Previously we seen how easy it is to connect to a VPN server if the provider offers a VPN client.
As I said earlier most VPN providers do not support Thales.
Therefore if you want to connect to a VPN from Thales and your provider does not support Thales you'll
have to manually modify the firewall settings installed the needed software and connect to the VPN server
that you want to connect to.
So in this lecture I'm going to show you how to do that so that you can connect to any VPN server from
tells please keep in mind like I said earlier connecting to a VPN from Thales is optional.
This is not a required step because as we know Thales automatically forces all traffic to go through
the Tor network.
Therefore by default it is more private and more anonymous than most operating systems.
So the main thing that I'm actually going to be showing you in this lecture is how to configure Thales
so that it redirects data to our VPN provider and then connect to this VPN provider.
So let's go to Thales.
As you can see here I haven't even logged in yet.
Before doing that you need to add an admin account.
So I showed you how to do that before.
We're going to click on the plus and we're going to click on the administrator password and we're just
going to set an admin password so that we can execute commands with Admin privileges.
They're going to click on add two added and then we're gonna start tells Now once you're inside tells
I'm going to go and start my terminal.
So we're gonna go through applications and run the terminal from here.
This is basically a program that allow us to execute commands on the system.
I know it sounds a little bit scary but don't worry I'm gonna walk you through it and the first thing
I want to do is change my privileges to admin privileges because I'm going to be modifying the system
settings and I'm going to be installing additional software.
Therefore I need to be admin for this so to change our permissions to admin.
We're gonna do sudo as you it's going to ask you for the admin password so I'm gonna put the password
that I just said at the start of the video.
Now if you notice at the start I was saying amnesia which is the user that we were using at amnesia
but now it's saying rude at amnesia meaning that we're gonna be executing commands as rude rude is the
admin user account on the system so I'm going to clear the screen and the first command that I want
to run is a command to install open VPN open VPN is a program that we're going to use in order to connect
to our VPN server regardless of what VPN provider you're using whether you use a node or any other VPN
provider.
It doesn't really matter.
You can use open VPN with all of them.
So the first thing that we need to do is install this program on tells and to do that.
All we have to do is do abd get.
This is the program entails that we can use to install other programs and what we want to do is install
and the program that we want to install is called Open VPN so apt get is a program that we use to install
other programs install is what we want to do we want to install another program and the program that
we want to install is called Open VPN.
I'm going to hit enter and this is TELL ME DO I REALLY WANT TO DO THIS.
I'm going to say yes so I'm going to type away from my keyboard and hit enter and perfect.
Now open VPN is installed as you can see in here.
Now you can see the notification that we have right now it's asking us if I want to install this program
on the once or install every time.
If you click on installed every time Thales will install this program every time you start tales because
as we know it tells us amnesia.
So if you pick install on the ones it'll only be installed for the session if you restart the computer.
It will be removed.
So I'm going to click on install every time and this way every time I'm a star tails it'll automatically
install open VPN for me and I'll be able to use it without doing the app to get commands that we just
did.
So now that we have open VPN installed we're actually ready to go and connect to our VPN.
But before doing that you need to go ahead and download the configuration files of your VPN.
Now you need to get these from your VPN Provider.
Most VPN providers will give you that.
The process of doing that is different.
You might even need to communicate with them.
But right now I already have them downloaded in my Tor Browser persistent directory in here.
These are the configuration files that I need for my VPN provider to connect use an open VPN.
The main file which is the conflict file is the file with the dot o VPN extension.
If I double click this file you'll see the open VPN configurations and all you need to do is basically
run open VPN.
The programs that we just installed and tell it to use the configuration in this config file.
This will work on any system you can even do it from Windows or Linux but it won't work from Thales
because like I said earlier Thales is configured to force all traffic through the Tor network.
So before doing that before trying to connect to our VPN we need to modify the firewall settings so
that all data is forced to go through the VPN first and then go to the TOR network so to do that.
I'm going to open the configuration file for the firewall so I'm going to go back to my terminal and
I'm going to do G.
