How to build your own VPN if you're wary of commercial options
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Re: How to build your own VPN if you're wary of commercial options
#2Or just use a modern deployment option like https://github.com/jlund/streisand
Re: How to build your own VPN if you're wary of commercial options
#3The problem with a home-grown VPN is that you lose some of the plausible deniability that's gained from a shared VPN. If you have a VPN connected to a privately-owned AWS instance, the IP coming from that AWS instance is easily traced back to you. Whereas if your external IP is coming from a cluster that is shared by thousands of other people using that VPN, it is more difficult for someone to tie that specifically back to you.
Re: How to build your own VPN if you're wary of commercial options
#4Alternatively, just use Algo. [1] It's a self-hosted, hardened IPSEC VPN that automates setup on multiple cloud providers.
Re: How to build your own VPN if you're wary of commercial options
#5Alternatively, just use Algo. [1] It's a self-hosted, hardened IPSEC VPN that automates setup on multiple cloud providers. 1. https://github.com/trailofbits/algo
Or Streisand.[0]
Re: How to build your own VPN if you're wary of commercial options
#6The problem with a home-grown VPN is that you lose some of the plausible deniability that's gained from a shared VPN. If you have a VPN connected to a privately-owned AWS instance, the IP coming from that AWS instance is easily traced back to you. Whereas if your external IP is coming from a cluster that is shared by thousands of other people using that VPN, it is more difficult for someone to tie that specifically b…
Yes, this!
Whether or not that's important depends on your risk model.
Re: How to build your own VPN if you're wary of commercial options
#7I setup something from a script on digital ocean a while back.
Re: How to build your own VPN if you're wary of commercial options
#8The problem with a home-grown VPN is that you lose some of the plausible deniability that's gained from a shared VPN. If you have a VPN connected to a privately-owned AWS instance, the IP coming from that AWS instance is easily traced back to you. Whereas if your external IP is coming from a cluster that is shared by thousands of other people using that VPN, it is more difficult for someone to tie that specifically b…
Exactly. The author says because hosting companies are big they would never give information but this is a complete flaw. Google and Reddit are both known to hand information to law enforcement. Companies like digital ocean don't put as high as emphasis on customer privacy as companies likes PIA. On 90% of the service portals for servers I've purchased have had a message showing my IP was logged for safety reasons. So by making your own vpn you're just turning a direct link to you into link to a link pointing right back at you instead of thousands of people.
Re: How to build your own VPN if you're wary of commercial options
#9I would like to have a setup like this:
- One VPN to connect laptop on the road with machines at home LAN, and with VM:s on different hosts.
- Have this VPN "exit" via a commercial VPN-provider (for privacy).
Could I easily configure this? Have one of the VM's be the VPN server and configure it to "exit" trough the commercial VPN?
I haven't really managed / configured "real" VPN's, how does local access work? I.e, when I'm at home with my laptop and access my desktop that's on the same network, will the packets flow out to the remote VPN server and back, or can it resolve it locally somehow?
Also, will this break stuff that depend on Bonjour / ZeroConf (i.e Apple Airplay and stuff?)
Re: How to build your own VPN if you're wary of commercial options
#10Like, I'm not sure why anyone thinks that:
1. AWS, DO or Linode won't respond to a subpoena
2. That any of those three won't have extensive logging in place, without the privacy goals that a VPN provider would have
You're just switching your ISP to AWS when you do this, which might be better than what you've got, but certainly isn't flawless untraceable security