I contacted Proton VPN about the TunnelVision exploit and I got a response. I feel great about it, thank you Proton!
Hi,
Thank you for your patience.
Our engineers have conducted a thorough analysis of this threat, reconstructed it experimentally, and tested it on Proton VPN. Please note that the attack can only be carried out if the local network itself is compromised.
Regardless, we’re working on a fix for our Linux application that will provide full protection against it, and it’ll be released as soon as possible.
If there’s anything else that I can help you with in the meantime, please feel free to let me know.
Have a nice day!
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Please note that the attack can only be carried out if the local network itself is compromised.
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To be fair if you used it on a public network like an airport or restaurant… yeah
Yeah, it’s kind of incredible the responses I see to this story that are like “bro if they got as far as planting a rogue DHCP server on your network you were already owned anyway, yawn”
Like, you do realize people use VPNs over unsecured WiFi all the time right? That’s one of the primary use cases. You can’t guarantee every network hasn’t been compromised.
Armchair netsec quarterbacks need to get out more.
If I learned one thing from TunnelVision, it’s how blindly people are operating right now. If you open a VPN tunnel, also ensure traffic is actually routed through it, especially if you don’t control the network. Adding a tunnel on top of the insecure network also does not protect your client from other malicious clients on that network. I feel like people have seen one too many VPN snake oil salesman on social media.
“you don’t want hackers getting your IP address!”
VPN marketing is a problem.
Yep, https://dnsleaktest.com is your friend
I’ve been on this pedestal for years. Pop security YouTube has been overtly preying on rubes to sell shady VPN services for a decade now and it’s super cringe. There is no magic bullet to cyber security and it takes real effort and knowledge to be safe.
I am skeptical of this being viable on public Wi-Fi tbh. You’d need to know ahead of time which VPN servers the target will attempt to contact, some information about the target ahead of time, and you need to DHCP poison the entire network prior to the target connecting. That would effectively bring down the network for all but two hosts - the attacker and target.
I mean at that point, you can also just repeatedly deauth the target until it connects to your spoofed network and do whatever you want, and it would be way less obvious to an outside observer.
I think it’s because lot of us have been just kind of over-exposed to things like this. It’s like, yes, I’d imagine you could do a lot of interesting stuff if you’ve already compromised everything else first, thanks pen test. This one is not quite at that level, but I think we’re all just exhausted with similar ones, ya know.
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Your derogatory tone and little-dick energy is hilariously over-the-top and just completely unwarranted. Go big or go home eh?
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The exploit is possible because the local network may have a rogue DHCP server overwriting IP routes. If you’re on a mobile network, they are the local network. TunnelVision means a mobile carrier can spy on your VPN traffic now. Unless you run Android.
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I’m a bit confused how this is considered a new vulnerability. The IETF RFC which proposes option 121 literally states that malicious DHCP servers could be used to redirect traffic to malicious hosts, and I’m fairly confident that we learned about this exact thing in CCNA school in like 2003 (with regards to router configuration security).
I suppose the application to a VPN attack might be relatively novel?
I think the new thing is that VPN usage is fairly mainstream now. There are lots of services that advertise themselves as having the ability to hide all traffic. It’s certainly news to me, as I hadn’t even heard of a VPN in 2003. The researchers do say that this has been possible since 2002.
I thought that it doesn’t affect linux and android.
It doesn’t affect Android and Linux is the only OS with the possibility of a fix. I’ve seen people suppose that Android just always ignores option 121. My guess for Linux is that, because system level changes are allowed, you can modify the system to ignore option 121.
I’m not a network engineer, so I do not know this for sure. Does anyone else know more about it?