Re:Who Owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN Relationships ...
by extraduder_ire on Tuesday October 07, 2025 @04:22AM
(#45500667)
It may have been fixed since, but I saw a decent talk about this (defcon, IIRC) using Tinder as an example.
Using timing, amounts of data, and what was being connected to, you could recreate what someone was looking at and swiping direction. (left/right sent different amounts of data)
Re:Who Owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN Relationships ...
by TZubiri on Tuesday October 07, 2025 @09:35AM
(#45502887)
ip addresses are not encrypted, they are part of the header, not the body. The mailman needs to know the address.
Re:Who Owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN Relationships ...
by hansvm on Friday October 10, 2025 @09:11PM
(#45545588)
Yes. What I'm saying is that the pattern of data entering the mailbox lets you infer more about the contents than just the sender, especially when you can pattern match against known behavior for that sender.
Toss that into any sort of "anomaly detection" or other such nonsense, and it's easy to create rare edge cases at an ISP level.
It's somewhat analogous to how you can sometimes "reverse" hashes like SHA256. E.g., suppose the thing you're hashing is an IPV4 address. There are only 4 billion of those, so a pre-image attack just iterating through all of them and checking the forward direction of the hash is extremely effective. TLS makes that a little more complicated since the content itself is actually hidden, but time and space side-channels give you a lot of stochastic information. You might not be able to deduce somebody's bank password, but you can probably figure out where in the bank's login flow they are and approximately what they did once they logged in.