Solitude online is a difficult thing to reach. For starters there are a lot of businesses which are really curious in where you go and what you do to allow them to get you to purchase things. In addition to that there are the spying eyes of the government seeing to make sure you’re saving this data in massive warehouses all and not a bad guy. This mass data collection appears to exist in each and every apparatus we possess; to smart TVs from notebooks to telephone. It’s sufficient to make someone paranoid, or at least when connected to the net to look for some type of solitude.

For many the thought is using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) service. These services let you connect to the net by means of a proxy that’s designed to hide your actual IP address and keep the spying at bay. Using VPN services has burst in the months following the disclosures by Edward Snowden on simply how much advice authorities collect about us.

Unfortunately these services have had their defects and, sometimes, have left their users just as exposed as someone right on the world wide web. The latest of these defects turns out to be OS and browser related and not tied to any one source. The defect is in the browsers that support the VPN and WebRTC. This defect enables a site (and get) IP address info from specific VPN servers called STUN Servers (Session Traversal Utilities for NAT). What these servers do is translate your address to a brand-new public IP address and vice versa through a common protocol called NAT (Network Address Translation) and to keep the packets streaming to and from you without any loss of information during the micro seconds required to make the change. To do this they must maintain a table of your actual one and your VPN established public IP. House routers perform a similar (although simple) function in translating private IP addresses back and to public.

Like the requesting website would it just uses a script and catalogs it routine visits. It’s an approach that is very simplistic and it has a pretty simple fix. Up to now the problem seems to exist merely in Windows based systems which are running Chrome and FireFox. These browsers have several plugins that may mitigate this defect. For FireFox you may use NoScript or place the media.peerconnection.empowered setting to false (you get there by typing about:config in the address bar). Chrome could be hardened against this with installing ScriptSafe or WebRTC Block.

You can setup your house router/firewall to connect to your VPN service right. This removes the chance of a software defect that is established from showing your advice. These measures don’t provide you 100% protection, but then again nothing will. You’ll be able to take a look at the links below if you would like to inspect the security of your browsing habits including if you’re vulnerable to the WebRTC defect. Stay safe out there.