At the same time, users would be able to choose the combination of technologies that better suit their needs. We believe that a more privacy conscious customer base would force VPN service providers to take serious actions towards securing their services and clients against issues that have been known to the community for a long time. “In order to improve the current situation it is of primary importance to better reach out to the general public through active information campaigns. “Throughout this study we realised that another worrying aspect of today’s market of VPN services is the large misinformation end users are exposed to, which makes it hard for them to properly tell apart vague and bold claims typical of product advertisement campaigns with actual facts,” they noted. They also pointed out that although enterprise VPNs might be exposed to these attacks, their impact is rather limited compared to commercial VPN services. The researchers have also offered possible countermeasures to prevent IPv6 leakage and DNS hijacking, but noted that for anonymity and privacy, users should turn to Tor, not VPNs. What’s more, they found that by mounting a DNS hijacking attack that exploits a key vulnerability in many VPN configurations can lead to a substantial amount of IPv4 traffic being leaked from the VPN tunnel. They discovered that many of the services still rely on outdated tech that can be easily broken through brute-force attacks, that most of the VPNs clients suffer from data leakage in dual stack networks, that significant amounts of traffic are exposed to public detection, and that the small amount of IPv6 traffic leaking outside of the VPN tunnel has the potential to actually expose the whole user browsing history even on IPv4 only websites.
VPN IPV6 DNS LEAK AIRVPN WINDOWS
All these features are meant for Windows users as they are more likely to experience DNS.
Alongside this feature are other options to Force all network interfaces for DNS and Ignore IPv6 DNS pushed by server. The researchers registered credentials with the services, explored their infrastructure, the tunnelling technology they use, and their client software. The VPN goes further to ensure that your original DNS is not exposed by providing an automatic DNS leak protection feature. They found that ten of them leak IP data, and all except one are vulnerable to IPv6 DNS hijacking attacks (click on the screenshot to enlarge it):
VPN IPV6 DNS LEAK AIRVPN HOW TO
Each router is different but most have the ability to turn IPv6 completely off - in that case, you won't have to change anything in your devices.įor information on how to disable it on your router, check your router's user manual.Virtual Private Network (VPN) services can be used for circumventing Internet censorship and accessing blocked content, but researchers warn that you shouldn’t believe the companies’ claims that they offer privacy and anonymity.Ī group of researchers from the Sapienza University (Rome) and Queen Mary University (London) have recently tested 14 of the most popular commercial VPN services: Hide My Ass, IPVanish, Astrill, ExpressVPN, StrongVPN, PureVPN, TorGuard, AirVPN, PrivateInternetAccess, VyprVPN, Tunnelbear, proXPN, Mullvad, and Hotspot Shield Elite. You can disable IPv6 in your network completely by changing your router configuration. IPv6 Man-in-the-Middle through Router Advertisement This has been discussed for years and there are several exploitation tools available to mount an attack yet awareness of the problem seems to be very very low. How else can you protect yourself from IPv6 leak? The paper discusses two separate attacks: 1. You can read more about it here: ĭepending on your device and/or network, you can disable the usage of IPv6 altogether - in 99.9% cases it will have no extra effect on your internet usage - IPv6 adoption process is slow, and almost all services allow access through IPv4. NordVPN has integrated IPv6 leak protection. How does NordVPN protect you from IPv6 leaks? It can happen even if you are using a VPN but this is not the case with NordVPN. This is where IPv6 leak may happen - the requests you are sending to that website or service will contain both your IPv4 and IPv6 IP addresses. Here is a real-life example: your ISP is using both protocols and you are connecting to some website or service which supports only IPv4. Most of the current websites support only IPv4, while there are quite a few internet service providers (ISPs) that support both IPv4 and IPv6.