This is something that I feel gets hidden away among the comments, and that’s a big misconception among people asking about using VPNs to get local access as if in one country while in another. So let’s start a new thread/discussion about it.
Simplified, VPNs work as tunnels. Instead of entering the open internet at one location your computer’s connection does so somewhere else.
That’s just like how some cities have tunnels letting you bypass large parts of it to get straight to the neighbourhood you want to.
But unlike a city’s shortcuts, that save you time, internet tunnels as a rule always add more distance; which means that they add time, they add delay. (That’s just basic physics, you can’t add an app or service to make your electrons travel faster.)
Most of the time that delay is unnoticeable, but can be significant enough if added on top of an already long distance combined with using a bluetooth headset while on a video call. So humans may or may not easily notice it.
However, if the servers you regularly connect to keep track of that delay they can tell when you move between countries; and even by just the initial delay they can tell whether or not you’re local or not.
Delay is very easily noticed by computers, and can easily be used to flag an employee so to have a techie do a quick manual test to tell if there’s a VPN or greater distance involved.
So, simply put, VPNs can not hide distance; and given enough data points as you move around may even to a fairly high degree reveal your exact location.
(If you want a much heavier text about how the natural delay in internet traffic can be used to track the location of people you could start with this one, that talk about how such delays can be used to extract user location from popular internet messaging apps: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.10523.pdf )
Your post appears to be a very commonly asked question or thread here relating to VPNs and/or hiding your location. Please check out the VPN Wiki for common answers to these common questions. You can also find other recent posts related to this topic here
Just a note, poor peer routing between ISPs can cause greater latency than VPNs. So latency and ping times can already vary significantly which makes latency a poor way to measure distance.
Also if you have satellite internet, if you use your phone as a hotspot, or if your local internet isn’t fully wired to your house you may see widely varying latency regardless of your location.
All of this is to say no automatic checks are used in networking or network security using latency to identify the location of a server because it is not a good measure of distance.
Now, if someone wanted to prove you are using a VPN they could look at the latency of your inbound traffic and compare that with the latency of a ping sent to your IP. If the two numbers are wildly different it is a good indicator that a VPN is being used.
This is just silly. No corporation is monitoring their employee’s latency to try and spot anomalies indicating someone might be working from abroad. And supposing a company was that paranoid, there are far easier ways than this.
If an employer REALLY wants to know they probably can find out you are working outside the US one way or another. So only do that without telling your employer if you are not worried about getting fired. But most companies just want you to do your work and not be on the hook for foreign taxes and regulations (Don’t ask don’t tell).
I think you’re over worried about this, but if you really need to care about latency unmasking you then just make sure you never connect without a multi-hop VPN. Try send the traffic further away the closer you are.
I’m a CISO. We don’t give a shit about your latency. You’re more likely going to be noticed by colleagues or customers if your voice and video quality sucks consistently.
VPN in this context is primarily useful for getting around basic geo blocking.
I don’t see how you can prove anything with latency. Sure, distance cause extra latency, but so does crappy LTE or DSL, satellite, old wifi routers or malfunctioning network equipment.
So you are the IT department and you ping every employee’s laptop and start questioning everyone with more than 100ms of ping. And the employee says, " Hmm I don’t know anything about that" because for a whole bunch of them that will be the truth.
If an IT department wants to track employee location it’s much easier than playing sherlock with a ping tool. Any chat or monitoring app you install on a phone can request location access and that can easily be required of employees.
If I connect via VPN from a location close to the workplace, there’s still an increase in latency. Latency only indicates a possibility that you’re in a different country, but it’s not proof of the fact.
On that basis, there’s a minuscule to zero chance that any employer would use this metric to get upset with you.
A wireless connection in your home will have more latency than a wired connection in your condo on the other side of the planet. This thread is bullshit. Nobody is checking your freaking latency. This isn’t CSI Miami.
The deniers are either losing sight of or ignorant of the fact that lots (most) companies buy monitoring software that monitor all connections to protect against, cyberattack. They don’t have to be looking for your lies to get an email flagging your connection as suspect. Caught!
While technically true, you will be caught by your work issued machine passively observing other wifi and Bluetooth devices near you and their locations long before your employer does this. If anything they will just demand you fix your network connection to something satisfactory for remote working or you will no longer be remote. Or the classic: being on webcam with a window in site making it obvious you are in the wrong time zone.
I wonder if things like the ad blocker and anti-tracker on Bitdefenders VPN as well as their browser extension can make it harder for people to use your ping to a certain server to attempt to locate you, due to the features possibly adding more latency, or removing it. Also a VPN connection is only seen from the other end as the VPNs servers, it’s basically just a glorified proxy secured by a encrypted connection between you and the VPN server. The advantage they have is that they’re more resistant to MiTM attacks. (Although sometimes they break, because perfection is a lie)
With AWS/Azure/GCP you don’t even need a VPN. Just run a desktop in their cloud and RDP or TeamViewer into and work from the cloud desktop. No latency issue between the cloud desktop and work. To save money only run the desktop when you need it.