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Mullvad VPN: Introducing Defense against AI-guided Traffic Analysis (DAITA) (mullvad.net)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

178 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Even if you have encrypted your traffic with a VPN (or the Tor Network), advanced traffic analysis is a growing threat against your privacy. Therefore, we now introduce DAITA.

Through constant packet sizes, random background traffic and data pattern distortion we are taking the first step in our battle against sophisticated traffic analysis.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

That sounds strange given that Mullvad works fine for torrenting in my personal experience and even up to quite a good speed (it can use the full 200Mbps download speed from my ISP)

Also modern NAT will do deep packet inspection on common well known protocols to automatically adjust the port of your machine listed on any "here I am" protocol messages being sent out from your side to be an actual port on the VPN Router and to have an internal association of that port in the Router with the actual port in your machine so that connections of that port can be sent to your own machine and the actual port in it that are used.

It's only the pure listenner services (such as webservers and e-mail servers) were the port is pre-defined by convention and not a variable one sent out on any "here I am message" that require explicitly configured port-forwarding on the VPN Router side, plus because the port is fixed by convention for each type of service (such as port 25 for SMTP and port 80 for HTTP), off all the clients connected by VPN to that VPN Router at any one time, only 1 will be able to get that specific port.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You need port forwarding to connect on torrents. Your able to torrent because everyone you torrent from has port forwarding enabled. If you want to access more seeders, and more commonly leechers you need port forwarding. This is useful for people using private trackers that want to maintain a ratio.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I can download at the maximum rate my ISP supports and I can seed after downloading (probably only to those clients which my own client has connected to).

However I cannot seed in a brand new session during which I did not download that specific torrent (as I just tested).

I expect this is because, as I explained, the NAT implementation actually tracks which IP addresses your client connected to and through which VPN Router port that went so that subsequent connections from those IPs to that port get sent to the right port in your own machine, but it doesn't support uPNP/NAT-PMP port forwarding so the bitttorrent client cannot configure on that VPN Router a static port-forwarding so that it can listen for connections from any random client.

So if I understand it correctly it totally screws self-hosted seedboxes and if you want to give back to the community you have leave it seeding immediatelly after downloading and it's not going to be seeding anywhere as fast since its limited to peers connected to during the dowload stage.