In the TestFlight app, you should receive an invitation to try out ProtonVPN, and when it becomes available, you’ll get a message to begin testing. The company reminds that seats are limited, so the sooner you do this, the bigger the chances to be accepted in the program. All you have to do is to log in with your account and go to the dashboard to provide your Apple ID information to associate it with your Proton account. Registering for the program isn’t at all difficult. “This way we can focus on the feedback from the most active ProtonVPN user groups,” it explains in a blog post today. The first ProtonVPN beta is available as part of the TestFlight app, but the dev team says it’s limiting it to these two categories of members because of capacity reasons. However, you can’t yet download ProtonVPN from the App Store, as the parent company first wants to improve it with help from the community, so it’s running a beta program for Plus and Visionary users. Millions of people’s security is in Apple’s hands, they are the only ones who can fix the issue, but given the lack of action for the past two years, we are not very optimistic Apple will do the right thing.” Amplifi says Apple’s fix is unstableĪmplifi responded to a customer query by saying that it had tested the fix, and found it caused reliability problems.The wait is finally over, as the ProtonVPN team has recently announced the very first beta version of the app for iOS devices. Apple declined to fix the issue, which is why we disclosed the vulnerability to protect the public. We first notified Apple privately of this issue two years ago. “The fact that this is still an issue is disappointing to say the least. Proton founder and CEO Andy Yen said that they made the decision to make the flaw public after Apple told them it would not be offering a full fix. Insecure connections to some Apple services remain in place after a VPN is activated. However, the company found that it was only partially effective. Proton told me that it was aware of the claimed fix, and had tested it at the time. It’s unclear why this would be, and why it seemingly hasn’t been implemented by any of the VPN apps tested. However, for some reason, it is off by default. If this value is true and the tunnel is unavailable, the system drops all network traffic. Apple says it has offered a fix since 2019Īpple announced what appeared to be a way for VPN app developers to solve the problem in a WWDC session in 2019 ( video). Proton notified Apple, but says that it failed to take any action. They discovered the problem in iOS 13.3.1, and say that the flaw remains in place today. His tests backed up a 2020 complaint by ProtonVPN. This includes Apple’s own push notifications. This is already a big deal because some people activate their VPN immediately before doing something sensitive, but Horowitz found that some connections can remain up for hours. In some cases, those insecure connections can persist for a few minutes. This was true of multiple iOS VPN apps on multiple devices. That means that some data continues to be sent over an unsecured link. iPhone VPN app security issueĪs soon as you activate a VPN app, it should immediately close down all existing (non-secure) data connections, and then reopen them inside the secure “tunnel.” This is an absolutely standard feature of any VPN service.īut security researcher Michael Horowitz did some testing, and found that not all existing connections were closed when a VPN app is activated. If you’re not familiar with how VPNs work, please check out the brief primer in yesterday’s post. This backed a previous report by ProtonVPN … The controversy began when a well-known security researcher said that iOS virtual private network (VPN) apps are broken, due to a flaw that he claims Apple has known about for at least two and a half years. Update: AmpliFi, which offers routers with built-in VPN capabilities, backs Proton’s position that the fix doesn’t reliably work – see below.Ī debate about whether iPhone VPN app security is flawed continues today, with Apple insisting it has offered a fix since 2019, while ProtonVPN says that it’s only a partial solution.
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