. I'm going to try that in my PFSense and test it with ProtonVPN, Tailscale, Wireguard to my UnRaid and NordVPN. See if maybe any of them have a way of hardening that, or at least completely dropping the packages if not.

If no VPN can be hardened for this, is there a chance that Tor or I2P can be used to avoid it instead?

Thank you very much for such a wakeup call.