iOS VPNs Have Leaked Traffic For More Than 2 Years, Researcher Claims
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
A security researcher says that Apple's iOS devices don't fully route all network traffic through VPNs, a potential security issue the device maker has known about for years.
Michael Horowitz, a longtime computer security blogger and researcher, puts it plainly-if contentiously-in a continually updated blog post. "VPNs on iOS are broken," he says.
Any third-party VPN seems to work at first, giving the device a new IP address, DNS servers, and a tunnel for new traffic, Horowitz writes. But sessions and connections established before a VPN is activated do not terminate and, in Horowitz's findings with advanced router logging, can still send data outside the VPN tunnel while it's active.
In other words, you'd expect a VPN to kill existing connections before establishing a connection so they can be re-established inside the tunnel. But iOS VPNs can't seem to do this, Horowitz says, a finding that is backed up by a similar report from May 2020.
"Data leaves the iOS device outside of the VPN tunnel," Horowitz writes. "This is not a classic/legacy DNS leak, it is a data leak. I confirmed this using multiple types of VPN and software from multiple VPN providers. The latest version of iOS that I tested with is 15.6."
Privacy company Proton previously reported an iOS VPN bypass vulnerability that started at least in iOS 13.3.1. Like Horowitz's post, ProtonVPN's blog noted that a VPN typically closes all existing connections and reopens them inside a VPN tunnel, but that didn't happen on iOS. Most existing connections will eventually end up inside the tunnel, but some, like Apple's push notification service, can last for hours.
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