VPN Flaw Shows Users' IP Addresses 124
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by
Soulskill
from the illusion-of-privacy dept.
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."
Re:garbage in, garbage out... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Tor (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Tor (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Tor (Score:3, 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?
Re:garbage in, garbage out... (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 ...