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Why Your VPN Is Not Enough? A Comprehensive Analysis of Anonymity in Cyberspace
Published: 00:00 11/20/2025
Analizy
Introduction: The End of the "Browser Padlock" Era
A decade ago, the green padlock symbol next to a website address gave us a sense of blissful security. "It's HTTPS, no one can see my passwords, I'm safe," we thought. We live in times where content encryption (payload) is the standard, but the fight for privacy has moved to a completely different level—the level of metadata and behavioral analysis.
Today, it's no longer about whether someone "overhears" your conversation. It's about algorithms knowing who you are talking to, for how long, with what frequency, and what emotional state you are in—all without breaking a single bit of the content encryption itself. I invite you to a deep analysis of a reality where "Incognito Mode" is a joke, and a $5/month VPN might be the nail in the coffin of your anonymity.
Part I: The Network That Sees More Than You Think
The "Envelope" Problem: SNI and Encrypted Client Hello (ECH)
Let's start with the basics. Imagine you are sending a letter. The content of the letter is encrypted (unreadable), but the recipient on the envelope is written in large, block letters. This is exactly how the HTTPS protocol worked for years. The SNI (Server Name Indication) mechanism meant that your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or company network administrator didn't see what you were reading on a given site, but they knew perfectly well which site you were visiting. They knew you connected to a dating site at 8:00 PM and a website about venereal diseases at 11:00 PM. The content was secret, the context—public.
The year 2025 finally brought broader adoption of Encrypted Client Hello (ECH). This is a technology that—sticking to our analogy—puts one envelope inside another. The outer envelope is addressed to a general provider (e.g., Cloudflare), and only the inner, encrypted envelope contains the actual destination address.
Authoritarian regimes and censorship systems hate ECH. Since they cannot block specific sites hidden within ECH, they begin blocking entire IP ranges of cloud service providers or the protocol itself. Furthermore, ECH implementation is sluggish. Giants like Cloudflare or Fastly are on board, but traditional hosting providers still leave us "naked" on the web, exposing our habits to public view.
RevealNet: When Infrastructure Becomes a Spy
Until now, we believed that to correlate user traffic (e.g., linking entry into the Tor network with an exit), a powerful, central supercomputer collecting logs from all over the world was needed.
Meet RevealNet. Research from 2025 shows that this process has been decentralized. Modern, programmable network switches (P4 standard) are no longer just "dumb" packet-forwarding devices. They have become intelligent sensors.
These devices generate so-called "flow sketches"—miniature, cryptographic summaries of your traffic (timing, packet size). They exchange these with each other in real-time. This means the internet infrastructure itself (the backbone) can track the path of a packet across multiple hops. For users of anonymizing networks, this is a nightmare. Your VPN provider and your target server might be on opposite ends of the world, but the intelligent network between them "sees" that these two data streams match.
| Protocol / Tool | Visibility to ISP (Domains) | Visibility to ISP (Full URL) | Content Visibility (Payload) | Metadata Visibility (Size, Time) | Vulnerability to SNI Analysis |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HTTP | Full | Full | Full | Full | N/A (Clear text) |
| HTTPS (Standard) | Visible (via SNI/DNS) | Hidden | Hidden (Encrypted) | Full | High (SNI leaks) |
| HTTPS + ECH | Hidden (Encrypted) | Hidden | Hidden | Full | Low (Dependent on destination IP) |
| VPN | Hidden (VPN IP Visible) | Hidden | Hidden | Full (Tunneled) | None (Only VPN handshake visible) |
| Tor | Hidden (Entry Node Visible) | Hidden | Hidden | Obfuscated (fixed-size cells) | None |
Part II: AI Enters the Game. Your Packets Have an "Accent"
If you thought ChatGPT was the peak of AI capabilities, look at network traffic analysis. Encryption has become ubiquitous, so "Big Brother" stopped trying to break it. Instead, it started analyzing side channels.
Website Fingerprinting and Graph Neural Networks
Every website loads in a specific way. An image here, a script there, a font later. This creates a unique data transmission rhythm—a specific "fingerprint" of the site.
A new generation of attacks, known as STC-WF (Spatio-Temporal Correlation Website Fingerprinting), utilizes Graph Neural Networks (GNN). These algorithms don't look at network traffic as a simple timeline. They build complex spatio-temporal graphs.
- Spatial dimension: analyzes how different resources load in parallel.
- Temporal dimension: checks how these relationships change in fractions of a second.
