Introduction
Hey everyone, it’s been a little bit since our last update. We hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. We’ve been continuing our work on our VPN/proxy chain project and have run into a few problems since our last update. Two members of our team have been working on the VPN element of our project. There has been difficulty connecting to the various other elements of our project.
VPN Difficulties
We wanted to mask the IP address of the client machine. The client would show that it connected to the VPN, but refused to mask the IP. As a result we changed almost everything at least once. We adjusted the config files for the VPN, changed settings on the clients, and tried to use different VPN solutions other than OpenVPN, but we were never able to fix our problem. At the end, we determined that the problem most likely lied in how we had to build our mini-network. By using the LCDI’s network, we dealt with issues that wouldn’t have appeared in another situation.
Solutions
As a result, we reflashed the Raspberry Pi with the PiVPN setup to receive a clean slate. Then, we reinstalled Raspbian Stretch. We proceeded with a regular install for an OpenVPN Server as if we weren’t even using the Raspberry Pi (we didn’t use PiVPN). PiVPN is meant for easy setup where a majority of the files are created for you through automation. By using a regular OpenVPN install we were able to change each individual file and configuration that we needed to change to reflect our network. This fix would work for anyone that’s not working inside a security intensive network. The problems we had was a result of us conducting our research in a network that is not optimized for standard network users. The prior research we followed will be listed in our final report and will most likely work on a rudimentary network setup.
Conclusion
The end of the semester is fast approaching and with it, the end of our project. We hope to have everything working, but if we don’t, we will give you all the information you’ll need to work something like this. Our final report should be coming out in a few weeks, so look forward to reading up on our total progress.
Thank you and have a great holiday season and rest of your year.
We welcome all feedback! Feel free to comment here or email us at lcdi@champlain.edu. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter for the most recent updates on projects, such as App Analysis, VPN Proxy Chain, and more!