Forensic Blogs

An aggregator for digital forensics blogs

by

My Experience on The VPN Comparison Team

By Miles Campbell

We were able to learn a lot from our research into the VPNs, but I also received a lot of great experience from my first semester at the Leahy Center.

As the semester came to a close, my team finished polishing up our presentation. We decided to use Google Slides to create our presentation. This allowed us to all work on it at the same time. Additionally, all of us would have access to it, even if no one else was online.

What I Gained From my Experience

For starters, I believe this project has helped me learn how to create a professional presentation. I learned that presenting research in this setting is far different than in school. The work we’re doing at the Leahy Center is important, which adds weight when you’re trying to present it. It makes it much more stressful to try and make something great, but it pushed me into doing really good quality work.

Since this is my first semester as an intern, I was also taking a class with Mark Zammuto. This class was connected to my internship, and for it I created another presentation, along with my teammates Derek Farrell and KCMalinda Hlordsz. We presented to the other first semester interns over Google Meets. This further built upon some of the experiences I had gotten from my Leahy Center presentation. It also allowed me to compare my work directly with other intern’s works.

Overall, my first semester here at the Leahy Center was a great experience for me. I learned skills that I wouldn’t have otherwise learned in a classroom alone. My team and the rest of the Leahy Center staff have been nothing but supportive of me and my learning. I look forward to working with the rest of the team in the future, and I hope all my colleagues have a happy holiday break!

Stay up to date with the Leahy Center by following us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook!

The post My Experience on The VPN Comparison Team appeared first on The Leahy Center for Digital Forensics & Cybersecurity.

by

VPN/Proxy Chain Update 3

Introduction

Hey everyone, it’s been a little bit since our last update. We hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. We’ve been continuing our work on our VPN/proxy chain project and have run into a few problems since our last update. Two members of our team have been working on the VPN element of our project. There has been difficulty connecting to the various other elements of our project.

VPN Difficulties

We wanted to mask the IP address of the client machine. The client would show that it connected to the VPN, but refused to mask the IP. As a result we changed almost everything at least once. We adjusted the config files for the VPN, changed settings on the clients, and tried to use different VPN solutions other than OpenVPN, but we were never able to fix our problem. At the end, we determined that the problem most likely lied in how we had to build our mini-network. By using the LCDI’s network, we dealt with issues that wouldn’t have appeared in another situation.

Solutions

As a result, we reflashed the Raspberry Pi with the PiVPN setup to receive a clean slate. Then, we reinstalled Raspbian Stretch. We proceeded with a regular install for an OpenVPN Server as if we weren’t even using the Raspberry Pi (we didn’t use PiVPN). PiVPN is meant for easy setup where a majority of the files are created for you through automation. By using a regular OpenVPN install we were able to change each individual file and configuration that we needed to change to reflect our network. This fix would work for anyone that’s not working inside a security intensive network. The problems we had was a result of us conducting our research in a network that is not optimized for standard network users. The prior research we followed will be listed in our final report and will most likely work on a rudimentary network setup.

Conclusion

The end of the semester is fast approaching and with it, the end of our project. We hope to have everything working, but if we don’t, we will give you all the information you’ll need to work something like this. Our final report should be coming out in a few weeks, so look forward to reading up on our total progress.

Thank you and have a great holiday season and rest of your year.

We welcome all feedback! Feel free to comment here or email us at lcdi@champlain.edu. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter for the most recent updates on projects, such as App Analysis, VPN Proxy Chain, and more!

The post VPN/Proxy Chain Update 3 appeared first on The Leahy Center for Digital Investigation.

by

VPN/Proxy Chain Update 1

Introduction

With each passing day, privacy is growing into a larger public concern. The goal of this project is to experiment with ways to combine the usage of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) with chained proxies to create a more private internet connection. Our team is exploring possible configurations and implementations.

VPN vs. Proxy

The first step is understanding the difference between VPNs and proxies.

A VPN is a network connection that creates an encrypted connection to a VPN server. This makes it appear to whoever is watching that your traffic is coming from the VPN’s IP address. All internet traffic from your computer uses the VPN encrypted tunnel. This prevents anyone from sneaking a look at your data on the trip between you and the VPN server.

A proxy is very similar. It creates a secure connection between your computer and the proxy server. But, proxies weren’t designed to encrypt all traffic. They usually only do one application at a time. The proxy is usually configured for each application individually. and often passes the original IP address along. In a chain, proxies can provide a degree of anonymity.

Project Goals

Our project is combining these two methods of security.  Why would someone want to do this? Well, if a proxy goes bad, or is somehow traced back to the original IP address, the eavesdropper will see the VPN’s IP rather than your own. By creating layers of privacy and security, it is less likely for a single point of failure to lead to exposure.  

Method

To test various configurations, our team is using the Raspberry Pi 3.

These micro-computers allow us to simulate having many servers to host our VPN and proxy services. All without involving expensive external hosting for testing.

So far, we’ve experimented with different configurations and tools. Two Raspberry Pi 3s are dedicated proxy servers, hosting the SOCKS proxy server, Dante. On the client end, the Linux client utilizes proxychains to connect to the proxy servers. The Windows client utilizes Proxifier to access the proxy network.

One Raspberry Pi 3 is the dedicated VPN server, running an OpenVPN server. We used PiVPN, a set of scripts designed to make the OpenVPN install a smoother process.

Conclusion

We’re moving forward with this configuration and troubleshooting the connections on a local level. Once we have a setup that works, the next step is investigating commercial cloud options to shift out servers to.

Like the Leahy Center for Digital Investigation (LCDI) on Facebook and follow us on Twitter to get notified of more project updates.

The post VPN/Proxy Chain Update 1 appeared first on The Leahy Center for Digital Investigation.