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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: May 9th, 2024

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  • Yeah TOR is an example of a mixnet. WHat I was talking about was a combination of your Scenario A and Scenario B, where you have a mixnet where everybody’s traffic goes through multiple proxies, and many people are using each proxy, and you have padding and timing added to make sure traffic flows are consistent. As far as trusting nodes, you have to do that regardless of your set up. If you don’t use any VPN, you have to trust your ISP. If you use a VPN like Mullvad, you have to trust Mullvad. If you use a mixnet, you have to trust that all your chosen proxies aren’t colluding. So like you said, it’s up to your own judgement and threat model.


  • why is a split tunnel relevant? I thought all VPNs are vulnerable unless they use a firewall like I do, or network namespaces.

    At least the way I understand it, a normal VPN redirects your internet traffic to instead go through a virtual network interface, which then encrypts and sends your traffic through the VPN. This attack uses a malicious DHCP server to inject routes into your system, redirecting traffic to the attacker instead of towards the virtual network interface.









  • Actually my firewall is persistent, just like many of the other good VPN clients, so “kill switch” is a bit of a misnomer. Which is why I called it wg-lockdown, named after Mullvad’s lockdown mode. Persistent firewalls are effective, they just add a very tiny side-channel, as discussed in the link in my post. I just used the terms “kill switch” in my post because that’s what many other people use.

    Though the point about the LAN is a good point, I didn’t consider that. I added LAN access because without it, the firewall was interfering with the networking of my docker container and virtual machines, which use local subnets. Even the official Mullvad client has issues with this. What do you recommend in this case? Manually whitelist the local subnets used by docker and my other virtual networks?

    Edit: actually upon reading Mullvad’s statement on TunnelVision, I realized that my firewall is still effective because it only allows traffic directed to LAN IP’s to bypass the VPN. So regular internet traffic will be blocked if the attacker tries to redirect it to the LAN. I’m glad I used Mullvad as a reference implementation 😅