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VPN use is at an all-time high – but are people safe?
- mikewarot 3y agoI've always assumed that VPN service providers are nation states looking for people trying to avoid the attention of nation states.
- activiation 3y agoThe only VPN I use is one that I host ... I also use Tor though
- wg0 3y agoVPN = Rented proxy? Even running your own VPN means that the destination knows your IP and that IP range is known to be allocated to a particular cloud provider and at any particular time, any cloud provider knows by the second which VM/tenant their allocated IPs are attached to. So who are you hiding from and are you really hidden?
- bradknowles 3y agoMy ISP is well known for using Deep Packet Inspection techniques to look at what you're doing and where, and to shape traffic to sites they want to discourage -- like NetFlix. And they inject their own ads into web pages, which could be a source of malware. It's trivial for large providers to get root certs so that they can MITM any TLS traffic on their network, unless you're using pinned certificates. So, I need to protect myself against my ISP. And their name? AT&T.
- rjh29 3y agoDo you have any proof that AT&T are conducting mass-scale MITM attacks against their users?
- xyst 3y agohttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/20/att-price-on-privacy https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/20/att-pr... It’s even explained on their site: https://cybersecurity.att.com/blogs/security-essentials/what-is-deep-packet-inspection https://cybersecurity.att.com/blogs/security-essentials/what... Justification: to keep you safe!1
- rjh29 3y agoOkay, I concede that they have injected cookies into HTTP sites for tracking purposes, and maybe injected ads. But 8 years later the web landscape has changed, everyone uses TLS by default and we have Certificate Transparency, so this sort of thing can't be done anymore. The most they can do now is spy on your DNS and redirect unresolved domains to some ad-filled page.
- Reisen 3y agoIt's worth considering that spying on DNS is a tremendous privacy leak, much more than "the most they can do" implies. An aware user might configure their system with DoH and use a privacy respecting DNS provider but for many users on a default home connection the ISP is pretty much able to build up a traffic profile of everything you visit and when you visit it. A VPN provider can close this hole too quite easily. Just from DNS, your ISP can: 1. Infer shopping habbits. 2. Infer which communication services you use (flag users hitting signal.org) 3. Infer when you install, update, or open programs based on telemetry DNS, potentially the versions being run, and how long they run for. 4. Infer when you're most active, infer sleeping habits. 5. Infer probability of health problems if you're hitting more medical sites. 6. Infer political alliance from news sites you visit. And much more. Since US congress dropped the rules preventing ISPs selling this data this might be the most insidious thing your ISP can do today. If you believe that a VPN provider is less likely to spy due to it being the incentive for a paying customer, then a VPN with a no-log DNS option is a huge privacy win. I would argue DoH with NextDNS by itself does more for your privacy than any VPN does with IP masking.
- 3y ago
- thriftwy 3y ago"It's trivial for large providers to get root certs so that they can MITM any TLS traffic on their network" Seriously? Just like that? You can pretend that you are a random site.com and get a SSL lock icon in 2023 if you are big enough?
- blueflow 3y agoIts already worse than that. Any provider sitting between you and LetsEncrypt could pass the HTTP challenge on your behalf and get themselves certified as your server.
- rootusrootus 3y agoI'd love to hear how exactly they'd pull that off.
- blueflow 3y agoIn Linux, you can do a dstaddr/dstport based redirect in the iptables FORWARD chain to your own http server and serve the ACME challenge/response things from there. This is basically a transparent proxy setup.
- rootusrootus 3y agoWhat does that buy you? The challenge is merely an authorization, intercepting it does not get you a certificate.
- blueflow 3y agoWhat else would i need to request the certificate?
- 3np 3y agoThe ambition is that this will be addressed by supporting RFC8657[0], which would allow domain owners to restrict HTTP-01 issuance by declaring an issuance policy through DNS records. It's been live at staging for years and still waiting to make it to prod[1]. DNS-01 attacks are by default similarly vulnerable to MitM between the issuer and your DNS server, which can be mitigated by setting up DNSSEC. [0]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8657 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8657 [1]: https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/prod-support-for-rfc8657-caa-constraints-for-accounturi-and-validationmethods/181584/2 https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/prod-support-for-rfc8657...
