CVE-2024-3661: TunnelVision - How Attackers Can Decloak Routing-Based VPNs For a Total VPN Leak — Leviathan Security Group - Penetration Testing, Security Assessment, Risk Advisory
www.leviathansecurity.com
We discovered a fundamental design problem in VPNs and we're calling it TunnelVision. This problem lets someone see what you're doing online, even if you think you're safely using a VPN.
  • Emotet@slrpnk.net
    22·
    6 months ago

    Interesting read.

    So, in short:

    • The attacker needs to have access to your LAN and become the DHCP server, e.g. by a starvation attack or timing attacks
    • The attacked host system needs to support DHCP option 121 (atm basically every OS except Android)
    • by abusing DHCP option 121, the attacker can push routes to the attacked host system that supersede other rules in most network stacks by having a more specific prefix, e.g. a 192.168.1.1/32 will supersede 0.0.0.0/0
    • The attacker can now force the attacked host system to route the traffic intended for a VPN virtual network interface (to be encrypted and forwarded to the VPN server) to the (physical) interface used for DHCP
    • This leads to traffic intended to be sent over the VPN to not get encrypted and being sent outside the tunnel.
    • This attack can be used before or after a VPN connection is established
    • Since the VPN tunnel is still established, any implemented kill switch doesn’t get triggered

    DHCP option 121 is still used for a reason, especially in business networks. At least on Linux, using network namespaces will fix this. Firewall mitigations can also work, but create other (very theoretical) attack surfaces.