News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Being privacy-aware in 2016 by wongarsu on Monday June 06, 2016 @08:54AM (#11846388)
It depends on your goal. For privacy, a self-hosted VPN is a nightmare. To prevent sniffing and/or modification of content, a self-hosted VPN is great (your VPS company is less likely to target VPN traffic than a dedicated VPN provider).

I think a reputable VPN provider offers the better tradeoff, but there are legitimate reasons for self-hosting a VPN.

Re:Being privacy-aware in 2016 by nowherecat on Monday June 06, 2016 @09:50AM (#11846714)
could you please explain why a self-hosted vpn is a nightmare for privacy? i am running a streisand server and the disk is fully encrypted
Re:Being privacy-aware in 2016 by halomru on Monday June 06, 2016 @11:39AM (#11847570)
With a VPS-self-hosted VPN all your connections to the outside originate from a static, unique, unshared IP, making it trivial to track and correlate your behavior across all protocols. Instead of containable identifiers like cookies, your IP has become a guaranteed unique identifier.

To leverage this, it's fairly easy to detect you're on a self-hosted VPN: your IP is in an IP range assigned to a hosting/colocation provider, is not a TOR proxy (there is a public list of those) and doesn't belong to any remotely popular VPN (easy to enumerate for a little money, lots of lists exist).

In exchange for that you have eliminated your ISP (or public wifi) as a threat but instead added the hosting provider to the list of threads. And for any adversary that stands above the law, the routing infrastructure of your hosting provider is already a valuable target.

Re:Being privacy-aware in 2016 by nowherecat on Monday June 06, 2016 @02:16PM (#11848941)
thanks. so basically there is no way to hide the addresses i access through my vpn from the provider of my dedicated server? would it help if i used non logging encryped dns server?
Re:Being privacy-aware in 2016 by vox_mollis on Monday June 06, 2016 @11:02AM (#11847256)
Because you're moving the "exit" from your non-anonymous local ISP to your non-anonymous colo provider. If you want to hide your traffic or at least make your adversary work a little to determine who you are, shared VPN endpoints are better.
Re:Being privacy-aware in 2016 by philsnow on Monday June 06, 2016 @11:42AM (#11847598)
How is that any different? ISPs don't let just anybody know who the subscriber is at a given IP (though if you do reverse lookups, many ISPs so leak a lot of locality information, so still a good idea to use some VPN instead of no VPN).

My Streisand hosted on AWS looks to the outside like anybody else's Streisand hosted on AWS, doesn't it?

Similarly, my f-secure egress looks like anybody else's f-secure egress, so what's the difference?

I don't really know, I don't use a VPN. Really asking.

Re:Being privacy-aware in 2016 by vox_mollis on Monday June 06, 2016 @12:24PM (#11847947)
ISPs don't let just anybody know who the subscriber is at a given IP

They certainly let law enforcement and intelligence agencies know, often without a warrant.

Please read my comment as if the threat model includes panopticon governments, not common skids running aircrack-ng.

Re:Being privacy-aware in 2016 by philsnow on Monday June 06, 2016 @07:47PM (#11851419)
And reputable VPN vendors resist efforts by nation states to procure information about subscribers? I would expect to have to pay a handsome fee for that.

(I'm not saying you're wrong; again I've not really thought about having to thoroughly anonymize my own traffic.)