What is he talking about, public WiFi can easily poison and monitor your DNS requests (most people don’t know or use encrypted DNS), and there’s still tons of non-https traffic leaks all over the place that are plain text. Even if encrypted, there’s still deep packet inspection. VPNs can mitigate DPI techniques and shift the trust from an easily snoopable public WiFi to the VPN’s more trustworthy exit servers.
This guy really needs to elaborate on what he’s trying to say when the cyber security field very much disagrees with this stance. I’m not a huge fan of Proton, but they aren’t doing anything wrong here. You should use it for public Wi-Fi.
most people don’t know or use encrypted DNS
But a cybersecurity expert does. That’s the point. If you know those things, VPNs become obsolete, for most people. So why not teach people about it, instead of promoting VPNs?
And can you really trust an extremely profit focused company, that is built on user data, more than your local Café? If you’re in China, sure, use a VPN, they’re the lesser evil. But most spots don’t have the resources or expertise to analyze and sell or otherwise misuse your logs. VPN companies not only do, most rely on it.
If you’re a highly targeted person, it’s another story, but in that case your only hope is Tor or a new identity.
So why not teach people about it, instead of promoting VPNs?
Ok then, in the meantime the rest of us will use a fucking VPN? I don’t know what “encrypted DNS” means, and I’m 99% you’re going to respond with either “whaaaaat you don’t know something that 99.999% of other people also don’t know? Clearly you are too dumb for the internet” or else “oh sure I’d be glad to explain that! It’s real simple, see when you have a Rosendin gembal, it befrazzles the gesticulators of your brangles (link to a Wikipedia article on brangles). So you just have to re-delineate the scanditrons to break the tensor lines in your scintrins! You can code a fairly simple app from scratch to do it, and there’s a FOSS program someone made to help you identify the cabangs in your computer’s lenticles: (link to a github page that is literally just a transcription of an eldritch god screaming in binary)”
VPNs are extremely user friendly and they are happy to explain in layman’s terms exactly what they do and how they work. If there’s a better way, it’s locked behind years of techie knowledge.
And most users don’t know what a VPN is. In both cases, they’re not gonna learn anything about it. Except you need to pay for a VPN, after figuring out which one is kinda trustworthy instead of snakeoil, while encrypted DNS is a simple setting on any OS. Nothing more. You don’t need whole articles to explain what your product does and why you respect privacy and blah, while not saying a single word that’s true. It’s a simple setting. VPNs are not only user friendly, they’re a full ripoff for most people and snakeoil. They don’t explain what they do in “laymans terms”, most of them just blatantly lie. Anything for the cash. If you want an explanation of encrypted DNS:
A DNS is kind of like your GPS. It translates an address into something more usable, e.g… like your GPS translates ‘123 Baker Street, Washington’ into coordinates, so you can use it on a map, for example. A DNS does the same, but for the internet: It translates “google.de” into a format that is actually readable and usable to the computer. However, to translate “google.de” you need to reach out to someone else, that knows the address. The thing is, if someone just pretends to give the right answer, but in fact gives you their own address, you may end up at the wrong website, or in the GPS example, at the wrong house. So instead of visiting your actual bank’s website, you’re going to visit someone else’s website, which looks basically the same, except once you log into your bank account the attacker can read that and steal all your money. In the GPS example, you would now be at the slaughterhouse instead of Disneyland. An encrypted DNS just means that you specify exactly whom you will trust, for example google, and that you want your communication with google to be encrypted, so no one can even read which website you want to visit.
If someone doesn’t understand this, they wouldn’t understand what a VPN is, even broken down to bare concepts. So for those people: It makes you safe just trust me just set this setting, no app, no account, no money required. Because that’s the level a typical VPN company argues on.
People can’t learn not to throw trash in the street, climate change that is backed by decades of science is a problem, or hell, they can’t even learn to effectively not click on super suspicious phishing links.
How on earth are they going to learn about implementing encrypted DNS when most barely know the difference between a browser and a computer.
99.9% of people don’t throw trash in the street.
At least in most countries.
But most spots don’t have the resources or expertise to analyze and sell or otherwise misuse your logs.
Most spots don’t have also the resources or expertise to secure their own spot. As I remember, cheap routers used in public places may contain a lot of vulnerabilities.
encrypted DNS
Will it help me if I’m using LbreTorrent do download piracy content on my phone? Or how it would help me to hide my location from mobile apps that extract location from IP?
