Related papers: Characterizing the VPN Ecosystem in the Wild
VPN adoption has seen steady growth over the past decade due to increased public awareness of privacy and surveillance threats. In response, certain governments are attempting to restrict VPN access by identifying connections using "dual…
Virtual Private Network (VPN) solutions are used to connect private networks securely over the Internet. Besides their benefits in corporate environments, VPNs are also marketed to privacy-minded users to preserve their privacy, and to…
As more users adopt VPNs for a variety of reasons, it is important to develop empirical knowledge of their needs and mental models of what a VPN offers. Moreover, studying VPN users alone is not enough because, by using a VPN, a user…
Internet users increasingly rely on commercial virtual private network (VPN) services to protect their security and privacy. The VPN services route the client's traffic over an encrypted tunnel to a VPN gateway in the cloud. Thus, they hide…
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) offer an alternative solution using Internet Protocol (IP) tunnels to create secure, encrypted communication between geographically distant networks using a common shared medium such as the Internet. They use…
Centralized Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) when used in distributed systems have performance constraints as all traffic must traverse through a central server. In recent years, there has been a paradigm shift towards the use of P2P in VPNs…
HTTPS is quickly rising alongside the need of Internet users to benefit from security and privacy when accessing the Web, and it becomes the predominant application protocol on the Internet. This migration towards a secure Web using HTTPS…
The majority of electronic communication today happens either via email or chat. Thanks to the use of standardised protocols electronic mail (SMTP, IMAP, POP3) and instant chat (XMPP, IRC) servers can be deployed in a decentralised but…
Secure communication is an integral feature of many Internet services. The widely deployed TLS protects reliable transport protocols. DTLS extends TLS security services to protocols relying on plain UDP packet transport, such as VoIP or IoT…
As the smart home IoT ecosystem flourishes, it is imperative to gain a better understanding of the unique challenges it poses in terms of management, security, and privacy. Prior studies are limited because they examine smart home IoT…
As IPv6 deployment accelerates, understanding the evolving security posture of network peripheries becomes increasingly important. A DSN 2021 study introduced the first large-scale discovery of IPv6 network peripheries, uncovering risks…
The domain name system (DNS) is a crucial backbone of the Internet and millions of new domains are created on a daily basis. While the vast majority of these domains are legitimate, adversaries also register new hostnames to carry out…
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are widely used for censorship evasion and traffic protection. VPN users expect to be provided with adequate security protection, and at the same time not be affected by other users connected to the same VPN…
Distributed Virtual Private Networks (dVPNs) are new VPN solutions aiming to solve the trust-privacy concern of a VPN's central authority by leveraging a distributed architecture. In this paper, we first review the existing dVPN ecosystem…
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) provides private network connections over a publicly accessible shared network. The effective allocation of bandwidth for VPNs assumes significance in the present scenario due to varied traffic. Each VPN…
Anecdotal evidence suggests an increasing number of people are turning to VPN services for the properties of privacy, anonymity and free communication over the internet. Despite this, there is little research into what these services are…
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are a crucial Privacy-Enhancing Technology (PET) leveraged by millions of users and catered by multiple VPN providers worldwide; thus, understanding the user preferences for the choice of VPN apps should be…
Many systems today rely heavily on virtual private network (VPN) technology to connect networks and protect their services on the Internet. While prior studies compare the performance of different implementations, they do not consider…
Website fingerprinting (WF) attacks identify the websites visited over anonymized connections by analyzing patterns in network traffic flows, such as packet sizes, directions, or interval times using a machine learning classifier. Previous…
Desktops and laptops can be maliciously exploited to violate privacy. In this paper, we consider the daily battle between the passive attacker who is targeting a specific user against a user that may be adversarial opponent. In this…