If you live in a city or other urban area, typically you have the option of the decoupled telco (BT Openreach) that more or less everybody has, the entity which bought all the cable television companies (Virgin Media) and usually a fibre-for-purpose Internet company that decided to do your city or region.
If you live in a rural area where people are co-operative, there might be a community owned fibre operator plus Opeanreach, otherwise just Openreach.
If you live somewhere very silly, like up a mountain or on your own island, your only practical option will be paying Openreach to do the work.
Edited to add, Notably: Only Openreach is usable by an arbitrary service provider. So if you want to pick your service provider separately, the actual last mile delivery will always be Openreach. And if they're small it won't just be last mile, Openreach also sell backhaul to get your data from some distant city to the place where the ISP's hardware is, you're buying only the, like, actual service. Which is important - mine means no censorship, excellent live support and competent people running everything, but the copper under the ground is not something they're responsible for (though they are better than most at kicking Openreach when it needs kicking)
CityFibre is only available through wholesale ISP's. Other smaller alt-nets (such as the one I work for - Netomnia (including Brsk/YouFibre)) is gearing up to provide wholesale access.
In the UK there are even aggregators like Fibre Café [1] that makes it easier for ISP's to connect through multiple networks.
If you are lucky, yes. For example, I have a choice between CityFibre (XGS-PON), Openreach (GPON) and Virgin Media (DOCSIS) as well as 2 different 5G networks. It is rare for a property to only be covered by a single wired network these days in the UK.
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I had forced ASLR on in windows for a while... You'd be surprised how much stuff breaks with that. Almost feels like more is broken than not. Just to name a few: MinGW (including git for windows), Unity, Whatever installer Framework Signal and some others use, some Anti-Cheats
What happened if some government agency were to order both Obscura and Mullvad to log a certain user or certain activities? Wouldn't it be possible to combine those logs? If it isn't: would that change if Obscura was ordered to also use a separate Mullvad account for a specific user/IP?
Governments do not even need any of the providers to comply, they can access global NetFlow data. This is conveniently not discussed by any commercial VPN provider.
It ultimately depends on your threat model. But assuming a state actor has access to NetFlow data, an attack could work like this:
* State actor determines that an IP belonging to a VPN company had a session on example.com around t1-t2
* You -> VPN server at t1
* VPN server -> example.com at t1+latency
* More traces from both sides until around t2 as you browse the site
By correlating multiple samples, and accounting for latency between you and the VPN server and delay introduced by the VPN itself, they would be able to get decent confidence that it was you.
Basically when you go at the point of state threat actors. Things get real spooky.
The censorship , the what not.
I feel sad that we have given governments such major accesses in the name of unification.
We need more decentralization at the political level & economical level as well (like most money goes to your city , then state , then at the country , very nominal amount)
Let city decide what it wants with major town hall discussions.
The threat actor most use to talk about this is a global passive adversary: a threat actor who can see all relevant traffic on the Internet but who can't decrypt or adjust the traffic.
This adversary would have the ability to ingest massive amounts of data and metadata[0] it acquires from tier 1 ISPs all over the country[1] and the world[2]. They'll not see raw HTTP traffic because most everything of interest is encrypted, but can store and capture (time, srcip, srcport, dstip, dstport, bytes).
From there, it's a statistical attack: user A sent 700 kilobytes to a VPN service at time t; at t+epsilon the VPN connected to bad site B and sent 700 kilobytes+epsilon packets. Capture enough packet flows that span the user, the VPN, and the bad site and you can build statistical confidence that user A is interacting with bad site B, even with the presence of a VPN.
This could go other directions too. If bad site B is a Tor hidden site whose admin gets captured by the FBI and turns over access, they'll be unmasking in reverse – I got packets from Tor relay A, which relay sent packets at time-epsilon to it, (...), to the source.
There's very little you can do to fight this kind of adversary. Adding hops and layers (VPN + VPN, Tor, Tor + VPN, etc.) can only make it harder. It's certainly an expensive attack both in terms of time consumption, storage, and it requires massive amounts of data, but if your threat model includes a global passive adversary, game over.
I'm bearish on introducing noise[0] to resist traffic analysis, and I'm exceptionally bearish when the only layer managing noise injection is "a for-profit entity that can be legally compelled to do things"
But every layer helps; I'd feel more than happy torrenting over Mullvad alone, and I'd definitely use it as an additional layer of defense with other tools to keep me private if my threat model needed to consider stronger risks.
Synchronous packet transfer only solves the problem if you build a truly constant rate network. Traffic monitoring works when variances exist; your flow has to be fully homogeneous to provably secure against it. That means in your model your users would need to transmit and receive exactly 96kbps at all times when on net, and your nodes would talk to each other at 1024kbps at all times when on net. Otherwise, consider A->onion1->onion2->B – an attacker could potentially see the flow from onion1->onion2 decrease to 1 PPS sec when A isn't talking, and increase when A is.
Truly constant rate anonymity networks dramatically add resistance to passive traffic analysis, but they move users from a low-latency/high-throughput network to 56k dialup speeds :) Not only does this suck so most people won't use it, but the people who do chose to use it will glow neon bright to adversaries. The use of the system will be a strong indicator that, even if you don't know what the user is doing, the user is doing _something_ interesting.
And even if there was desire, these networks are intrinsically limited in size and scale if they want to maintain constant rate. Herbivore[0] is an interesting proposal in this space - use a DC-net partitioned into smaller cliques to give in-group anonymity but mass participation. And most use chaff packets – A has nothing to send so sends encrypted random data to maintain the constant rate guarantee... I'm trying to find the paper I read that suggests a global passive adversary who goes "hands on" in the network could use a combination of watermarks generated through packet dropping/artificial queues + knowledge of which packets are chaff to build a trace, but I'm struggling. If I do I'll drop it here.
Could you protect against NetFlow analysis by pushing a bunch of noise over the VPN tunnel at all times? I'd assume it would at least make the analysis significantly more challenging.
Some of the prior works in this paper[0] address noise in anonymity networks, but in general: you either add noise at the link level which malicious nodes can identify & ignore, or you add noise by injecting fake chaff packets that are dropped somewhere inside the network which are statistically identified when you look at packet density across the network.
This might or might not extend to VPN nodes depending on your threat model - I'd personally assume every single node offered to me by a company in exchange for money is malicious if I was concerned about privacy.
The first grant was for $616,000 (over several years), and there are at least three more grants attached to this research.
Academia is sometimes a bit ridiculous. This feels like something an undergrad student could do in their spare time for a capstone or thesis project with no material cost.
I like the effect, but is there a way to make it independent of the zoom level?
On a related note, this probably adds randomness, is there a way to seed it? For example to be able to define a single correct render result at a given size.
I am on phone and can not see the noise in the final image at all. I think its there but when I zoom in, it feels like it disappears. You should probably consider making it bigger or independent of zoom for the sake of mobile viewers.
As the other comment mentions, yes there is a seed attribute, also the algorithm for the randomness function is defined in the specification as 186 lines of C code[0], so in theory different implementations should behave the same.
Although looking at the cod, it uses floating point math, which I believe is implementation defined, so maybe it could behave differently on various platforms.