No. That’s a whole different use case. We’re discussing what most people in a public network should do. Some people, such as whistleblowers, journalists etc. maybe should use a VPN. For you grandparents, it would be pure snake oil. And even as such an endangered person, choosing the wrong, so almost all, VPNs would be even more dangerous.
For your problems, a VPN could be useful, even though for the former I would use the usenet or soap2day-like sites, which do not have you seed that content. If you still want to share it, then use a VPN. ONLY for the torrent process, not for anything else, as that would still be bad for privacy and security, as the VPN company could, and most WILL, surveil and log you. And for the latter problem, don’t use such apps except in closed environments or without internet access.
Lmao, we’re not worried about the cafe. We’re worried about the man in the middle. And yeah with enough tech knowledge you can set up an encrypted tunnel home and use your normal connection from there. But most people aren’t that tech savvy
If you’re not relatively tech savy, a typical VPN IS the man in the middle. That’s the problem. A VPN, in itself, is very good. But as you said, non-tech savy users won’t be able to set up a VPN themselves, so they need to trust a company to route all their traffic, be their DNS server, not log anything, not be hacked and not give any data to current or future totalitarian governments. Not even I could recommend any VPN company that fulfills enough points there, especially the security related ones.
But Proton Bad? I don’t understand. The armchair security nerds on Lemmy want me to hate something.
Encrypted DNS doesn’t solve everything. Handshake for TLS sessions is still in clear, you can usually see the SNI, and since we are talking about Wireless, usually this data is available to anybody who is in the vicinity, not just the network owner. This already means that you can see what sites someone is visiting, more or less. TLS 1.3 can mitigate some of this (for those who implement ESNI, but you don’t know that beforehand). Also TLS works until the user is not accepting invalid certificates prompts (HSTS doesn’t work for everything) and there are still tons of HTTP-based redirect (check mailing newsletters and see how many first send you to an HTTP site, for example) that can be used for MiTM attacks.
A VPN moves the trust to a single provider that you can choose, which is much better than trusting every single WiFi network you can attach to and the people connected to it, I would say.
Also if you pay for the VPN (I pay Proton), it’s not true that the company business is based on user data, they are based on subscriptions.
I’ve never really understood that argument. Most VPN software I’ve seen forces your DNS through the VPN as well which would bypass a public Wi-Fi’s attempt to DNS poison.
I use a VPN anytime I’m not on my home network just because it’s a super easy way for me to force my DNS to my own custom DNS with Adblock listing on the machine that’s running the VPN endpoint.
It’s wireguard, and it connects to a direct IP address. If someone tries to redirect or otherwise man in the middle of the connection wireguard will simply fail to establish a connection. Thanks to the fact that it uses a similar idea to pgp where the client and server already have each other’s public keys and there’s not really an unencrypted initial handshake even the initial talking has a form of encrypted communication thanks to the key pairings.
So like, my vpn is definitely proving security. Whether or not every random ass VPN you can buy is smart enough to force all DNS over the VPN or anything else I guess I can’t say for sure maybe it’s not common and that’s why but it definitely can be used to help automate some security measures when using a public network
I’m not even an expert in this stuff, but with a tool I found online I demonstrated that it was easy to snoop people’s passwords on my school’s wifi networks back in the day. It took minutes.
How is DPI a problem if it’s encrypted? That would only work if the attacker had installed their CA cert on your client machine, right?
I’m doing DPI on my own network and I can still view TLS certificate fingerprints and some metadata that provides a good educated guess as to what a traffic flow contains. It certainly better that it’s encrypted, but there is a little information that leaks in metadata. I think that’s what was meant.
True, but this is generally not useful information to anyone. They can see you’re visiting bank.com, but they still can’t see your bank details.
It might be useful if they’re trying to target you for phishing, but a targeted attack is extremely unlikely.
Also, any wireless equipment from the past 15 years or so supports client isolation.
Yup. You can grab any unencrypted data passed between the user’s browser and a server literally out of thin air when they’re connected to an open access point. You sit happily at the Starbucks with your laptop, sniffing them WiFi packets and grabbing things off of them.
Oh and you have no idea what the myriad of apps you’re using are connecting to and whether that endpoint is encrypted. Do not underestimate the ability of firms to produce software at the absolute lowest cost with corners and walls missing.
If I was someone who was to make money off of scamming people, one thing I’d have tried to do is to rig portable sniffers at public locations with large foot traffic and open WiFi like train stations, airports, etc. Throw em around then filter for interesting stuff. Oh here’s some personal info. Oh there’s a session token for some app. Let me see what else I can get from that app for that person.
