this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill (www.birminghammail.co.uk)
submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/technology@lemmy.world
338 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Prominent backbench MP Sarah Champion launched a campaign against VPNs previously, saying: “My new clause 54 would require the Secretary of State to publish, within six months of the Bill’s passage, a report on the effect of VPN use on Ofcom’s ability to enforce the requirements under clause 112.

"If VPNs cause significant issues, the Government must identify those issues and find solutions, rather than avoiding difficult problems.” And the Labour Party said there were “gaps” in the bill that needed to be amended.

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[–] NateNate60@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Attached below is a Wireshark trace I obtained by sniffing my own network traffic.

I want to draw your attention to this part in particular:

Underneath "User Datagram Protocol", you can see the words "OpenVPN Protocol". So anyone who sniffs my traffic on the wire can see exactly the same thing that I can. While they can't read the contents of the payload, they can tell that it's OpenVPN traffic because the headers are not encrypted. So if a router wanted to block OpenVPN traffic, all they would have to do is drop this packet. It's a similar story for Wireguard packets. An attacker can read the unencrypted headers and learn

  • The size of the transmission
  • The source and destination IP addresses by reading the IP header
  • The source and destination ports numbers by reading the TCP or UDP headers
  • The underlying layers, up until the point it hits an encrypted protocol (such as OpenVPN, TLS, or SSH)
[–] wrassleman76@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You're using the default port though, are you not? If the source port were not 1194, a port associated with openvpn, would wireshark still identify this as openvpn traffic?

[–] NateNate60@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Wireshark can't but there are other methods, such as checking for the known OpenVPN protocol opcodes in the headers: