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Novel attack against virtually all VPN apps neuters their entire purpose
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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So there are ways.
Common Linux w
Not really, Linux is still vulnerable and there is a mitigation but it opens a side channel attack.
Except sometimes.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Except sometimes
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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True, if you neg a linux dev online enough for two years, you can make your entire infrastructure vulnerable to attack
Wait so the vulnerability exists on macos and iphone even though those are based on bsd (right?)
Edit: and also Windows, forgot about Windows
Hilariously enough, Windows users can use WSL to run a Linux VPN (but only applications running in WSL are safe if I understand the attack right)
Hate to rain on the Linux parade here, but didn't the article say: "There are no ways to prevent such attacks except when the user's VPN runs on Android." and that Linux was just as vulnerable as Windows?
It's not as vulnerable but it still is.
But in the details this attack is not that bad. E.g. NordVPN and I guess also other VPNs use firewall rules to drop traffic on normal network interfaces.
Their side channel is still routing traffic away from the VPN channel. Then they can observe that there is no traffic and guess that the user either didn't make requests in that moment or that he wanted to visit a website in the range covered by the route. They can not spy on the traffic.
Also you can not quickly move into a network and apply this attack, as DHCP leases usually last 1 day or at least 1 hour. Only when they expire you can apply the attack (or you force the user to drop from the network, which is easy if they are using WPA2, but only possible by blocking the wifi signal if they are using WPA3)
It is a serious issue and should be mitigated, but not as huge as news articles make it.
I saw that but unfortunately it doesn't detail how to set it up persistently on every boot. And I also haven't seen anybody using this method, probably because of the lack of tooling around it. For example afaik the official Mullvad client on linux just uses a firewall.
you're replying to a verbatim quote from the article.
I was going from this: (emphasis mine)
Partial context is a bitch.
This is the way