We need a switch like Firefox has that disallows anything non-HTTPS, but from the phone level. Companies like Apple and Google could also eventually warn apps that they’re going to make it the default setting.
Apps don’t use the system browser to connect to REST endpoints. Neither do they use the OS. Apps typically use a statically linked library. There are use cases for HTTP-only connections so it’s unlikely that those libraries would mess with forcing or even warning its users that they’ve used HTTP instead of HTTPS. Point is Google and Apple can do little in this regard. Unless they scan apps’ source code which could be possible to some extent but still difficult because URLs are often written in pieces.
Just FYI https://shop.hak5.org/products/wifi-pineapple. There are ready-made devices that can do basically what you are describing!
Oh nice. Just gotta dress em up like Unifi or Aruba then stick em up on the ceiling.
Also, any unlatched, unfirewalled vulnerabilities you have are immediately available to anyone on that local WiFi network. One thing VPNs may do is cause you to ignore requests from systems on the local network, which helps.
That’s an interesting one. I know it depends on configuration, but in the run-of-the-mill case, does connecting through VPN stop local services to listen on local IPs? I know our corpo VPN kills local LAN access but I’m curious what the default for OpenVPN/Wireguard might be.
Yeah, while it is true, lots of VPN companies are grifts just buying VPS’s and installing OpenVPN, this “Cyber security expert” puts far too much faith in HTTPS and probably never seen a lecture from the Black Hat conference
probably never seen a lecture from the Black Hat conference
Not defending Robert Graham because I’m also eyebrow raising his statement. And while you may be 100% correct that he never actually stayed to listen to a lecture, he absolutely spoke at a lot of them since 2000.
Dpi only works if they install a cert on your phone. Else they can’t crack it (in real time) or you would receive HTTPS errors
You dont need to examine the contents of http traffic to do what many services call DPI.
you can still read unencrypted traffic, like most DNS. Or even without that, you can frequently tell from the endpoint IP who someone is talking to, and what types of applications from port numbers used. Etc.
If you’re torrenting, for example, that’s pretty easy to see.
The only effective antivirus program known to man is called a backup
How is this related to a VPN? Antivirus does nothing against a MITM attack.
Woosh
I’m saying that no system is secure on a long enough timeframe . But that if you do get infected you can nuke and pave if you have a backup. Most of these VPN advertisers treat their product VPN like a magic shield / antivirus when it is In fact, nothing more than a fancy condom.
VPN is not an anti-virus program. Also, you can’t really backup your online accounts and restore them in case they are hacked.
The VPNs you characterise as “shitty” aren’t necessarily a bad choice; they’re cheaper than the legitimate privacy VPNs. Mullvad is famously 5€ per month, Proton is 4.49€ per month, but NordVPN is 3.09€, Surfshark is 2.19€, and PIA is 1.79€ per month.
If you’re really just here to pretend you’re in another country (rather than privatemaxing) or hide your torrenting activity from your ISP, the cheaper options can be a perfectly legitimate choice.
Mullvad doesn’t try and lock you in with any auto-renewal shenanigans and was the second service that I know of to offer payment via xmr. The first was ivpn but their server speeds were trash.
That’s true. Mullvad will even let you send cash by post to them which is definitely not something you can do with other services.
However, in terms of private payment options, you can always use BTC’s Lightning Network with the other options if that concerns you.
https://thatoneprivacysite.xyz/ is a good base for comparisons
Bear in mind that info hasn’t been updated since 2019, when the OG thatoneprivacysite sold out to a shady company. The .xyz site is an old backup someone put up of the site before it changed to only recommend a handful of bad VPNs.
The only real use case for VPNs is to bypass geo blocking on streaming sites, and the VPN providers know this. They also know that if they lean too hard into that, eventually someone will sue them and their business model will evaporate - so they add the “iT MaKEs yOu mORe SeCurE” nonsense as a fig leaf so they can say with a straight face that they operate a product with legitimate uses
That is definitely what 90% of people use them for.
I think Tom Scott is the only person who’s ever done an honest VPN sponsor read.
Dude is completely right. VPNs are good against geoblocking but thats it. All VPN providers that claim not to log stuff are lying and if there are logs it doesnt make a difference privacy wise
You know, from a business standpoint, it makes financial sense NOT to log user traffic.
Reason one: plausible deniability. You can’t give what you don’t have.
Reason two: storage. Why the fuck would you keep logs, when it costs money to?
Reason three: these boots taste fantastic! (People generally don’t enjoy licking boots).
