Comment by vectorEQ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vectorEQ | Hacker News Reader

could have obtained 'records' live instead of from logs... vpn provider can easy break your crypto if they need to, mitm you and get cleartext 'records' from live data. that being said, i think most vpn providers log because they are forced to do so by law. if you dont want your vpn provder to play along with fbi or nsa, try a russian one or so... they will cooperate with other agencies though ^^...

probarbly some lame story will come back if any , by purevpn, as if fbi did some mitms from their services / on their services, they would probarbly not be allowed to speak of the details of how this was done and what was done..

purpose of vpn is to hide your location mainly, if u want it to protect u from your countries agencies, don't pick one in your own country and be very specific on what one you chose... >.> seems like a case of poor choice and awareness on the user's part more than the vpn provider, who is probarbly unable to stop these kind of intrustions by the agencies without getting taken down...

> if u want it to protect u from your countries agencies, don't pick one in your own country and be very specific on what one you chose

Why just use one? Go to a Russian one, then tunnel everything through a US one, then to a German one

TorVPN

Isn't tor painfully slow? (where bouncing from VM to VM isn't as slow)

> vpn provider can easy break your crypto if they need to, mitm you and get cleartext 'records' from live data.

Could you elaborate on that? I'm going to China soon and don't know if I should trust commercial VPN providers. I was under the impression that if I use SSL/TLS it's impossible to MITM my connection.

If an entity can mint certificates that are signed and appear legit then MITM is possible. We so many certificate authorities now it is possible that are certificate trust is failing us or can fail us.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/googl...

Google chrome can detect a google cert that is not legitimate because it has embedded the certificate fingerprints in the browser for its public certs. We don't have that benefit elsewhere.

Might some state actors have cert signing ability. You be the judge.

If someone has the private key to a trusted root certificate, they can forge the certificates for any TLS connections you make.

The countermeasure is certificate pinning, but that is typically implemented only for a handful of sites; e.g. Google with Chrome.

Didn't China just recently ban VPNs?

They "ban" them for the last 20 years, but it's like baning encryption. Cat is already out of the bag.

Hey,

It's not that simple - it depends on the implementation, otherwise if your browser trusts root cert which was issued by chinese gov, what's to stop them doing the mitm? I mean, they issued the cert.

However to mitigate this, VPN providers (some of them) implement checks to make sure they only trust particular root certs, which makes doing mitm much harder.

Re your trip to China I would not be worried about that though - 30 % of Internet users in China are using VPN's daily so it's not like you will be flagged and get locked for using a VPN. Pick one of the reputable ones (NordVPN?) and you should be good.

It may be impossible to MITM your connection. However, it is entirely possible for the authorities to just prevent the connection from working in the first place.

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