VPNs are designed to protect you online and allow you to keep data safe and more, according to a recent report, that wasn’t the case on the Apple iOS platform.
This news comes in a report from Ars Technica that revealed that VPNs on Apple devices like iPhone and iPad keep connections open and also expose data.
This was originally discovered by security researcher Michael Horowitz who revealed that VPNs on iOS basically don’t work, apparently, Apple may be aware of, you can find information on this below.
VPNs on iOS are disabled. At first, they seem to work well. Your iOS device gets a new public IP address and new DNS servers. The data is sent to the VPN server. But, over time, a detailed examination of the data leaving the iOS device shows that the VPN tunnel is leaking. The data leaves the iOS device outside the VPN tunnel. This is not a classic/legacy DNS leak, this is a data leak. I confirmed this by using multiple types of VPN and software from several VPN providers. The latest iOS version I tested is 15.6. This data leak was first announced by ProtonVPN in March 2020 and iOS v13. (This section was added on August 5, 2022)
Update August 17, 2022: Ars Technica picked this up: VPN Security – iOS VPNs have been leaking for over two years, researcher claims. So did Hacker News, which has produced 218 reviews as of this writing. The number of pageviews for this page increased from about 2,000 to about 76,000.
It is not yet clear why there is a problem with VPNs on iOS and it seems that this problem has been around for some time.
Source: Michael Horowitz, Ars Technica
image rights: David Grandmogen
Filed under: Apple, Apple iPhone, Top News