The result? An accuracy rate of 96-98% in guessing which site you are visiting, even if you use Tor or a VPN. Worse, Large Language Models (LLMs) are entering the game. Researchers have learned to treat sequences of internet packets like words in a sentence. An LLM "reads" your encrypted traffic and understands context that was invisible to classic algorithms. This is the end of anonymity as we knew it.
The "Tor over VPN" Myth
Many of us (myself included, I admit) used the configuration: "First I'll turn on the VPN to hide from the ISP that I'm using Tor, and then I'll turn on Tor."
However, the latest publications leave this strategy in tatters. Tor sends data in very specific packages (fixed-size cells of 512 bytes). This creates a rhythm that cannot be easily hidden. Even if we pack this into a VPN tunnel (encryption inside encryption), algorithms based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) "see" the texture of Tor traffic inside the VPN tunnel.
Detection effectiveness? Over 93%, and sometimes even 99%. For a state censor, distinguishing someone watching Netflix via VPN from someone sending secret documents via Tor-over-VPN is trivial. It is an illusion of security.
Part III: Digital Fortress – Operating Systems
Since the network is compromised, we must retreat to endpoint defense. Antiviruses are useless against 0-day attacks. The only way is isolation (Security by Isolation).
Read more: about 0-day attacks
Qubes OS: The Digital Bunker
Special attention must be paid to Qubes OS. It is a system that operates on the assumption: "you will be hacked, it's only a matter of time." Therefore, Qubes is not a single system. It is a manager of multiple virtual machines.
You have your browser in one "box" (Virtual Machine - VM). Your work in a second one. Passwords in a third (the Vault). If you open a virus-laden PDF in the work "box," the virus is trapped inside. It has no access to your passwords in the Vault or to the main system.
The key here is the qrexec mechanism—something the authors call a "software air-gap." Imagine you want to copy a file from the "Internet" zone to the "Vault" zone. In Qubes, this doesn't happen directly. The system supervisor (Dom0) intercepts this process, checks the security policy, and only then permits (or denies) the transfer. You can configure the system to act like a diode—files can fall into the Vault, but nothing ever leaves it. This is a level of security unattainable for Windows or macOS.
Part IV: The Browser – Your Face on the Web
The most exposed element is the browser. This is where the concept of Resist Fingerprinting (RFP) appears.
Most of us want to stand out. In the world of privacy, standing out is death. If you have a unique screen resolution, a specific set of fonts, and a rare version of graphics card drivers—you are unique as a snowflake. And easy to track without any cookies.
The RFP strategy (used in Tor Browser and Mullvad Browser) relies on lying.
- Your system says it is in the UTC time zone, regardless of whether you are in Warsaw or New York.
- The browser window has a standard dimension (letterboxing)—hence those strange white bars around pages in Tor Browser.
- The browser pretends to be the "most popular version of Windows," even if you are on Linux.
The goal is to be "indistinguishable in the crowd." However, we must be wary of the privacy paradox: if you enable these features in a standard Firefox used by a handful of people in such a configuration, you paradoxically become more unique.
uBlock Origin: Hard Mode
For advanced users of the "clearnet" (regular internet), we suggest switching to uBlock Origin in Hard Mode. This isn't just ad blocking. It is a firewall for the browser.
In this mode, the default rule is: "block everything that comes from outside (3rd-party)." No tracking scripts, no Facebook frames, no Google resources on other sites. It requires the user to learn and have patience—sites will "break." But clicking the gray "noop" column (which means "stop blocking with dynamic rules, but keep filtering ads") for specific domains becomes a habit that drastically limits our exposure to surveillance.
Part V: Money Doesn't Stink, But It Leaves Traces
The Bitcoin blockchain is a public ledger. Everyone sees everything. Companies like Chainalysis have monetized the de-anonymization of crypto users. The answer is Monero (XMR).
Monero Under Fire
Monero is a fortress:
- Ring Signatures: Hide the sender in a crowd of others (decoys).
- Stealth Addresses: Hide the recipient.
- RingCT: Hides the amount.
But current publications cast a shadow even on Monero. Attacks on the network layer have appeared. Malicious nodes (Sybil nodes) in the Monero network try to map where a transaction physically originates (from which IP) before it is dispersed and hidden (attack on the Dandelion++ protocol).
There is also mention of a leaked video from Chainalysis, suggesting they have methods to track Monero. This likely involves running their own listening nodes. The authors of the publications suggest users practice "churning"—sending funds to oneself several times at random intervals to break probabilistic links before spending the money.
