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Posted by RGBCube 10 hours ago

Mullvad exit IPs are surprisingly identifying(tmctmt.com)
421 points | 250 commentspage 2
linkregister 9 hours ago|
Given that Mullvad is basically a bulletproof VPN host[1], it would be great if site operators could rely on this property to enact bans. Given that the solution is simple (add a pseudorandom seed), Mullvad will likely push out a fix within a couple days.

1. It's the preferred VPN of TeamPCP.

fastily 8 hours ago|
Source? Been googling for this but I don’t see any relevant info
watchful_moose 6 hours ago||
oopsie, has someone burned their proprietary intel for internet points?
reincoder 4 hours ago||
I work for IPinfo. Even though we are in the VPN detection business, I will give Mullvad the benefit of the doubt, to be honest. They were one of the three VPN providers we found that did not attempt to submit inaccurate geolocation information to IP geolocation providers like us. I am sure they will fix the issue.
Melatonic 3 hours ago|
Who else ?
reincoder 23 minutes ago||
Windsribe and iVPN.

https://ipinfo.io/vpnreport

faangguyindia 8 hours ago||
I maintain a list of

"23034 IPs to blocklist.txt"

blocked IPs they contain all VPN providers. Often VPN providers seed Geofeeds with wrong data, this is why i use traceroute and ping network to locate their real location.

BLKNSLVR 8 hours ago||
I have a script that logs IPs for any traffic coming in to my servers on ports that don't accept traffic. I then block those IPs from accessing ports behind which there are services.

If they're checking my locked doors, I don't want them coming in my unlocked doors.

notpushkin 7 hours ago|||
This might be a good idea, but consider banning them for, say, a couple hours at a time. It’s easy to rotate IP, especially if you’re using a residential proxy service, and there’s a good chance you’ll end up blocking real users using the same ISP.
m00dy 7 hours ago||
yeah, I'm using https://proxybase.xyz for this. It's like Mullvad but for proxies. No kyc, no email but supports xmr.
throwaway2037 3 hours ago|||
You should put your business (https://proxybase.xyz) in your HN profile. It might help to find more customers.
m00dy 3 hours ago||
I’m not here to promote anything just wanted to share a valid use case in the right context.
CallMeMarc 5 hours ago||||
Is this your service? Since you've made seven posts to HN about it and also your username shows up in the commits on their GitHub.

Because I'm quite curious on where the IPs are from. Usually residential IPs is a fancy wording for malware infested devices from regular people.

notpushkin 4 hours ago|||
> Is this your service? Since you've made seven posts to HN about it and also your username shows up in the commits on their GitHub.

Ohh, that makes sense haha.

@m00dy: please disclose when you’re talking about your own projects! It’s okay to plug your stuff sometimes, just be honest about it :-)

m00dy 3 hours ago||
I’m not hiding anything :-)
notpushkin 2 hours ago||
No, but you weren’t upfront about it either. I’ve suspected it looked like your own project but checked your comments in the profile and didn’t see any other, so I didn’t dig any deeper.

> I’m not here to promote anything just wanted to share a valid use case in the right context.

There’s a small difference: if one of your users did this it would be totally fair, but when a founder does this I think it’s a polite thing to disclose it. That’s what I’ve been doing when talking about my own project on HN [1], and I think in most cases other legit founders just say that upfront, too. I’m not sure if that breaks any rules, but it feels juuuuust a bit shady not to :-)

[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

throwaway2037 3 hours ago|||

    > Since you've made seven posts to HN about it
Do you have a tool to text search a user's comment history? Your comment is very specific: "seven"!
notpushkin 2 hours ago||
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

(Seems to have some weird cache issues though, had to play around with the ?querystring part to get more results)

KolmogorovComp 6 hours ago||||
Do they say how do they have access to those IPs? Most residential IPs are malware-infected devices.
m00dy 3 hours ago||
That’s part of our value proposition. It’s same as when you go to a bank and ask where the yield comes for your account or asking OpenAI where they get data to train their models.
KolmogorovComp 3 hours ago||
> or asking OpenAI where they get data to train their models

Yes I know it comes from pirating/torrenting/scrapping. Are you saying you acknowledge your IPs come from malware, and that is OK because OpenAI is shady too?

m00dy 3 hours ago||
For the context, I have the right not to tell you anything about how we operate our business but we're not shady, we don't take any action without user consent. The other thing is that we don't use "source" keyword in our business context. I think when you use that essentially you inherently accept some part of your business is shady as hell. Instead, we use "providers". That's a lot better.
notpushkin 6 hours ago||||
I like the API-centric nature of it. $10/GB seems a bit steep though, especially compared to Mullvad’s 5 €/mo.

