Hello Jan,

Thanks for your reply.

> Sent: Friday, December 16, 2016 at 2:24 PM
> From: "Jan Just Keijser" <[email protected]>
> To: "Sebastian Rubenstein" <[email protected]>, 
> [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [Openvpn-users] Keywords to look for that may indicate a VPN 
> provider is providing strong encryption/decryption?
>
> -  you can add 'remote-cert-tls server' yourself and if your VPN does 
> not come up (i.e. the server fails this test) then I'd *not* trust the 
> server or the VPN provider

Thank you again. This is a significant piece of information for me :)

> - tls-auth + key-direction is nice but it adds a false sense of 
> security: as discussed earlier, tls-auth is based on a pre-shared secret 
> amongst *ALL* VPN clients - this means that anybody that subscribed to 
> that particular VPN provider at some point the past probably has that 
> tls-auth key file. You can also bet that security services (FBI, NSA 
> etc) will have that tls-auth key already. The only extra benefit of 
> having the tls-auth file is that it prevents some DDoS flooding attacks, 
> mostly against the *server*.

I really appreciate your taking the time to explain the above to me.

It seems to me that using the --tls-auth key file is not good for security at 
all as an expert had earlier replied that anyone who has the --tls-auth key 
file could inject malicious packets. What viable alternatives would you propose 
please?

> - a private key size of 4096 does not mean anything. What is more 
> important is that the CA certificate used to sign the client and server 
> certs is 4096 bits (or EC based) and that the remaining certs 
> (intermediate, server, client) are at least 2048 bit in strength; 
> Increasing the strenght beyond that is useless for now (RSA 2048 has not 
> been broken yet) and it will only slow things down.
> 
There is no way for a customer like me to get hold of my VPN provider's server 
and intermediate certificates to check if the cipher strength is at least 2048 
bits, correct?

Regards.

Sebastian

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