index.json

[{"authors":["admin"],"categories":null,"content":"We believe all internet users should have access to secure communications. Encryption technologies need to be easy to use and widely available.\nWe try to solve hard problems, connecting technologists, researchers and grassroots organizations. As part of this work, we provide tools to build your own VPN infrastructure, and clients to connect to it. Easy. Secure. Beautiful.\n","date":-62135596800,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"term","lang":"en","lastmod":1605114231,"objectID":"16dec3729c3466c77e11195c1c026e2b","permalink":"https://chuckmcandrew.com/leap.se/author/leap/","publishdate":"0001-01-01T00:00:00Z","relpermalink":"/leap.se/author/leap/","section":"authors","summary":"We believe all internet users should have access to secure communications. Encryption technologies need to be easy to use and widely available.\nWe try to solve hard problems, connecting technologists, researchers and grassroots organizations.","tags":null,"title":"LEAP","type":"authors"},{"authors":["admin"],"categories":["vpn"],"content":"Our VPN is built on top of OpenVPN, a well tested and widely used technology that has been around for almost two decades. As most software with enough history it has grown with a lot of features and code complexity. This is great as it has everything that we need to provide a stable service, but at the same time it brings now and then security issues. The OpenVPN team has been really good at handling them in a timely manner and in LEAP we\u0026rsquo;ve been lucky to have designed our VPN in a way that prevented us from being affected by most of the ones that have appeared in the last years.\nSince a few years there is a newcomer to the free software VPNs: WireGuard. WireGuard uses nice modern cryptography primitives, a pretty simple protocol and has a small code base. This makes it a very fast VPN and probably less prone to security issues.\nIf WireGuard is so great why don\u0026rsquo;t we ditch OpenVPN and use WireGuard instead? WireGuard is great, but (yes, there is always a \u0026ldquo;but\u0026rdquo;) it wasn\u0026rsquo;t designed for our use cases and it is not trivial to make it work for us.\nWireGuard uses UDP, which is great for speed. But many of our users are in networks that don\u0026rsquo;t allow UDP traffic and for them to be able to connect we need the VPN to support TCP. We are currently using OpenVPN on TCP mode, but our plan for the future is to dynamically use UDP if available and if not to fall back to TCP.\nSome time ago there was a discussion about TCP support in the wireguard mailing list, with proposed solutions like using ssf, socat or udptunnel. All of them sound a bit hacky, one extra moving piece that can break.\nAnother problem is that WireGuard doesn\u0026rsquo;t provide dynamic IP allocation. We don\u0026rsquo;t know in advance who will be connected to assign static IPs to each client. We rely on OpenVPN to do it dynamically each time a client connects. In WireGuard we would need to build some tooling around to do all this IP assignment without the service operators getting the possibility to correlate users and clients to IPs.\nBesides all these technical issues there is a security issue, the authentication protocol of WireGuard is not Forward Secret. That means an observer recording all conversations only need to wait until the server long term secret key gets compromised to be able to figure out which client produced each connection. Let me remark, this doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that the attacker can decrypt the traffic, they only see the authentication key, so they can pinpoint a client being the same in different connections.\nWhile this is a flaw, it is clearly an improvement over TLS 1.2 with client certificates, which we are currently using with OpenVPN. Previously to TLS 1.3 (the latest version) if you authenticate the clients using a cert, which we use to avoid having a list of users, the cert is sent unencrypted. That means that currently an observer does not even need a compromised server private key to track the users. We do minimize that by rotating the cert frequently and we are preparing a migration to TLS 1.3, that solves this problem by transferring the cert over a forward secret channel.\nThe dynamic IP allocation and the lack of forward secrecy for client identifiers are being worked on in a separate tool named wg-dynamic which does handle the IP allocation and rotates the client identifier. So maybe in the future those will be solved when wg-dynamic becomes more mature.\nRight now for us adopting WireGuard would require a lot of development work to get around those issues and to get a new technology stable enough to be used in production. We already have our hands full maintaining the existing service and prefer to prioritize our energies on providing a more stable and smooth VPN.\n","date":1593561600,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1605115669,"objectID":"b6c6a06c23c520689a58d320bf19829b","permalink":"https://chuckmcandrew.com/leap.se/post/2020_07_wireguard/","publishdate":"2020-07-01T00:00:00Z","relpermalink":"/leap.se/post/2020_07_wireguard/","section":"post","summary":"in which we answer recurring questions about not using wireguard","tags":["ramblings","whynot"],"title":"On wireguard","type":"post"},{"authors":["admin"],"categories":["packaging"],"content":"We get frequently asked why we don\u0026rsquo;t do flatpack or appimage or arch packages or\u0026hellip; for our VPN. There are many distros and many package managers in GNU/Linux. Sadly our time is limited and we have to decide what we focus our energies on. And currently in GNU/Linux we are focusing our work on snap packages.