Technology

59174 readers

2122 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

497

Novel attack against virtually all VPN apps neuters their entire purpose (arstechnica.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

138 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago (2 children)

It's not as vulnerable but it still is.

Interestingly, Android is the only operating system that fully immunizes VPN apps from the attack because it doesn't implement option 121. For all other OSes, there are no complete fixes. When apps run on Linux there’s a setting that minimizes the effects, but even then TunnelVision can be used to exploit a side channel that can be used to de-anonymize destination traffic and perform targeted denial-of-service attacks.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

you're replying to a verbatim quote from the article.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

I was going from this: (emphasis mine)

Interestingly, Android is the only operating system that fully immunizes VPN apps from the attack because it doesn't implement option 121. For all other OSes, there are no complete fixes. When apps run on Linux there’s a setting that minimizes the effects, but even then TunnelVision can be used to exploit a side channel that can be used to de-anonymize destination traffic and perform targeted denial-of-service attacks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Partial context is a bitch.