What information does an OpenVPN provider store about me [closed]

Question

I was wondering what information is stored about me when I connect to an OpenVPN VPN provider. For example, can the provider know my operating system? I cannot seem to find any docs about this.

Thanks!

Answer 1

What a provider can do in theory, is doing in practice and publicly admitting/promising to do or not do are three different things.

A provider must store

• your account details, otherwise you can't log in.

They will have always have access to (but not necessarily storing that information) :

• the public IP-address you connect from
• all (encrypted) traffic that is transmitted over your VPN connection

• according to the OpenVPN manual the software itself will send at least the following information (but more when configured to do so with –push-peer-info) :

  • IV_VER=<version> — the client OpenVPN version

  • IV_PLAT=[linux|solaris|openbsd|mac|netbsd|freebsd|win] — the client OS platform

  • IV_LZO_STUB=1 — if client was built with LZO stub capability

  • IV_LZ4=1 — if the client supports LZ4 compressions.

  • IV_PROTO=2 — if the client supports peer-id floating mechansim

  • IV_NCP=2 — negotiable ciphers, client supports –cipher pushed by the server, a value of 2 or greater indicates client supports AES-GCM-128 and AES-GCM-256.

  • IV_UI_VER=<gui_id> <version> — the UI version of a UI if one is running, for example “de.blinkt.openvpn 0.5.47” for the Android app.