Senator asks NSA to update Americans about VPN spying risks
Brief
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. , is pressing the National Security Agency to revise cybersecurity guidance to warn Americans that a standard commercial virtual private network service may not protect them from sophisticated foreign surveillance threats.
Foreign intelligence services monitoring large parts of the internet may be able to connect a VPN user to specific websites by matching the timing and amount of encrypted data entering and leaving the VPN server, according to a Congressional Research Service analysis requested by Wyden that his office released Wednesday.
The method, known as traffic analysis, does not require an adversary to break the service’s encryption and could expose a user’s online behavior even while the underlying data remains unreadable.