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Linux under WSL2 can be leaking

mullvad.net

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Re: Linux under WSL2 can be leaking

#61

Post by chmod775 »

ss3000 wrote: post #53
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #16

A bit off topic, but this sort of transparency is why I don't mind paying $6 / mo for a vpn when mullvad's competitors are much cheaper. Their wireguard support is great, and their speeds are much faster than what I got through openVpn on pia.

I love everything about Mullvad except their device limit, which is unfortunately a deal breaker for me. 5 is completely inadequate for my use cases.

Mullvad uses the superior way of not having a real account at all - you just get a number you can "deposit" money into.

It's the only way they can reliably prevent abuse like a thousand people using one number - because this way you can just track the number of open connections per account number.

This is superior to tracking IP-addresses to detect fraud for obvious privacy reasons. I do a similar thing for a service I run.

Out of curiosity, how do you even manage to use more than five devices for private use at once? Even just owning that many is unlikely.

Re: Linux under WSL2 can be leaking

#62

Post by shmerl »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #35
shmerl wrote: post #11

Using WSL should be a very last resort anyway. Just use Linux straight on your hardware if you have a choice and ditch Windows.

Yeah I've never understood the use case there exactly....

One use case MS thought of was to give excuse to lazy corporate IT not to support Linux on the desktop, to prevent Windows usage dropping among developers. I think that was their main intent.

Re: Linux under WSL2 can be leaking

#63

Post by shmerl »

garethrowlands wrote: post #55
Bedon292 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WSL is actually really good. To me, it gives you the best of both worlds. Linux for dev stuff, Windows for GUI and games. And its actual Linux, so I am dev'ing a little closer to prod than those on Macs. But that's less of a factor now everything is in Docker and we are all using the same containers. I also feel I have a superior Docker (runs on WSL2) experience to them, better interface and much better battery life.…

One reason to move off of Windows would be running graphical Linux apps. But that'll change soon.

If you are playing games on Linux, WSL doesn't help anything for sure, it only adds overhead.

Re: Linux under WSL2 can be leaking

#64

Post by [deleted] »

roywiggins wrote: post #54
monadic2 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea but a whole fraud department of humans emits a ton of carbon. There's no way the banking and finance industry doesn't compete emissions wise with bitcoin.

Fraud departments provide a pretty useful service to consumers. The existing finance system is so much larger than the Bitcoin economy that it's no surprise if they, in total, rival Bitcoin in energy intensity. It processes orders of magnitude more transactions and provides other services that people use that have no Bitcoin equivalents. This isn't a defense of the modern financial system, which is arguably a trash f…

[deleted]

Re: Linux under WSL2 can be leaking

#65

Post by Bedon292 »

garethrowlands wrote: post #55
Bedon292 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WSL is actually really good. To me, it gives you the best of both worlds. Linux for dev stuff, Windows for GUI and games. And its actual Linux, so I am dev'ing a little closer to prod than those on Macs. But that's less of a factor now everything is in Docker and we are all using the same containers. I also feel I have a superior Docker (runs on WSL2) experience to them, better interface and much better battery life.…

One reason to move off of Windows would be running graphical Linux apps. But that'll change soon.

Yeah, I do have a narrow focus though and don't use any Linux GUI apps. Its been a while, but if you run an X11 Server on Windows you can make many things work, though definitely not all of them. And I know its getting better. I tend to live in VSCode though, and that natively works with WSL under the hood.

Probably going to check out this for GUI stuff again soon: https://github.com/cascadium/wsl-windows-toolbar-launcher

Re: Linux under WSL2 can be leaking

#66

Post by johnisgood »

Barrin92 wrote: post #59
monadic2 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea but a whole fraud department of humans emits a ton of carbon. There's no way the banking and finance industry doesn't compete emissions wise with bitcoin.