Search for “mobile proxy” – those are usually cheap-ish monthly subscriptions, with unlimited traffic, and often an API to rotate the IP programmatically if you need it. No KYC, but you usually do have to sign up with an email.

m00dy 6 hours ago|||
@ notpushkin,

yes, it's a bit more expensive because it's for different use cases. You can't use VPNs or Mullvad for anything mission critical. Just try to log in to your bank in US, it will increase your risk score on their end because VPNs by nature are very easy to detect whereas "residential proxies" much harder.

notpushkin 6 hours ago||
> You can't use VPNs or Mullvad for anything mission critical. Just try to log in to your bank in US, it will increase your risk score on their end because VPNs by nature is very easy to detect whereas "residential proxies" much harder.

Naturally! I’m just saying there’s residential proxy providers that are a LOT cheaper than that.

(IIRC, you can usually reply to fresh comments if you click on the “n minutes ago” – the reply link should be visible there even if it isn’t shown in the main comments tree)

m00dy 6 hours ago||
I think when it comes to privacy or XMR, money is not really that important. Just give me a few names that support XMR payments + no KYC and providing mostly non-flagged residential IPs that you can use them for mission critical stuff.
notpushkin 5 hours ago||
That’s a good question! I haven’t been in this scene for a long long time now, so can’t say for sure.

I’ve been implementing an Instagram liker service back in... 2018 was it? So a stable pool of non-flagged residential proxies was important here, and it was my client who introduced me to the concept of “mobile proxies”. Basically, they use regular 3G/4G/5G modems with regular SIM cards, and expose that as a SOCKS proxy. You get a normal-looking IP from a pool of mobile operator’s IPs. Since mobile devices reconnect all the time (and are behind a CGNAT mostly nowadays), you can’t really flag an IP like that – and if it is flagged, you can get a fresh one in a moment.

I’m not using this mostly because I’m too lazy to research. Here’s a random one I found (so not an endorsement!) which is $1/GB, seems to only require email to sign up, and takes crypto (including XMR): https://floppydata.com/

illiac786 6 hours ago||||
That’s nice, I need to implement this.
hypeatei 4 hours ago|||
Closed ports are not "locked doors", and open ports are not "unlocked doors"

That is a binary thought process with a lot of assumptions. You might introduce even more attack surface in pursuit of this "security" measure by installing additional software like fail2ban, for example. Close your ports, maybe assign a non-standard port to the popular ones (like SSH) to reduce log spam, and patch your server often. Anything more complicated than that is not worth it, IMO.

marcus_holmes 7 hours ago||
You know that people use VPNs for perfectly legitimate reasons, right?

Like when I was travelling, sites would routinely use the language of my IP address location, not the language preference as I set it in my browser. So I would be served a site that I couldn't read. My only option was to use a VPN to spoof my location so that it would serve me a site in a language I understand.

notpushkin 7 hours ago|||
By the way, if you’re a webmaster doing this, look at the Accept-Language header instead: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...
fortran77 7 hours ago|||
I use aVPN when I’m traveling and want to order food delivery for my 93 year old mother in NY. UberEats and InstaCart will stop me from ordering when logged in my mom’s NY account if I’m in China, Saudi Arabia, India, Vietnam, etc.
m00dy 6 hours ago||
yeah, I know the pain...Refer my comment above.
gchamonlive 8 hours ago||
It's a game of cat and mouse. The service keeps banning IP ranges, the user keeps reconnecting to different servers and regions. The server can't know exactly who's who, just that a bunch of users are using mullvad, while the user just need to find one server on one IP range that works.

Seems like a good deal to me. I don't care if they know I use mullvad, I care they don't know I'm me, and that's not something mullvad will easily disclose.

dns_snek 8 hours ago|
> I don't care if they know I use mullvad, I care they don't know I'm me

That's exactly what the article is about, a side channel information leak that de-anonymises users, did you read it?

gchamonlive 7 hours ago||
Can it get my IP?