Part VI: OPSEC – The Human Factor
Finally, the most important part. You can have Qubes OS, connect via Starlink to Tor, and pay with Monero. If you then log in to your private Facebook or use the same nickname as on a fishing forum—you have lost.
Read more: short OSINT guide
Identity Compartmentalization (Personas):
- Real Identity: Bank, government offices. Zero darknet.
- Soft Identity: Social media, reviews. Not directly linked to a surname, but profileable.
- Hard Identity: Full anonymity. Dedicated hardware, cash/XMR only, never used during the same hours as the real identity (temporal correlation!).
And remember stylometry. The way you place commas, which words you overuse—that is your fingerprint. In "Hard" identities, you must write differently. Or use AI to alter the style of your statements.
Summary: Between Paranoia and Digital Hygiene
The analysis presented above paints a picture of a digital battlefield that might seem overwhelming, or even dystopian, to the average user. However, it is worth pausing and taking a deep breath. The tools and techniques we discussed—from Qubes OS, through ECH, to complex "churning" procedures in Monero—are currently the digital equivalent of a tank. They are powerful, effective, and (for the moment) provide real, mathematically proven anonymity.
However, one must ask the key question about the threat model. If you are not an administrator of a forum on "the onion," a whistleblower fleeing intelligence agencies, or a political dissident in an authoritarian country, you do not need to live in a digital bunker 24 hours a day. Using Qubes to watch memes or multi-layer traffic tunneling just to check the weather is asking for "security fatigue." We don't need to succumb to paranoia. Most of us do not need protection against a targeted state attack (APT), but against the mass, impersonal surveillance of Surveillance Capitalism.
This does not mean, however, that we can ignore these aspects. Quite the opposite. The fact that we have "nothing to hide" in a criminal sense does not mean we have nothing to protect.
It is worth maintaining your digital health and safety for three fundamental reasons:
- The right to make mistakes and change: The Internet does not forget. Behavioral data collected today—about your mental health, political preferences, or financial stability—can be used against you in a decade. Algorithms of an insurer, bank, or future employer might judge you based on the "information shadow" you cast today. Anonymity is an insurance policy for your future.
- Resistance against profiling: Even if you don't switch to "Hard Mode" with Qubes, implementing the basics (uBlock Origin, changing browsers, avoiding publicly boasting about every aspect of life) is an act of digital sovereignty. It is a signal that you do not consent to being free merchandise for data brokers.
- Education and awareness: Technology is rushing forward. Knowledge of how "fingerprinting" works or how artificial intelligence analyzes metadata allows for conscious use of the web. It allows you to understand why "Incognito Mode" does not protect you, and to make better decisions—even if we sometimes choose convenience over privacy.
In conclusion: you don't have to be invisible to be safe. Awareness is key. You don't have to wear a bulletproof vest to go buy bread rolls, but it's worth knowing that you are entering a monitored zone and to lock the door to your own house. Let's treat the tools presented here as a first aid kit—it's good to know how to use it and where it lies, even if we hope we will never have to reach for its most drastic contents.
Aleksander
Źródła zewnętrzne wykorzystane w analizie:
- Navigating Encrypted Client Hello (ECH): Insights from RSAC™ 2025
- RevealNet: Distributed Traffic Correlation for Attack Attribution on Programmable Networks
- Undermining Website Fingerprinting Defenses with Deep Learning
- Qubes OS Documentation: Qrexec
- Friend or Foe? Identifying Anomalous Peers in Monero's P2P Network
- uBlock Origin: Dynamic filtering guide
- OPSEC Guide - Zycher
- Enhancing uBlock Origin with uMatrix
- Bitcoin vs. Monero: Privacy, Transparency, and Transaction Design
- Forensics investigation comparison of privacy-oriented cryptocurrencies
- Leaked Chainalysis Video Suggests Monero Tracking Method
- SaTor: Satellite Routing in Tor to Reduce Latency
- Detecting VPN Traffic through Encapsulated TCP Behavior - Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium
- rafficLLM: Enhancing Large Language Models for Network Traffic Analysis with Generic Traffic Representation
- Two different threat models in website fingerprinting
- A Comprehensive Survey of Website Fingerprinting Attacks and Defenses in Tor: Advances and Open Challenges
About the Author
Aleksander Zębrowski
Chief Technology Officer at SecurHub.pl
PhD candidate in neuroscience. Psychologist and IT expert specializing in cybersecurity.
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