Uninitiated noon question below.

A couple of days ago, this haprogram https://programming.dev/post/41491279

Now, during the phonecall with my ISP, the guy asked, “is your router an ASUS?” to which I answered, “yes and no, because it’s sold as a router but I have it in AP mode and my actual router is OpenWrt on a Raspberry Pi.” To which he replied “noice!”

How did he know the make of my access point? A few of my own thoughts are:

  1. he was referring to historical data (I’ve been a loyal customer of theirs for a looong time…) from a time when I was using the same topology (setup?) but without a VPN on the router, so the hostname of the AP (stored in /etc/hostname on the ASUS OS/firmware ?) was simply displayed on whatever software an ISP uses for troubleshooting through… an ARP? But aren’t ARPs limited to a LAN/they cannot resolve beyond a hop? Or perhaps a variant of DNS? How indeed do hostnames transmit? Are they in the IP header by default?
  2. as in 1 above, but he actively used nmap or some other recog program
  3. as in 1 above but from a time when I was in fact using the ASUS machine as a router
  4. my VPN is “leaking” - not likely, because all my traffic either goes through the wireguard interface on OpenWrt/RPi, or it doesn’t go anywhere…

If 1, 2 or 3: why do they keep historical data on me? Is it praxis?

  • Clusterfck@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    Yeah, by virtue of not owning the entire connection (which is impossible unless you own the ISP, intermediary providers, and the service you’re connecting to) somebody somewhere is going to see something that may be identifiable to you. There are services that are offered by many companies for huge enterprises that give you basically a direct connection to a data center and a lot of times that traffic can be totally encrypted, but it’s usually for very big enterprises and isn’t cheap to get.

    And you’re definitely helping the privacy part running a VPN on the router level, but still, there’s always a chance of something getting leaked. It’s pretty low and gets better all the time, but that chance always exists. It’s the reason why air gapping is still a thing for things that ABSOLUTELY cannot be attacked/compromised/viewed by some random person.

    Again, if you’re going off of a privacy stance, you’ve made things hard enough that unless a huge ISP has some kind of agreement to sell data to advertising companies and spending the time to implement services to get you and the 2 percent (which is probably a huge overestimate) of customers taking similar steps, it’s just not worth them making the effort.