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TIL WebRTC fully bypasses SOCKS proxies

I knew WebRTC could (or rather, would) leak your real IP if you were trying to hide it behind a SOCKS proxy (or even behind a VPN), and this is why I disabled it in my main browsing profiles. But with the world-wide Covid confinement and all, I’ve had to use it quite a bit more (yay, let’s not use Mumble, let’s use Google freaking Hangout/Meet…), so what was bound to happen happened: while in a meeting, I eventually had connection trouble. Not a total connection loss, though, just very short interruptions, enough to cut off my SOCKS proxies but to keep anything else running fine.

And it struck me: despite my SOCKS proxies being all suddenly disconnected, the meeting went on. The freaking WebRTC had been ignoring the freaking proxy all the time. So it doesn’t just leak your IP here and there, it “leaks” it (not sure I should say “leaks” rather than just “uses”) constantly. Yikes. Not that it matters much, but still WTF. What a crappy protocol, thanks W3C (and all the creeps that work on or advocate for that plague).

Update:
Maybe a setting that would prevent this in Firefox: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/media-peerconnection-ice-proxy_only-true.416692/
No idea why the hell they don’t enable it by default though.
(cf also https://wiki.mozilla.org/Media/WebRTC/Privacy)

Posted in privacy.


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