I'll go ahead and answer that it can't. It knows I'm mullvad user X, thus deanonimization, "it knows I use mullvad", but it doesn't know my original IP, so "it doesn't know I'm me".

dns_snek 6 hours ago||
I'm not sure what you're going for, your ISP-assigned IP doesn't tell them your legal name either.

But when you connect to the site from via server A and later via server B they can tell that you're the same person.

And they can deanonymise you through data brokers. All Mullvad IPs are traceable back to the same number (acting as a pseudo account identifier) so if you ever entered your PII on any website when using Mullvad, it can be linked to the same Mullvad account.

And if you ever visited any of those sites without using a VPN, your home IP can be linked to your Mullvad ID through browser fingerprinting.

And if you ever entered any PII on any website from your home IP, you can once again be deanonymised.

Now the existence of browser fingerprinting isn't Mullvad's fault, but this flaw makes it a lot easier to accidentally deanonymize yourself.

Riany 8 hours ago||
surprising that the mapping may be stable enough to become a user-level signal. and rotating away from deterministic assignment seems like a cheap way to avoid creating an extra fingerprint
gruez 9 hours ago||
>Surprisingly, the exit IP you are given is not randomized each time you connect to the server, but deterministically picked based on your WireGuard key

What's the point of this? This seems more complicated to implement than mapping exit ips at the server level, so surely they must be doing this for a good reason?

TheDong 8 hours ago||
It's simpler to implement because it's more stateless, and it's a better user experience.

If you get a new exit IP each time you connect, you need something like a NAT table to look up "key 0xabc exits ip 1.2.3.4", and that grows to be the size of the number of users you have active, and you need to save it forever so that when the NSA asks who used the IP for what duration you can tell them.

With a static mapping derived from the key, you don't need a table like that.

It's also better UX since it means reconnecting your VPN software (say you switch wifi hotspots) doesn't give you a different IP address, so things like SSH sessions can resume, which wouldn't be possible if it were a different public IP each time.

arciini 9 hours ago|||
I'd guess that this is to ensure one abusive user doesn't get every other user blocked from a large service (say, Google) for botting over the VPN and constantly rotating IPs.

It's a practical measure, but definitely has a privacy cost though.

stevekemp 9 hours ago||
It's possible that contributes, but to be honest most VPN users are split "privacy seeking" and "abusive". Though I grant you paid users are probably slightly more circumspect than users of Tor, etc.

It seems more likely this is just about load-balancing use against their available nodes.

Riany 8 hours ago|||
My guess is deterministic assignment makes load distribution and debugging easier. But for a privacy product, that convenience probably needs to be reconsidered
tempest_ 9 hours ago||
I imagine there are a bunch of things on the internet that break if you start trying to connect to them from varying IP addresses. Things like the various CAPTCHA schemes and rate limiting etc, IP reputation etc.
lmm 9 hours ago||
> I imagine there are a bunch of things on the internet that break if you start trying to connect to them from varying IP addresses. Things like the various CAPTCHA schemes and rate limiting etc, IP reputation etc.

Given how much of the world is stuck behind CGNAT now, I would expect any major sites to handle it.

nly 5 hours ago||
Ironically the CGNAT at my ISP is so broken at peak times the only way I can actually use the internet is via a VPN (presumably because I then only occupy one connection tracking slot on the NAT)

I'm also stuck in a 2 year ISP contract

paulpauper 8 hours ago||
This is why VPNs have always been crap. The pool of IPs are backlisted/tainted, so you will run into various roadblocks and cpatchas, in addition to slow speed. If you are serious about privacy and don't want blocks and blacklists, buy high speed private proxies. Don't use a pooled service.
BLKNSLVR 8 hours ago|
A VPN by any other name would smell as sweet.
charcircuit 7 hours ago||
Reusing the same VPN between multiple identities is a horrible idea regardless. And let's be real. As a forum moderator if you ban a Mullvad user and then a new Mullvad user signs up the next day it is probably the same person. You should be using residential or mobile proxies if you want privacy and to blend in to everyone else.
haunter 5 hours ago|
I just use it to watch iPlayer outside of the UK lol
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