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Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

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Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#101

Post by gosub100 »

thrwaway1985882 wrote: post #88
ortichic wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would such an attack work?

The threat actor most use to talk about this is a global passive adversary: a threat actor who can see all relevant traffic on the Internet but who can't decrypt or adjust the traffic. This adversary would have the ability to ingest massive amounts of data and metadata[0] it acquires from tier 1 ISPs all over the country[1] and the world[2]. They'll not see raw HTTP traffic because most everything of interest is encr…

Could they go to synchronous packet transfer and static payloads?

- users only ever talk to nodes in 8kb chunks, and they TX/RX 12 packets per second.

- nodes only talk to each other in 128kb chunks. Up to 8x / second, no lower than 1x/second

Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#102

Post by abound »

dizhn wrote: post #94
layer8 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory, there could still be a possibility to track through the retailers who bought which one-time code (or have particular buyers be sent particular codes). But Mullvad also simply accepts cash by mail.

There's a new privacy focused entitlement proving thingy now. The first implementation is by cloudflare I believe but Kagi also just went live with it. The name escapes me at this mobile moment.

Privacy Pass!

Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#103

Post by zikduruqe »

Nyr wrote: post #43
ortichic wrote: post #32

What happened if some government agency were to order both Obscura and Mullvad to log a certain user or certain activities? Wouldn't it be possible to combine those logs? If it isn't: would that change if Obscura was ordered to also use a separate Mullvad account for a specific user/IP?

Governments do not even need any of the providers to comply, they can access global NetFlow data. This is conveniently not discussed by any commercial VPN provider.

Honestly, paying for a VPN is just purchasing slow internet speeds at a premium.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_b8Z2kAFyY

Just use Tor.

Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#104

Post by hirvi74 »

staticelf wrote: post #82
arccy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

careful not to mail them from close to home, or have any handwriting, or leave any fingerprints

Doesn't matter if you use Windows / Mac because it will ping their services before you jump on the VPN and it will know the before IP and the IP after. :)

My boy, Tim Cook, ain't a snitch though. (At least, I hope not).

Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#106

Post by push0ret »

Nyr wrote: post #43
ortichic wrote: post #32

What happened if some government agency were to order both Obscura and Mullvad to log a certain user or certain activities? Wouldn't it be possible to combine those logs? If it isn't: would that change if Obscura was ordered to also use a separate Mullvad account for a specific user/IP?

Governments do not even need any of the providers to comply, they can access global NetFlow data. This is conveniently not discussed by any commercial VPN provider.

Could you protect against NetFlow analysis by pushing a bunch of noise over the VPN tunnel at all times? I'd assume it would at least make the analysis significantly more challenging.

Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#107

Post by ziddoap »

zikduruqe wrote: post #103
Nyr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments do not even need any of the providers to comply, they can access global NetFlow data. This is conveniently not discussed by any commercial VPN provider.

Honestly, paying for a VPN is just purchasing slow internet speeds at a premium. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_b8Z2kAFyY Just use Tor.

This over-simplification misses different threat models and situtations where a VPN is a good fit and Tor is not.

Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#108

Post by theon144 »

0xEF wrote: post #25
bdhcuidbebe wrote: post #18

Wanna know about something cool? Tor i offers real untraceable anonymity and is 100% free.

It was also developed by the United States Navy and has been criticized for not being as secure as it claims it is. This should come as no surprise since the US military and agencies have a history of demanding backdoors in software, which just means more attack vectors for outsiders to sniff out. I make no claims that commercial VPNs are more secure, but at least they have some level of interest in keeping their pro…

>It was also developed by the United States Navy

Cool, sounds like an organization that is heavily incentivized to make their communication hard to intercept and eavesdrop on.

Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#109

Post by dizhn »

abound wrote: post #102
dizhn wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a new privacy focused entitlement proving thingy now. The first implementation is by cloudflare I believe but Kagi also just went live with it. The name escapes me at this mobile moment.

Privacy Pass!

Yes. Very exciting tech.

Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#110

Post by immibis »

Run_DOS_Run wrote: post #64
immibis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This comment is wrong and not funny. 1) you didn't read path selection constraints: https://spec.torproject.org/path-spec/path-selection-constra... >We do not choose more than one router in a given network range, which defaults to /16 for IPv4 and /32 for IPv6. (C Tor overrides this with EnforceDistinctSubnets; Arti overrides this with ipv[46]_subnet_family_prefix.) 2) There is currently no exit-node hosted at Hetzne…

1) Hetzner has more than one /16. Probably not in the same rack though. Might be adjacent rows. Organizations which have their own IP ranges can use them at Hetzner, too.

2) Exit circuits are not the only type of circuit.

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