dngray
commented
5 years ago Have them (AzireVPN) fix their data protection practices and when they do, put it up. The "Blind Operator mode" kernel module AzireVPN says to use on their servers is not auditable for the public?
Based on https://git.zx2c4.com/blind-operator-mode/about/ it seems rather irresponsible to use that module. It also seems like it would be rather easy to work around it. If you have root access you could unload it, if you operate a server further up the network you'd be able to use tcpdump anyway.
Okay so after doing a bit more research it's not easy to unload. Also reading their security page that seems evident. I wouldn't depend on it to protect me. It's not part of our criteria so if they want to run that on their servers it's really not going to mean much to us. Many providers probably do not as they are concerned about breaking things.
The source seems available to me. We do trust that the source that is there is the source they are running. That trust is implicit when you use any VPN service.
We would give them the not-audited badge as they haven't been externally audited. They would get the IPv6 badge along with Mullvad https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacytools.io/issues/1435
AzireVPN. Some bits of misleading info in the FAQ. Not fully GDPR compliant.
I would like to know specifically what part is not GDPR compliant as This is not my area
AzireVPN concern. From FAQ:
Download or upload anything anonymously, without limit.
well it does, its just not strong anonymity but yes I think they should take out the word "anything" otherwise it is false marketing
I would be sure this is in the context of torrents and general P2P related materials. Realistically it's not the most sinful thing they could say. As you said:
Mullvad. A warning label for false advertising about trackers.
Looking at their website they do say "and trackers" without being really clear what trackers.
To be honest I'm only opposed to marketing which makes a VPN sound like a "silver bullet" that can "perform miracles" and should be "used to avoid the NSA and state level agencies". I do not get that vibe from AzireVPN.
We all know the ones that do that...
Protect your identity as a researcher, journalist, whistle blower or any kind of sensitive position. And remove that, because a person like that will have state actors that will employ fingerprinting etc, a VPN should not be recommended where life longevity/imprisonment is an issue
This one bothers me more than the previous ones. I guess it's because a whistle blower should be very careful about "who knew what they are blowing the whistle on", and whether it would lead back to them. I would bet that is how they would get apprehended, not through technical means unless they were consistently releasing some kind of data. That doesn't generally seem to be the case, usually it's a dump of documents to the media. Then in that case something like SecureDrop (which requires Tor) makes more sense.
Possibly if it said "Help protect your identity as as a...." would sound better. Incidentally that's what is said on their "About Us" page:
AzireVPN was founded in 2012 with the mission to become a market-leading VPN service to help people avoiding censorship and interception on the Internet.
It may very well have been a slip of the tongue. Their about us page sounds a lot less grand and down to earth.
System logs are disabled.
Concern, impaired system security.
Agreed, system logs usually don't have anything too sensitive in them anyway
This once again is not part of our criteria. In fact we do warn to not rely on a "no logging policy".
running in RAM without any physical hard drive disk which protect our users in case of seizure.
It really doesn't. There's a PXE server somewhere with disk images. The customer data is somewhere in possession of the company, anyway.
It could very well be the image they run is fairly "generic" and the configuration is pushed by something like ansible/saltstack, in that case they support "templating" from a vault of secrets.
Ie configs have things like
{{ sensitive_value }}and during run time the operator must open an encrypted volume, where the contents of{{ sensitive_value }}is to have it substituted inThat means if a server goes "offline" it needs operator access to bring it back up, but the assumption is customers will move to another working server if all operators are busy.
I asked about this in irc://irc.freenode.net/#AzireVPN and got the answer I suspected:
14:52:13 <dngray> Curious question, if a AzireVPN server went down for some reason, or was rebooted, would it come back online automatically?
14:53:39 <dngray> for example I note there you talk about PXE https://www.azirevpn.com/docs/environment#pxe
14:54:03 <dngray> do you use any sort of orchestration like ansible, saltstack etc when the servers are brought back online?
14:54:04 <@tobiasa> dngray: No
14:54:14 <dngray> tobiasa: ah that's the correct answer
14:54:39 <dngray> tobiasa: i am guessing the operator would need to open a vault and push secrets to server upon reboot like private keys etc.
14:55:11 <@tobiasa> dngray: correct
scafroglia93
djoate
Description
From discussion in Matrix with Linda, We could consider adding AzireVPN but the following issues would need to be solved:
Based on https://git.zx2c4.com/blind-operator-mode/about/ it seems rather irresponsible to use that module. It also seems like it would be rather easy to work around it. If you have root access you could unload it, if you operate a server further up the network you'd be able to use tcpdump anyway.
well it does, its just not strong anonymity but yes I think they should take out the word "anything" otherwise it is false marketing
And remove that, because a person like that will have state actors that will employ fingerprinting etc, a VPN should not be recommended where life longevity/imprisonment is an issue
Agreed, system logs usually don't have anything too sensitive in them anyway
It could very well be the image they run is fairly "generic" and the configuration is pushed by something like ansible/saltstack, in that case they support "templating" from a vault of secrets.
Ie configs have things like
{{ sensitive_value }}and during run time the operator must open an encrypted volume, where the contents of{{ sensitive_value }}is to have it substituted inThat means if a server goes "offline" it needs operator access to bring it back up, but the assumption is customers will move to another working server if all operators are busy.