this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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I definitely agree with some of this like avoiding EU and NATO but Mullvad is kinda the best of bad options and theyve been audited and shown to not log. If you know of a better alternative pls share it id love to get a better one. But if your advovating to not use a VPN thats a bit self defeatist. And different encryption methods are definitely more resistant to quantum computers cracking them. Are they magic and perfect? Of course not but theyre a lot harder to crack then the more basic encryption some people still use. Your basically stalling the stronger encryption you use the longer you have til those data packets get decrypted. The goal being to push that date so far to the future it doesnt matter cuz your dead.
I think your view is a bit warped too. Capitalism definitely works to spy on people but one thing capitalism will always do is reserve certain privledges for people with money. One of those is privacy. Its elitism at its most pure. Dont want the government spying on you? Pay a premium.
Also the open encryption standards are exactly how you can be secure in a service like this. The company uses open source standards so we know there arent any backdoors. You can even set it up to use open source apps through openvpn when you set the connection up. So even in a case where the VPN is logging your traffic all theyd see is your IP, and the IP of whatever your connecting to. The actual traffic would still be encrypted. So even if you dont trust the audits that say they dont log its worth having.
Would this traffic be encrypted just because a website is https or do you have to do something else to encrypt it?
Https is encrypted but it uses TLS which is a method thats pretty crackable with quantum computers as far as im aware. Its main upside isnt even really encryption of your data tho. Because the traffics encrypted it cant be injected with malicious or otherwise stuff. Like unencrypted http traffic can be altered easily and an ISP could insert ads into websites, or malicious actors could alter the website your viewing to redirect you somewhere else etc. So https is very important for that reason. The encryption is nice too but like i said it wont be secure for much longer so theyll have to update it soon to another protocol.
No. Current TLS ciphers and key exchanges, are EXTREMELY FAR from "pretty crackable" with anything, quantum or otherwise, especially when considering the lifetime of the keys are so short. The only entities we can reasonably foresee as capable of performing any kind of quantum cracking in the future are going to be global superpowers (arguably only the US and China).
But the keys to all TLS transactions are based in root CAs, and nearly all of those are subject to US/western intelligence jurisdiction. There's no need for the state to crack RSA to compromise TLS. Look into how chain of trust works.
MITM has been commercialized, it's basically what Cloudflare does. If a host is behind CF your connection is only encrypted to CF, which then decrypts and re-encrypts the connection from itself to the host. Cloudflare is busy swallowing up the internet, so it's not just state-level attacks that can openly compromise TLS with zero cracking required. VPNs can't protect you from this, either.
I'm sure you have good intentions, but you shouldn't be making statements like this.
Thanks for explaining that.