Confused about which VPN is right, US senator asks the NSA for guidance
Senator Ron Wyden asked the NSA to update public guidance on VPN configurations, questioning single-hop designs and services like Tor.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter Wednesday to NSA director Gen. Joshua Rudd requesting updated public guidance on VPN best practices for Americans facing advanced foreign threats, including government personnel, contractors, and journalists. The letter highlights limitations such as decrypted traffic at single-hop termination servers, metadata like timestamps enabling nation-state profiling, and asks the NSA to assess multi-hop architectures, random delays, cryptographic padding, and specific services including Apple Private Relay, Nym, and Tor.
Wyden seeks upgraded NSA security guidance on commercial VPN use
Senator Ron Wyden asked the NSA to update public guidance on commercial VPN security risks and answer questions about foreign surveillance threats against single-hop VPNs.
Sen. Ron Wyden sent a letter to NSA Director Gen. Joshua Rudd urging the agency to revise public guidance on commercial VPNs, following earlier letters to federal agencies in March and July. He argues single-hop VPNs offer little protection against sophisticated adversaries able to compel or compromise the single provider, citing a Congressional Research Service paper favoring multi-hop and mixnet architectures. The letter references a September NSA advisory on a China-sponsored campaign against telecom, government and military networks and asks unclassified questions about multi-hop systems such as Apple Private Relay, Tor and Nym versus mixnets.
2026-012: Critical Vulnerabilities in Check Point Products
Check Point issued emergency hotfixes for two CVSS 9.8 flaws (CVE-2026-85102, CVE-2026-85103) enabling unauthenticated RCE on VPN-enabled gateways.
On 9 September 2026, Check Point released emergency security updates for CVE-2026-85102 (improper certificate-data validation in VPN negotiation) and CVE-2026-85103 (heap overflow in VPN certificate ASN.1 decoding), both CVSS 9.8, allowing unauthenticated remote code execution. The flaws affect Security Gateway, Security Management Server, and Spark Firewall deployments configured with Remote Access or Site-to-Site VPN, spanning versions R80 through R82.10. CERT-EU advisory 2026-012 urges immediate hotfix application, prioritizing internet-facing and perimeter appliances.