iOS VPNs have Leaked Traffic for More than 2 Years, researcher claims.

[brad03]

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/08/ios-vpns-still-leak-traffic-more-than-2-years-later-researcher-claims/

Quote

A security researcher says that Apple's iOS devices don't fully route all network traffic through VPNs, a potential security issue the device maker has known about for years. Michael Horowitz, a longtime computer security blogger and researcher, puts it plainly—if contentiously—in a continually updated blog post. "VPNs on iOS are broken," he says.

Any third-party VPN seems to work at first, giving the device a new IP address, DNS servers, and a tunnel for new traffic, Horowitz writes. But sessions and connections established before a VPN is activated do not terminate and, in Horowitz's findings with advanced router logging, can still send data outside the VPN tunnel while it's active. In other words, you'd expect a VPN to kill existing connections before establishing a connection so they can be re-established inside the tunnel. But iOS VPNs can't seem to do this, Horowitz says, a finding that is backed up by a similar report from May 2020. "Data leaves the iOS device outside of the VPN tunnel," Horowitz writes. "This is not 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."