Why would you need a third party app on Android? I just use the native VPN support over ipsec. Or are people using them for older Android installs?
Privacy and Security Risks of Android VPN Permission-enabled Apps
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Re: Privacy and Security Risks of Android VPN Permission-enabled Apps
#12Wait, there are people who don't use OpenVPN when they set up VPN on Android? Nice.
Re: Privacy and Security Risks of Android VPN Permission-enabled Apps
#13[deleted]
Re: Privacy and Security Risks of Android VPN Permission-enabled Apps
#14Why would you need a third party app on Android? I just use the native VPN support over ipsec. Or are people using them for older Android installs?
That was my thoughts. My guess is that people are falling for "FREE VPN NOW!!!" type apps. Running your own VPN is easy for the HN crowd, but well beyond most users. I'm lucky enough to get a free, highspeed VPN via my ISP, but I suspect that is very uncommon as well.
Re: Privacy and Security Risks of Android VPN Permission-enabled Apps
#15Why would you need a third party app on Android? I just use the native VPN support over ipsec. Or are people using them for older Android installs?
> Why would you need a third party app on Android?
Because the consensus seems to be that if you use any VPN besides OpenVPN you're a moron, and therefore some build-in solutions for some OSes only support OpenVPN.
Re: Privacy and Security Risks of Android VPN Permission-enabled Apps
#16looked at the report to see if they'd reviewed torguard and apparently they... don't realize it's a VPN service and think it's related to the onion router. Kinda undermines they're credibility a bit if they can't even identify the tools they're auditing properly.
Re: Privacy and Security Risks of Android VPN Permission-enabled Apps
#17It is no surprise that 'free' VPNs don't work or compromise security. Would be good to see the actual list of VPNs that comply with basic security requirements.
TorrentFreak maintains a list of providers that responded to a questionnaire about anonymity, including one about encryption used: https://torrentfreak.com/vpn-anonymous-review-160220/ Personally, I prefer the "roll your own" approach mentioned above. A VPS from DigitalOcean or something beats most providers' pricing.
providers have the advantage of offering multiple geographic locations without having to spin up a new instance every time you switch which may be useful to some people though.
Re: Privacy and Security Risks of Android VPN Permission-enabled Apps
#18It is no surprise that 'free' VPNs don't work or compromise security. Would be good to see the actual list of VPNs that comply with basic security requirements.
TorrentFreak maintains a list of providers that responded to a questionnaire about anonymity, including one about encryption used: https://torrentfreak.com/vpn-anonymous-review-160220/ Personally, I prefer the "roll your own" approach mentioned above. A VPS from DigitalOcean or something beats most providers' pricing.
> A VPS from DigitalOcean or something beats most providers' pricing.
Does it? A VPN subscription costs around $40 a year, DigitalOcean starts from $60 a year for the lowest level standard droplet. Am I overlooking something?
Re: Privacy and Security Risks of Android VPN Permission-enabled Apps
#19looked at the report to see if they'd reviewed torguard and apparently they... don't realize it's a VPN service and think it's related to the onion router. Kinda undermines they're credibility a bit if they can't even identify the tools they're auditing properly.
Actually, their report is much more credible because they note the difference between TorGuard (and a few similar apps) vs normal VPNs. To actually quote the report[1]:
67% of Android VPN apps claim to provide traditional VPN services (labeled here as “VPN clients”) including enhanced security and privacy, anti-surveillance or tunnels to access geo-filtered or censored content. Note that we consider Tor clients (e.g., Orbot, Globus VPN] and TorGuard VPN client) as a separate category.
That seems a pretty fair distinction.
Notably, the report doesn't include the word "onion" in it at all, so I'm not sure where you got "[they] think it's related to the onion router" from.
[1] https://research.csiro.au/ng/wp-content/uploads/sites/106/20...
Re: Privacy and Security Risks of Android VPN Permission-enabled Apps
#20People should NOT trust free VPN services at all, as you don't pay level of service is not guaranteed. What's worse, who knows what the service provide is doing with the data flowing through the tunnels (to)? cover the operational cost (and goal for profits) Install and configure your own VPN services (IPsec or OpenVPN), use strongSwan (Android native client which works great with RSA authentication with x509 certs,…
One side effect of schools blocking websites is students downloading and using free VPN software. They have no money, and it works well enough for "unblocking" websites as far as they're concerned. Rip privacy.
Can you elaborate where you are seeing this? Is this as the post-secondary level or lower? I worked in higher-ed in the US and almost uniformly our institution and those we talked to in mailing lists were adamantly anti-blocking. Remembering back to when I was in HS and our library was outfitted with a few donated computers that shared a 56k connection, I know they had a net-nanny installed, but that was quite some time ago.