Technology

58143 readers

5296 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

497

Novel attack against virtually all VPN apps neuters their entire purpose (arstechnica.com)

submitted 4 months ago by jeffw@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

136 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Read this part more carefully:

By pushing routes that are more specific than a /0 CIDR range that most VPNs use, we can make routing rules that have a higher priority than the routes for the virtual interface the VPN creates.

Most traffic gets sent through a VPN only because of a default gateway (set by the VPN) in the client's routing table. If the client's ISP were to have their DHCP server set one or more specific routes that are broad enough to cover most of the global address space, they would effectively override that default gateway. I believe that's the scenario described in the article.

Note that the "ISP" here could be a mobile operator, an internet cafe, an airport, someone running a wifi access point that looks like the airport's, or a guest on the same local network running an unauthorized DHCP server.