- raesene9 3y agoIt really shouldn't be and (AFAIK) isn't trivial for people to get root certs any more unless they can get end-users to install them on their systems. It used to be relatively straightforward (you could buy security appliances that had them) but that was quite a long time ago, things have tightened up considerably since then. So if an ISP wants to do this, the only other option is a mandatory proxy.
- bradknowles 3y agoHow many root certificate authorities are there in the world that are trusted by default by most browsers, or have their authority cross signed by one of the trusted root certificate authorities. At last count, the number I heard of was north of 300. All it takes is one of them being semi shady and being willing to sell or cross sign root certs for someone else, like an ISP. And surprising number of those 300+ are pretty shady. This is one of the methods used in the Great Firewall of China. Or Russia. Or a number of other countries. And most of those countries have smaller annual budgets than AT&T. Of course, that's also why a lot of people in China use VPNs. Just like any sufficiently well funded company or country can go to certain businesses in Israel and get professional zero day/no touch malware that they can drop on any unsuspecting target. And Israel is not the only country selling that kind of technology.
- blueflow 3y agoI don't dare to call my virtual home network a "VPN" anymore because people will instantly ask which provider its using. I need a new word that means virtual private network but doesn't have the "rented proxy for hiding my identity" meaning.
- rjh29 3y agoLAN. Or 'virtual home network'.
- calvinmorrison 3y agoVlan
- dathinab 3y agoYes, that's what it is for many people today. Through to be more precise "Rented proxy which uses an opaque encrypted tunnel and can be setup in a system wide transparent manner which avoid all the pain traditional web proxies tend to introduce. Also a proxy which at least pretends to keeps your side of the connection private and might provide (or pretend to provide) some additional security benefits compared to a traditional web proxy.". > So who are you hiding from and are you really hidden? Your ISP, in most countries ISPs will analyze network data and sell some aggregated statistics, but in some countries they can go far beyond this in ways which can have noticeable negative effects on your life. In case of using anything with a P2P connection to untrusted 3rd parties which seems fine initially but turn out to be fanatics, extremists, or crazy (in a negative/dangerous way) . E.g. if you play online in a game which uses P2P someone might use this to trace you down, maybe try to hack you and especially in combination with ISPs selling to private infos might be able to easily find out where you life. This can put your life in danger, even if you aren't a streamer or parts of a frequently harassed minority. Overreaching not person specific state surveillance, not that you have anything to hide but you shouldn't tolerate it anyway. I mean just because you don't have anything to hide today doesn't mean you don't have tomorrow, potentially in retrospective. I mean for an extrema example I don't think most Jews in 1938 did expect they have to hide for their live in Germany just a few years down the line. And who knows what will happen in the future.
- ineedausername 3y agoVPN isn't exactly supposed to provide safety though.
- tokai 3y agoThat's the primary argument in vpn commercials.
- ineedausername 3y agoIt's funny because arguably you achieve less safety routing your traffic through someone else's servers.
- thriftwy 3y agoVPNs basically solve three mass issues: * Pretending to be in another country to evade geoblocks by internet resources. * Using P2P and avoiding law enforcement attention of your own country. * Avoid your own country's legally enforced IP and DNS blocks of specific resources. VPNs are fairly efficient at all that without providing any additional anonymity.
- toadi 3y agoAs far as I see there are 2 uses for VPN. 1/ Being "safer" using public wifis. I use 5g hotspot to my phone to avoid that. 2/ Proxy to other countries for streaming reasons. Still use it for this. All the rest is just bogus marketing speak.
- osigurdson 3y agoThe internet seems slightly broken if necessary to trust the first hop.
- dharmab 3y ago3. Avoiding government blocks/censorship/monitoring (if you trust your government less than the VPN provider). Not every country has open and free access. 4. Accessing your home country's internet while abroad, since many sites redirect you to a foreign market version 5. Checking if another geo has cheaper prices. Tom Scott mentioned he got cheaper prices on international rental cars by VPNing to the destination country than when going direct from a foreign country.
