Tracking a VPN

[Martin Hash]

Government has sniffers on the Internet Service Provider's (ISP) ingoing lines. The Virtual Private Network (VPN) packets from a single stream can all be identified otherwise an entire message would never be able to be put back together. The ISP knows who the VPNs are so traffic going out before it hits the VPN is easily identified by Big Data Artificial Intelligence (AI); even if everybody was on VPN, AI could eventually figure all the VPNs out.

1) Use a sniffer.
1) Determine VPN packets.
2) Follow all packets during that session from the ISP feed. Look for a history of similar traffic. (An AI does this.)
3) The ISPs know every IP that is on VPN, and can sniff where they're going.
4) Match to the end requests. (An AI does this.)
5) Arrest you.

[DBTrek]

Government has sniffers on the Internet Service Provider's (ISP) ingoing lines. The Virtual Private Network (VPN) packets from a single stream can all be identified otherwise an entire message would never be able to be put back together. The ISP knows who the VPNs are so traffic going out before it hits the VPN is easily identified by Big Data Artificial Intelligence (AI); even if everybody was on VPN, AI could eventually figure all the VPNs out.

1) Use a sniffer.
1) Determine VPN packets.
2) Follow all packets during that session from the ISP feed. Look for a history of similar traffic. (An AI does this.)
3) The ISPs know every IP that is on VPN, and can sniff where they're going.
4) Match to the end requests. (An AI does this.)
5) Arrest you.

Some VPNs already address this by breaking the second step 1 you listed:
Obfuscation

Also, your method seems to require monitoring at the start and the end of the network communication. Obviously if you already knew where to start the monitoring and where to end it, you would know who was sending it without doing anything. The person you're monitoring at the start is sending it.

[Martin Hash]

There aren’t that many ISPs. Think Comcast.

[DBTrek]

There aren’t that many ISPs. Think Comcast.

There are an awful lot of users tho.
And, as I said, if the ISP knows to start monitoring the traffic of user 'X', then the rest of the charade is unneccessary. They already know they want user 'X'.

If they want to monitor ALL of their users that use various VPNs ... and then try to track ALL the traffic coming out of a VPN to match it to a specific user ... well... good luck. AI can't just be applied to a problem. As you know, AI must train on massive data sets, and then be refined over and over until it produces the desired result *most* of the time. How are you going to train an AI on anonymous, encrypted traffic? How are you going to know when it's producing the results you want, when you can't verify the results?


There are ways to track VPN users, for sure - but the steps you outlined don't strike me as being one of them.

[Martin Hash]

There aren’t that many ISPs. Think Comcast.

There are an awful lot of users tho.
And, as I said, if the ISP knows to start monitoring the traffic of user 'X', then the rest of the charade is unneccessary. They already know they want user 'X'.

If they want to monitor ALL of their users that use various VPNs ... and then try to track ALL the traffic coming out of a VPN to match it to a specific user ... well... good luck. AI can't just be applied to a problem. As you know, AI must train on massive data sets, and then be refined over and over until it produces the desired result *most* of the time. How are you going to train an AI on anonymous, encrypted traffic? How are you going to know when it's producing the results you want, when you can't verify the results?


There are ways to track VPN users, for sure - but the steps you outlined don't strike me as being one of them.

I suspect it's being done right now. AI works with quadrillions of information.

[DBTrek]

AI can't be trained without knowing what its looking for.
If you're trying to train an AI to identify cats in a picture, but all you have is encrypted data from anonymous sources, then you'll never know if the AI returned a picture of a cat or not. Without being able to verify the results, the fitness of the AI model cannot be determined.

Likewise, how will you possibly know if the AI has returned the right VPN user, unless tens of millions of VPN users volunteer to tell you "yes, that's my traffic"?

[Martin Hash]

AI can't be trained without knowing what its looking for.
If you're trying to train an AI to identify cats in a picture, but all you have is encrypted data from anonymous sources, then you'll never know if the AI returned a picture of a cat or not. Without being able to verify the results, the fitness of the AI model cannot be determined.

Likewise, how will you possibly know if the AI has returned the right VPN user, unless tens of millions of VPN users volunteer to tell you "yes, that's my traffic"?

The AI looks for patterns. It knows what IP is sending VPN data packets and to which VPN, also when & how many. On the other side of that VPN it can correlate the times, amount & destinations. Yes, like you've said before, if someone bought a burner phone, used it once and threw it away, that's probably untrackable, but that's not how people use VPNs. They try to watch porn during their lunch hour for about 15 minutes (max). Not so ***hard*** to find. (If you get what I mean? Wink.)

[Zlaxer]

Private pre-shared keys - and swap them every few months. What are you doing with a VPN that will get you arrested? Misgenerding some lbgtqgshdjfjfj+8^6# on a message board?

[SuburbanFarmer]

‘Quadrillions of information’.

[Martin Hash]

‘Quadrillions of information’.

Oodles