VPNs are designed to protect you online and allow you to data safe and more, according to a recent report, this is not the case on Apple’s iOS platform.
The news comes in a report from Ars Technica that has revealed that VPNs on Apple’s devices like the iPhone and iPad keep connections open and also expose data.
This was originally discovered by security researcher Michael Horowitz who revealed that VPN’s on iOS are basically not working, apparently, Apple may be aware of this, you can see information on this below.
VPNs on iOS are broken. At first, they appear to work fine. The iOS device gets a new public IP address and new DNS servers. Data is sent to the VPN server. But, over time, a detailed inspection of data leaving the iOS device shows that the VPN tunnel leaks. Data leaves the iOS device outside of the VPN tunnel. This is not a classic/legacy DNS leak, it is a data leak. I confirmed this using multiple types of VPN and software from multiple VPN providers. The latest version of iOS that I tested with is 15.6. This data leak was first publicized by ProtonVPN in March 2020 and iOS v13. (Added this section on Aug. 5, 2022)
Update August 17, 2022: Ars Technica picked this up: VPN security – iOS VPNs have leaked traffic for more than 2 years, researcher claims. So too did Hacker News which generated 218 comments as of this writing. Views of this page went from about 2,000 to about 76,000.
It is not clear as yet exactly why there is an issue with VPNs on iOS and it looks like this issue has been around for some time.
Source Michael Horowitz, Ars Technica
Image Credit: David Grandmougin
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