I was on another country with my work laptop. I connected my Beryl via ethernet in foreign country. Then I activated VPN-Client on my Beryl, where the VPN was in my home country. I connected my laptop to Beryl Wi-Fi. I verified the VPN was working and my IP address was in my home country.
Network:
Foreign-Country-Modem --> Beryl ---> VPN-Client home country. Work laptop connected to Beryl.
I even selected the option to always route all traffic via VPN only, even if it's not working. (I forgot the exact name of the option).
Anyway, after all of this, I get an email from security that they tracked my IP address from a foreign country.
I still can't figure out how they know... The only explanation I can think of is Beryl leaked the IP address when VPN connection failed, during re-connect, or something.
Is this a known issue or anyone heard of something like this?
If it is a work supplied PC, it may have all sorts of tools loaded on it to track the device.
Are there any other WIFI access points that your work laptop could see? It is possible to find your location just by the looking at other nearby WIFI access points. See:
There are many ways to track the location of a laptop. The Beryl leaking is only one possibility. It is why I warn people that a VPN is not a perfect solution to hiding your location.
Hi @eric, thanks a lot for your reply. Yes, I did connect to a Wi-Fi and there were other local SSIDs. So yes, initially I thought that was the issue.
However, the email from security kept pointing out to my IP address being from outside my home country. So that makes me think they didn't go far enough to for Wi-Fi positioning.
And yes, this laptop has crazy amount of security software. Even so, I'm in tech, and I cannot see a single way any of these programs could find out I'm outside my home country given I've connected to Beryl with a "kill switch: VPN or nothing" enabled. My laptop has no other way of accessing the internet beside that single Wi-Fi SSID. And supposedly, that single Wi-Fi SSID has no way of accessing the internet besides going through the VPN.
So once again, I'm coming back to the only conclusion that makes sense, Beryl leaked the IP address even with that kill switch enabled.
@HalfLife Beryl was connected via Ethernet. My laptop conected to Beryl via Wi-Fi.
I have not seen what you are reporting. That said most of my experience with 3.x or generic OpenWRT firmware. In older GL iNet models, I have not been happy with my 4.x testing, so I don't run it in production. You may want to share what firmware you are running on the MT1300.