Is there something that can generate random Internet usage to make the real sites I go to a bit obfuscated?
I’m thinking something that runs on my server, and simply visits a random website. It probably shouldn’t actually be random, and some sort of tweaking would be great. Like the ability to have it visit every news site there is. That way the ISP will have a harder time telling my political bias.
The threat model for this is below using a VPN for normal usage, although getting a dedicated VPN IP address is a project for one day.
It would be a lot easier to just use a vpn and hide your traffic from your ISP that way.
Actually this technique would be a lot more useful using a VPN due to correlation attacks.
If targeted correlation attacks are part of OPs threat model what OP is asking for isnt going to work anyway
You dont run your own VPN server. You use a company with thousands of customers. That’s the point.
Doesn’t change much for a correlation attack though if you already suspect a small subset of endpoints.
It helps a lot. Someone would need to go through the effort of tracking your VPN service and correlating that to you.
OP seems to worry about their ISP, and their ISP can’t see anything at the VPN, so they’d need to go out of their way to gather that info. So as long as OP trusts the VPN, they’re probably fine from everyone but state actors and well funded private investigators.
If you want to go beyond that, Tor is your next option. That should be effective against all but the most determined state actors.
As I mentioned I have a server, and I use a VPN to connect always to it. This makes using a paid VPN a bit harder. The dedicated VPN IP should fix this issue but I haven’t looked into how difficult that’d be.
Ahh i see.
Yeah it really slims down your VPN choices as having an IP address associated with your account makes it much more identifiable. So some providers wont offer them (such as mullvad).
It also usually costs more. The one I know offers a static IP is express VPN and ive heard Proton has plans on offering it. It looks like PIA offers it too.
Yup. Tailscale+Mullvad isn’t a bad option, but I’d rather not depend on tailscale and a true local connection will always be better. But then you have to pay through tailscale and then more identifiable.
So are you worried about your server’s ISP? If so, you could run your own VPN on your server so your traffic to your server would be protected.
That wouldn’t protect outgoing traffic, which may be what you’re concerned about (i.e. if you’re using your server as a SOCKS proxy or something).