Great point brought up in the comments that VM’s allow for snapshotting of entire memory state as well. So something to be aware of.
We have successfully completed our migration to RAM-only VPN infrastructure
101–110 of 195 posts
Re: We have successfully completed our migration to RAM-only VPN infrastructure
#102"They" will just spray the machines with liquid nitrogen, pull them out of the rack, put the DRAM in a thermos w/ LN2 and read the data at their leisure. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8388826
With modern encryption protocols, this yields you nothing. The feature is called Perfect Forward Secrecy, and protects past flows from later key compromise. Wireguard supports this, which is what Mullvad uses. (For some reason, speculation about which is an exercise left to the reader, WPA in Wi-Fi still does not.)
Not exactly nothing, just not ongoing compromise. TLS session keys can be pretty long-lived; I don’t know how long-lived Wireguard’s equivalent keys are, but even a relatively conservative few minutes can yield valuable traffic and metadata.
(That being said, I think having your RAM frozen to extract ephemeral secrets is firmly in the “fully hosed” threat model, and is not a realistic model for 99.9% of users to plan for.)
Re: We have successfully completed our migration to RAM-only VPN infrastructure
#103Not to provoke predictable responses, but I find it interesting that the tech-talented VPN providers are not using BSD in favor of Linux, especially with requirements like diskless operation, kernel customization, and tighter security.
Re: We have successfully completed our migration to RAM-only VPN infrastructure
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
There should probably be case law before anyone actually believes in warrant canaries. 'If it's illegal to advertise that you've received a court order of some kind, it's illegal to intentionally and knowingly take any action that has the effect of advertising the receipt of that order. A judge can't force you to do anything, but every lawyer I've spoken to has indicated that having a "canary" you remove or choose no…
What happens when someone asks you whether you have received a court order of some kind? Are you compelled by court to lie about it?
"We must comply with legal subpoenas in the jurisdiction in which we operate,"
Re: We have successfully completed our migration to RAM-only VPN infrastructure
#105Re: We have successfully completed our migration to RAM-only VPN infrastructure
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lying about it opens you up to potential litigation and being exposed through discovery. It makes less sense to outwardly lie to paying customers rather than simply lie by omission.
I can just imagine EFF drooling over such a prospect.
The EFF wants a world where this kind of BS, and consequent litigation, is a thing of the past. If there's water running down their face, it's tears, not drool. We deserve a better world.
Re: We have successfully completed our migration to RAM-only VPN infrastructure
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I formerly worked for a somewhat-older mainstream consumer VPN provider for a few years, to the extent that you can take my word for it, this is not industry-standard practice at least as far as the provider is able to control it. Commercial VPNs typically run on rental servers -- usually a mix of the major cloud providers and smaller hosting providers -- and in my former company's case, using dedicated hosting (bare…
> Anyway, there's also the looming "threat" (lol) of HTTPS and encrypted DNS proliferation and improvement making the core use case for commercial VPNs obsolete For a lot of people the core use case is accessing Netflix in a different country!
I always assumes the core usw case was piracy
Re: We have successfully completed our migration to RAM-only VPN infrastructure
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
There should probably be case law before anyone actually believes in warrant canaries. 'If it's illegal to advertise that you've received a court order of some kind, it's illegal to intentionally and knowingly take any action that has the effect of advertising the receipt of that order. A judge can't force you to do anything, but every lawyer I've spoken to has indicated that having a "canary" you remove or choose no…
What happens when someone asks you whether you have received a court order of some kind? Are you compelled by court to lie about it?
Why would someone have to lie? They can just say "We can't comment on that" without providing an answer. And then customers can go "sounds pretty suspicious, time to switch VPN services".
Re: We have successfully completed our migration to RAM-only VPN infrastructure
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problems with clicking past those errors are typically not due to network sniffing but with whatever crazy shit is on the page they are going to. The only two valid usecases of big VPNs like these are 1. Very mild security increase over public wifi 2. Shifting your risk from the ISP spying to mullvad or the VPN provider spying or slightly anonymizing if mullvad rotates IPs. (2) is a real benefit because ISPs are…
3. You live in a country where your ISP is legally mandated to record all of your browsing history and make it available to the government. 4. You live in a country where certain websites are blocked because the government doesn’t agree with them, or because those websites don’t want to deal with your country.
Those countries probably block VPN services, especially the popular ones which buy all the ads.
Re: We have successfully completed our migration to RAM-only VPN infrastructure
#110I wonder about those VPNs that say "we don't log or store anything". That may be the case, but they probably just send a continuous stream of data to the law enforcement / intelligence services or whoever instead of storing it themselves. They can then correctly say "WE don't log".
https://www.assured.se/publications/Assured_Mullvad_relay_se... Honestly I don’t think audits are worth anything. But it’d be a huge conspiracy to mess with so many parties.
Audits are IMO worthwhile, but end users should be aware of the scope of an audit. In the context of commercial VPN providers, it's usually just a code security audit -- are there any memory leaks? Is sensitive data being passed around a little bit too loosely? Is there some way for unprivileged users to gain privilege escalation by crafting a malicious request against one of your services?
In this sense, they're valuable. As someone working in software, I can figure out if the bugs were subtle or blatant, which is often a good proxy metric for the competence of the team behind the product. Are the same bugs cropping up year after year, even if they've already been previously fixed in other parts of the code? Again, a good red flag to use there.
Audits do not and often cannot cover things like "is the company reselling connection/user metadata to other companies," though, and in most cases consumers will care that there is an audit rather than caring what's in the audit.