>There's no way the banking and finance industry doesn't compete emissions wise with bitcoin not on a per transaction basis, which is the only relevant measure because the banking system supports a lot more people than bitcoin does. A single bitcoin transaction uses 610.20 kWh right now, which is comparable to the energy consumption of an average US household over 20 days.[1] Also for a comparison of scope, Tenpay, T…

I cannot wait for nuclear fusion to finally be here so people will stop worrying about the electricity consumption, and high consumption will not mean pollution or whatever.

Re: Linux under WSL2 can be leaking

#67

Post by [deleted] »

roywiggins wrote: post #54
monadic2 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea but a whole fraud department of humans emits a ton of carbon. There's no way the banking and finance industry doesn't compete emissions wise with bitcoin.

Fraud departments provide a pretty useful service to consumers. The existing finance system is so much larger than the Bitcoin economy that it's no surprise if they, in total, rival Bitcoin in energy intensity. It processes orders of magnitude more transactions and provides other services that people use that have no Bitcoin equivalents. This isn't a defense of the modern financial system, which is arguably a trash f…

[deleted]

Re: Linux under WSL2 can be leaking

#68

Post by ss3000 »

chmod775 wrote: post #61
ss3000 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love everything about Mullvad except their device limit, which is unfortunately a deal breaker for me. 5 is completely inadequate for my use cases.

Mullvad uses the superior way of not having a real account at all - you just get a number you can "deposit" money into. It's the only way they can reliably prevent abuse like a thousand people using one number - because this way you can just track the number of open connections per account number. This is superior to tracking IP-addresses to detect fraud for obvious privacy reasons. I do a similar thing for a service…

As much as I appreciate Mullvad's stance around privacy, I don't actually use a VPN for privacy (I use Tor for that), but mostly for bypassing geo-restrictions on my entertainment devices for games and streaming services and whatnot.

For that use case, I can't justify paying double/triple the price as other providers that offer 2/3x the devices for the same price. The provider I use now, Surfshark, offers unlimited devices for about 1/3 of the price, and also recently started offering WireGuard, it would be financially irresponsible for me to choose Mullvad which would effectively 10x what I'm paying right now for the same number of devices.

FWIW I understand that their account number mechanism is superior from a privacy perspective, and that there's no way to support unlimited devices while combating fraud using that mechanism. It's just not the right set of tradeoffs for my use case.

Re: Linux under WSL2 can be leaking

#69

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

Bedon292 wrote: post #42

Docker on Windows can run on WSL2 backend as well. So I assume this would also apply to Docker traffic too. Other interesting note, Docker Windows does some funky stuff with firewalls too. It puts and any/any exception in the firewall when you install it [1]. So may also be important to know with VPN stuff. [1] https://twitter.com/richturn_ms/status/1270766764356366336

> Other interesting note, Docker Windows does some funky stuff with firewalls too. It puts and any/any exception in the firewall when you install it

It does something similar on Linux, actually. Huge pain when trying to firewall servers only to discover that Docker happily bypasses all of your rules.

Re: Linux under WSL2 can be leaking

#70

Post by jeroenhd »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #18
jeroenhd wrote: post #5

Potential workaround: is it possible to configure VPN clients to _ignore_ the WSL2 runtime and instead run a VPN client inside WSL2? That way the Linux network config can deal with the Linux side of things and the Windows network config can deal with the Windows VPN routing. Of course you can just configure OpenVPN inside WSL2 and also run a VPN on the desktop but that's tunnels in tunnels and that way madness and ne…

If I read it correctly that wouldn't be tunnels in tunnels. It would be 2 separate tunnels side by side. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. WSL2 is basically a VM and any VM which binds directly to the Adapter (e.g. not NAT mode) will have the same behaviour. In some cases you'd even want it to do this.

If I read the article correctly, the traffic only leaks when the VPN disconnects or reconnects. This means the default situation would be a tunnel inside a tunnel.

WSL2's NAT is close to a standard Hyper-V NAT adapter but there's unexpected differences (like the localhost binding) that make it stand out.

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