<story><title>Secure your browsing using a home VPN</title><url>http://sriramk.com/blog/2011/08/ddwrt-pptp-vpn.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>davepeck</author><text>Shameless plug: my new app and service, Cloak (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.getcloak.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.getcloak.com/&lt;/a&gt;), is a zero-hassle VPN. It&apos;s currently in beta for OS X.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;d love feedback from the HN community!&lt;p&gt;Grab the app, enter your Cloak credentials, and you&apos;re done. If Cloak sees you&apos;re on on a password-less wireless network, it automatically activates. Cloak&apos;s servers are cloud-hosted; the client selects the back-end server that will give the lowest latency. Under the hood, Cloak for OSX is built on industry-standard OpenVPN.&lt;p&gt;I expect Cloak will exit beta when the iPhone/iPad client is finished, probably in early September. But if you&apos;d like to try it sooner, drop me a line [davepeck at getcloak dot com] and I&apos;ll send you a special HN invite code. Cheers!</text></comment>
<story><title>Secure your browsing using a home VPN</title><url>http://sriramk.com/blog/2011/08/ddwrt-pptp-vpn.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>_b8r0</author><text>From TFA:&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62; Here’s why I picked PPTP and I believe using it with very long passwords/passphrases is acceptable.&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind that the author is looking to use this in open hotspots such as coffee shops etc. I would not advise that people implement this.&lt;p&gt;As the author points out, there are a number of vulnerabilities in PPTP, the most serious of which is that the initiation protocol is susceptible to an offline brute force attack using tools like asleap[1].&lt;p&gt;To be clear, the attacker does not need a rogue access point, nor association with an access point for this to work. They can just passively sniff away, then at some point later go through the pcaps, crack it offline and do what they want. There&apos;s an episode of Hak5[2] covering this as well as this useful straight to the point video of asleep and THC pptp-bruter[3]&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.willhackforsushi.com/Asleap.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.willhackforsushi.com/Asleap.html&lt;/a&gt;
[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http://revision3.com/hak5/asleap&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://revision3.com/hak5/asleap&lt;/a&gt;
[3] &lt;a href=&quot;http://blip.tv/g0tmi1k/cracking-vpns-asleap-and-thc-pptp-bruter-3375795&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blip.tv/g0tmi1k/cracking-vpns-asleap-and-thc-pptp-bru...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The solution is to use L2TP and IPSec if you can and aren&apos;t jailbreaking, or to use a TLS VPN if you have jailbroken or don&apos;t have iDevices.</text></comment>