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Discover systematic vulnerabilities in OpenVPN through comprehensive protocol analysis and adversarial testing in this 20-minute conference presentation from WOOT '25. Learn how researchers from Northeastern University approached finding security flaws by first reverse-engineering OpenVPN's protocol specification, given the lack of standardized documentation. Explore the construction of detailed message sequence charts for both UDP and TCP variants of the OpenVPN handshake process. Examine the systematic testing methodology that uncovered multiple new attack vectors, including two novel denial-of-service attacks through replay of control and acknowledgment packets, input validation failures across 17 protocol configuration options, premature data transmission issues causing client-side data loss, and authentication degradation attacks where malicious clients with weaker authentication can impact victims using stronger authentication methods. Understand the critical importance of robust VPN security given OpenVPN's widespread adoption and the potential consequences of these newly discovered vulnerabilities for secure communications infrastructure.
