this post was submitted on 09 May 2024
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In light of the recent TunnelVision vulnerability I wanted to share a simple firewall that I wrote for wireguard VPNs.

https://codeberg.org/xabadak/wg-lockdown

If you use a fancy official VPN client from Mullvad, PIA, etc, you won't need this since most clients already have a kill switch built in (also called Lockdown Mode in Mullvad). This is if you use a barebones wireguard VPN like me, or if your VPN client has a poorly-designed kill switch (like NordVPN, more info here).

A firewall should mitigate the vulnerability, though it does create a side-channel that can be exploited in extremely unlikely circumstances, so a better solution would be to use network namespaces (more info here). Unfortunately I'm a noob and I couldn't find any scripts or tools to do it that way.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I thought TunnelVision applies to all VPN users that don't use firewall / network namespaces

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It doesn't apply to Linux unless you do split tunnel, which no commercial VPN configs use, because it doesn't make sense to

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

why is a split tunnel relevant? I thought all VPNs are vulnerable unless they use a firewall like I do, or network namespaces.

At least the way I understand it, a normal VPN redirects your internet traffic to instead go through a virtual network interface, which then encrypts and sends your traffic through the VPN. This attack uses a malicious DHCP server to inject routes into your system, redirecting traffic to the attacker instead of towards the virtual network interface.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

A separate routing table that takes precedence over the one modified by DHCP should works as well I think. Oh, and of course you have to use a vpn that forces its own nameserver or set one manually to prevent redirections.