- Contusion3532 3y ago6. At least in the USA, ISPs can sell your browsing habits(DNS lookups, connection end-points) to third parties. A VPN that doesn't sell this data protects you from that level of snooping from the ISP.
- amanaplanacanal 3y ago7. Hiding torrent usage from my ISP so they don’t cut my service.
- xethos 3y agoY'all forgot adblock via at-home (or at least self-hosted) PiHole, for when you want to block ads on LTE.
- georgyo 3y ago
- unsupp0rted 3y agoI've tried Mullvad but services like Firebase and Cloudflare randomly don't work with the Mullvad servers I use. There's no benefit to a VPN that makes you spend 20 minutes debugging your dev environment, only to remember you need to turn off your VPN before doing a `firebase deploy`.
- iKlsR 3y agoI use PIA and some sites like Bugsnag, LogRocket don't work, what I do is have a special browser (Chrome Canary) that I set a split tunnel rule for so it bypasses the vpn. Same for steam and epic that will kill you with captchas for something as simple as the pc going to sleep and waking (new ip).
- AlexandrB 3y ago1. I would love to know why people are using VPNs. I suspect it's for evading region blocks but if it is for privacy reasons it would be a strong counter-argument to the idea that people don't care about privacy. 2. Is this whole article a marketing piece? My understanding is that NordVPN has a somewhat checkered reputation including a data breach in 2018. The linked list[1] of best VPNs also effectively lists NordVPN twice since Nord now owns Surfshark. [1] https://www.techradar.com/vpn/best-vpn https://www.techradar.com/vpn/best-vpn
- psychphysic 3y agoI use VPN as some sort of disgruntlement if I'm honest. Some how VPNs convinced me using it was sticking it to the man in the same way using cash is. So I just leave it one. Don't think it affects me meaningfully I don't use websites other than Https nor am I interesting in any way. Occasionally I get past geo-locked content. Maybe once or twice a month.
- rcme 3y agoI run my own VPN on an EC2 instance. The main reason I do it is because even HTTPS leaks the domain names you connect to in addition to the IP address. It seems stupid to give that info to my ISP.
- aborsy 3y agoWouldn’t AWS collect the same metadata on your traffic “to deliver a better service, fight abuse and etc”? Genuine question, I don’t know. I feel like they are better than any ISP, but still monitor traffic on their networks.
- rcme 3y agoThey definitely can and do collect the traffic. But most ISPs actively sell your data to marketers. I don’t think AWS does that.
- _-____-_ 3y agoI use Cloudflare WARP to avoid ISP traffic shaping. I feel a lot more comfortable when my ISP just sees one outgoing wireguard connection.
- blisterpeanuts 3y agoI use ProtonVPN mainly for reading & browsing on my iPad at the gym or McDonald's or airport. It adds a layer of protection, particularly in a public place where they explicitly say your connection is not private. Probably it's not totally secure either, since nothing in this world is totally so, but Proton is reputable and reliable, along with Nord and a handful of others, so all I can do is hope for the best and probably avoid connecting to my bank and other sensitive uses. As for teens using free VPN's, this just sounds very sketchy and I wonder if there should be a required course in approximately 9th grade high school teaching people safe internet use, kind of like driver's ed or home economics... necessary basic knowledge in this day and age.
- raesene9 3y agoStandard VPNs just shift the point of trust from the local network/ISP to the VPN provider, so the question becomes, can you trust the VPN company more or less than those local networks/ISPs? This depends on quite a range of factors (e.g. what country you're in, what your personal risk profile is), so depending on the answers there, VPNs are more or less useful (from a security perspective). I'd expect that a lot of VPN use these days is geo-shifting to get access to region locked content, and they're not a bad idea for that.
- psychphysic 3y agoI'd argue most people benefit by putting that data into another jurisdiction. I.e. can your local law enforcement ping an email over to your ISP and just be handed years worth of IPs accessed? Or is there slightly more friction? Put another way if I used an exit in Tehran how easy would it be to get my data for Norwegian law enforcement? Even if the end point was 4g in Oslo?