\nWe know, snap has many problems. Packages often don\u0026rsquo;t work well in distros not based on debian ( #272, #77). It\u0026rsquo;s a centralized platform, controlled by one commercial entity and not everybody agrees with their decisions.\nOur primary target audience has always been the less computer-savvy users. In GNU/Linux most of them use ubuntu. That has been our main reason to focus our energies on supporting ubuntu first. And snap makes it very easy to include software in ubuntu which is convenient too. Also the most used distros around are debian based, and snap usually works well on those.\nKnowing that not everybody likes snap, we produce .deb packages as well and we do our best to keep them up to date.\nOne of the other options we have explored is flatpack. I think its architecture is great, its security is really nice and it solves some of the problems of snap (it\u0026rsquo;s not centralized, the control is in the users, \u0026hellip;). But flatpack is designed to containerize the applications, making it impossible to package something like a VPN, because it needs to modify the network configuration and the firewall which is by design not allowed by flatpack. So flatpack is not an option for us.\nSnap does containerize as well, but this is something that you can disable when you make the snap by using the \u0026lsquo;classic\u0026rsquo; mode. We do that to be able to package a VPN into snap.\nFrom the core team we might not have the time in the near future to work on any other packages. But we will welcome any contributors. If you would like to package the VPN for your favourite package manager we\u0026rsquo;ll be really happy to help. Don\u0026rsquo;t hesitate to open an issue to discuss it there, pass by on irc or write to our mailing list.\n","date":1592438400,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1605716903,"objectID":"3c5d054a2d6be1b47fb1e551859d37ba","permalink":"https://chuckmcandrew.com/leap.se/post/2020_06_linux_packaging/","publishdate":"2020-06-18T00:00:00Z","relpermalink":"/leap.se/post/2020_06_linux_packaging/","section":"post","summary":"what is our current packaging strategy","tags":["ramblings","whynot","snap","flatpack","linux"],"title":"Packaging in GNU/Linux","type":"post"},{"authors":["admin"],"categories":["vpn"],"content":"First things first: we\u0026rsquo;re alive and kicking, staying healthy and physically distant. In fact, we are keeping our physical distance at a minimum of 450kms (that\u0026rsquo;s 280 miles)!\nIf you are a Windows user, and you have tried to install or download RiseupVPN and ran into one of those big, red warnings?\nIt might not come as a big surprise to you, but virus and malware detection isn\u0026rsquo;t a very precise or exact science. The heuristics used vary, but they somehow have to figure out what malware or a virus is and if they fail to detect one, no one will want to use them again. In practice this means that there are many false positives and alas, it has been happening too often with our software, even though we\u0026rsquo;re doing our very best to keep you safe, sometimes it feels like a lottery!\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve been working hard to make this go away, and we think that the latest release makes some very significant progress. It is a painful process, sometimes very manual as we have to file disputes with the malware organizations. Have you tried the new version?\nRemember kids, when Windows asks: \u0026ldquo;Possible virus! Do you want to report this?\u0026rdquo; think twice, you could be re-inforcing a false report and making our job harder!\nDon\u0026rsquo;t forget to stay safe from your ISP (or neigbor/partner/family/\u0026hellip;) and use a trusted VPN provider like the Calyx Institute or Riseup.\nIf you want to read more about this:\n https://0xacab.org/leap/bitmask-vpn/-/issues/222 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_security_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antivirus_software#Issues_of_concern  When you want to help out:\n Code \u0026amp; Bugtracker: https://0xacab.org/leap ♥ donation: https://leap.se/en/about-us/donate Desktop translations: https://www.transifex.com/otf/bitmask/RiseupVPN/ Android translations: https://www.transifex.com/otf/bitmask-android/dashboard/ Mailinglist: leap-discuss@lists.riseup.net Chat: ircs://irc.freenode.org/#leap if you don\u0026rsquo;t have an irc client, you can use a gateway like Matrix  Image by Ross Harmes: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rossharmes/4347385767\n","date":1586476800,"expirydate":-62135596800,"kind":"page","lang":"en","lastmod":1605115669,"objectID":"91414e0010c02547c803a0de213e63be","permalink":"https://chuckmcandrew.com/leap.se/post/2020_04_smack_the_virus/","publishdate":"2020-04-10T00:00:00Z","relpermalink":"/leap.se/post/2020_04_smack_the_virus/","section":"post","summary":"some updates on the windows front and other news","tags":["news","windows"],"title":"Smack the Virus!","type":"post"}]