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VPN Flaw Shows Users' IP Addresses

Posted by Soulskill on from the illusion-of-privacy dept.

AHuxley writes "A VPN flaw announced at the Telecomix Cyphernetics Assembly in Sweden allows individual users to be identified. 'The flaw is caused by a combination of IPv6, which is a new Internet protocol due to replace the current IPv4, and PPTP (point-to-point tunneling protocol)-based VPN services, which are the most widely used. ... The flaw means that the IP address of a user hiding behind a VPN can still be found, thanks to the connection broadcasting information that can be used to identify it. It's also relatively easy to find a MAC address (which identifies a particular device) and a computer's name on the network that it's on.' The Swedish anti-piracy bureau could already be gathering data using the exploit."

5 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Re:garbage in, garbage out... by dotgain · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And it's just as sensible as spoofing your home address when ordering pizza that you ultimately want to eat.

  2. Re:Tor by Rijnzael · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I seriously doubt any reasonable level of donations will ever allow the Tor network to add the kind of capacity required to torrent. I think it has many more important needs than that anyway.

  3. Re:Tor by TheRealMindChild · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Not only that, but Tor isn't nearly as secure as most people think it is

    --

    "When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
  4. Re:Tor by bsDaemon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    In order to have a web of trust, don't you need to be able to establish the identity of the other people in your web to a reasonable degree of certainty? Wouldn't verifiable identities undermine the concept of anonymity that is the whole purpose of Tor?

  5. Re:garbage in, garbage out... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    "Spoofing" an IP address will tend to cause the packets to be delivered to the wrong place.

    On a very different note, it is worth remembering that MAC addresses are embedded in the IPv6 address. If these guys are presenting the idea that you can get a MAC address from an IP address (in IPv6) as a new security flaw, they obviously haven't been reading the RFCs. Why the #*%! do these morons think people are so reluctant to switch to IPv6? Because it makes it very hard to obscure a machine on the Internet, and since there's no built-in security on the Internet ...