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y agoLooking at how insistent many authoritarian regimes are at forcing international companies to host data in their own jurisdiction, you're probably right. I live in one of those countries and definitely prefer certain VPN and hosting companies to my own ISP.
- raesene9 3y agoyeah the national law aspect is interesting, and I could see it really taking off as new restrictive laws get passed in specific countries. To take one example the UK Online Safety Bill could make access to a load of content trickier (or even cause companies to stop offering services in the UK) at which time I expect a load of UK people will start using VPNs to shift their traffic to appear to come from non-UK locations.
- cf141q5325 3y agoEspecially as you are more and more at risk of wrongful convictions based on (erroneous) big data and stupid laws. Nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide only works with a perfect system which dont exist outside of fairy tales. Also dont think those are contradicting concerns. Be careful with what you trust which ISP or VPN provider with. Thinking you are good with just going with either category instead of the other is a recipe for disaster. Also worth mentioning that to lock your ISP properly out, take a look at hardware firewalls with whitelists and properly chosen signatures for the vpn tunnel. Especially if they are forcing a router into your home network.
- BLKNSLVR 3y agoI use a number of VPNs, some commercial, some with VPS' on which I've installed a wireguard instance, to create additional steps for anyone (else) who wants to snoop my data. Australia has legislated two-year metadata retention rules applied to ISPs, but not to VPN or VPS providers. Sure, it doesn't take much for law enforcement to potentially get access to VPN and VPS data as well, but the more hassle, the more work, the more wasted time, the better.
- seanw444 3y agoAustralia continues to creep me out. Really holding true to its prison island history.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sshine 3y ago> are people actually safe? Inevitably: Safe against what? Nation-states? No. Your mom, your school, your church, and your work place? Sure.
- dathinab 3y agoit depends on a lot of questions: - Where are you, the degree of abuse of power from network carriers wrt. things which change when users use VPN hugely differ. - Who are you the degree of risk you are exposed to where VPNs can help can differ a lot. - What do you do, e.g. if you do stream you probably want to keep your pace of of living private and in turn a VPN can noticeable reduce the risk. - Which VPN do yo use, some are pretty bad, some outright malicious, many soso, some focus more on the "private network" part and might not provide the same degree of privacy for some use-cases. Also some come with additional security features, e.g. preventing connections to known malicious servers and sides (which also can be abused by whoever provides that features, so not always a plus). - What do you even mean with "safe". All in all I would say depending on the country you are if you are a "typical non technical user" the answer rang anywhere from "yes, quite a bit" to "no it makes no relevant difference".
- jmclnx 3y agoBased upon the article, the Title should be "Free VPN services are bad". Which I believe is true. If you need VPN, unless you know how to setup your own server, get paid ones. Most people can afford it. But if at home, you live in what is generally considered a free country you probably do not need one. I guess there are cases were one may be useful at home. If in another type country, I think even with a VPN you could be at risk unless you are very careful.
- DueDilligence 3y ago[dead]
- glonq 3y agoThe prevalence of browser fingerprinting really breaks the deal for me with VPN's. There's less value in hiding your IP and location if advertisers and websites can still uniquely identify you.
- belter 3y agoHalf of these are just banned Reddit users....
- kkfx 3y agoA VPN is virtual PRIVATE network, a "commercial VPN" where the customer just have a client, and the server is from someone else means being in the service private network, or choosing to put a personal device on someone else LAN to be more direct and clear. A VPN is logic if one have a homeserver and do want to connect from home while being outside, for instance to filter their own craphone traffic, accessing Home Assistant without exposing it too much on the internet and so on. A VPN is logic for similar reasons for a company with nomadic workers. The sole reason for using a "commercial VPN" is having a glorified proxy for accessing some geoblocked content, fully knowing that you have all your traffic diverted to someone else machine, perhaps with a proprietary client on you won machine and with high privileges. That's is. There is NO EXTRA SAFETY for commercial VPN in privacy terms, except being sure that your own traffic would be monitored easily by third parties than by your own ISP, typically third parties hosted in some other countries while your ISP is local, so under local laws...