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Researchers claim to have detected vulnerabilities in VPN clients that went unnoticed -at least publicly- since 1996
(tunnelcrack.mathyvanhoef.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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Technology
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I wish they’d been more specific in the general description; this is a local routing attack that can be applied against clients of public VPN services.
For a moment I was worried about my personal VPN, which is not configured in a way that this abuse could happen.
Traffic leaking has always been a concern when sitting up a VPN or any network infrastructure. Especially when you're dealing with sensitive data. These concerns are old, and not sensational, new traffic leak discovered in local routing configuration of some VPN clients.
The truly paranoid would have a always-on VPN, no traffic may go outside the VPN, defense in depth. A VM that can only talk to the VPN endpoint. You could use qubes to configure something bulletproof, mullvad even has an article explaining how to do this yourself.
Just out of good hygiene I have leak checks in my computing systems. If they succeed it shuts everything down. Like if you open a browser it checks your external facing IP address. Imagine it's pretty common for people.
Very few people have functional leak checking set up; personally, I think it should be a built-in OS level function.
It would be nice. But it's a hard problem to solve. To figure out somebody's intense by running a VPN or having certain IP routing rules.
https://mullvad.net/en/help/qubes-os-4-and-mullvad-vpn/
I do like in this guy day emphasize setting up routing rules so the VPN can only route traffic to VPN endpoints. It's a nice fail safe