I think the value proposition that VPN services offer is twofold:
1) As mentioned, they enable location spoofing.
I have certainly VPNd back into my home router when away on business
trips in order that I can get bbc.co.uk without Adverts and iPlayer.
In addition, there are numerous US local government websites that I have
to use for work purposes that only permit connections from US geolocated
IP addresses and my company internet gateway is in france which causes
issues. As such, I have my own http(s) proxy hosted in us-east AWS with
some rules on my local proxy which forwards certain domains to the US
proxy (over ipsec) so that those websites see me as being in us-east
whilst the majority of my web traffic still goes out locally.
2) it (maybe mostly historically) was a benefit when connecting over
untrusted / insecure public wifi. These days virtually everything is
encrypted so this is probably less important but a signficant amount of
DNS and SNI is still in the clear so people could metadata enumerate
what you were up to on public wifi without a VPN (obviously the risk is
dependent on how paranoid you are.... plus you'd have to trust your VPN
provider and their upstreams because they could do the deed also....)
On 01/10/2024 12:27, Hugh Frater wrote:
Pretty much my thoughts entirely. The only benefit I can see is the ability
to spoof your geolocation to get round restrictions on streaming services.
I connect to my workplace VPN when I’m overseas specifically so that
iplayer and other stuff works 🤣
All traffic to/from most websites is running over https anyway.
Sent from my iPhone
On Tue, 1 Oct 2024 at 09:27, Terry Coles <d-...@hadrian-way.co.uk> wrote:
OK. A slightly tongue-in-cheek question, but I'd like to know what
people think.
I am fully familiar with the use of a VPN in a corporate setting, and as
many of you will know, I've implemented a VPN at the Wimborne Model
Town. However, the benefits of those use cases are clear; a network of
devices in a remote location may be secured much more effectively than
simply by using passwords, etc, and the traffic to and from the network
is encrypted. The result; the remote network is private (hence the name).
However, I've always looked upon the commercial offerings of VPN
services with a pinch of salt. AFAICT, the only private part of the
network that they create is the provider's own servers, so the only
benefits that I can see are being able to spoof your IP address and
having encrypted data to and from your device. On the other hand, the
user is granting permissions and privileges to the provider that may be
exploited by them, thus reducing security, not improving it.
The reason for this query is that we use Bitdefender antivirus on our
phones and tablets and this app also includes a VPN service. My wife
tried to enable 'Web protection' on her IPadOS tablet and got the
response that VPN had to be enabled to do this. On my Android devices,
I do not have to do this (in fact, VPN is a separate install).
I'd be interested to hear your comments.
--
Terry Coles
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