Virtual private networking (VPN) companies market their services as a way to prevent anyone from snooping on your Internet usage. But new research suggests this is a dangerous assumption when connecting to a VPN via an untrusted network, because attackers on the same network could force a target’s traffic off of the protection provided by their VPN without triggering any alerts to the user.

This won’t mitigate this specific attack, however running your VPN as a full tunnel will.

Full tunnel would not mitigate this attack because smaller routes are preferred over larger ones. So, sure, 0.0.0.0/0 is routed over the tunnel, but a route for 8.8.8.8/32 pointing to somewhere layer2 adjacent, pushed via DHCP option 121, would supercede that due to being more specific.

Full tunnel using routing wouldn’t work but many full tunnel implementations use a shim where once the Tunnel is connected, the system route table isn’t referenced anymore, so you can put as many static routes etc as you want, but all traffic will hit the VPN interface before routing is done. For example Cisco any connect removes route look-up from the TCP/IP stack of the local system.

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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