Edit the edit is a text editor so I'm basically saying I want to use a text editor to open a text file
and the text file that I want to open is the text file that controls the firewall in tails.
So the that text file is stored in ATC firm and the name of the text file is firm dot com.
So we're doing G edits because that's the text editor that we want to use and we're telling it we want
to edit the following file.
If I had entered this will open the file for me.
As you can see in here and what we want to do like I said we want to add an exception for the VPN server
that we want to connect to.
So I'm going to scroll down and I'm going to look for where it says whitelist access to local resources.
And in here we're going to add the information of this server that we want to connect to.
We can get this information from here from the conflict file.
Like I said this is the file with the dot o VPN extension.
So the first thing we're going to do is type D A D D R to specify the IP of the VPN server that we want
to connect to and we can get that from the conflict file.
It's after the remote in here.
So we have it right here.
I'm just going to copy this and paste it here then we're going to need to specify the protocol.
So I'm going to type protocol followed by the protocol.
Again looking at the conflict file we can see the protocol is UDP.
So again we're just going to type UDP in here then we need to specify the port.
So we're going to type deep port again we're going to get that from the conflict file from the remote
entry so the remote contains the IP followed by the port so we can see the port here.
It's 1 1 9 1.
Again we go back here 1 1 9 1 and we're gonna save for this specific IP with this specific protocol
with this port.
I want you to allow the admin user the route user to do anything.
So we're gonna open two curly brackets and we're gonna see mod owner the new I.D. of the owner is rude
like I said root is the admin in Linux and we're gonna say we want to accept all connections that this
user does to this specific IP with this specific protocol with this specific port the next thing that
we need to do is redirect and force all traffic to go through this VPN server so that anything that
the operating system does will have to flow this way and that way it is very difficult for other programs
to access the Internet directly and therefore leak information about our real IP and real identity.
So to do that we're going to scroll down to where it says Tor is allowed to do anything it wants to
do.
We're gonna say this can only be valid if the outer face.
So the interface in which data flows through is t u and 0 now 2 and 0 is a virtual interface that doesn't
exist right now.
It will be created once we connect to the VPN server and what we're doing right now in here is force
and all traffic to go through this interface that will be creating the encrypted tunnel between our
computer and the VPN server so that's it.
Right now first of all we added a rule to allow Thales to connect to the VPN server.
And second we configured the firewall to force all traffic to go through the connection of this VPN
server.
So I'm gonna do.
Control is to save this and we're gonna do control q to quit the file.
We're also done with the config so I'm going to close it in here and I'm gonna clear my screen and right
now we just have to do one more thing before connecting to the VPN server which is restarting our firewall
for these changes to take effect.
To do that we're going to do ATC in it the D firm which is the name of my firewall and we're going to
say I want to restart this firewall.
We're going to hit enter and if you fail at the stage it means that you miss configured one of the rules.
So please just revise the video and make sure you set up the rules exactly like I did.
As you can see I was able to restart it with no issues at all.
Therefore right now I am ready to go ahead and connect to my VPN server now before doing that let me
just show you right here.
As you can see the configuration files are stored in my home.
Persistent tor browser.
So I need to navigate to this location before being able to use these files.
So we're going to use the CDE command to change my current working directory to this directory.
So we're going to do CDE followed by persistent and you can use the TARP to auto complete for example.
I'm just gonna type T O R and press tab to auto complete tor browser.
If I hit enter you'll see that I am inside the correct path right now.
Same path as you see in here.
Therefore right now I can go ahead and use this file to connect to my VPN server.
So we're going to use the program open VPN that we installed at the start of the video.
So we're gonna do open VPN dash dash config to specify the config file and again as you can see in my
case the conflict file right here is called config dot or VPN.
In your case it might be called something else but the config file is always the file that ends with
DOT or VPN.
So I'm gonna type config that or VPN and before I had entered.
Just gonna go over the command or use an open VPN.
This is the program that will allow us to connect to our VPN server.
We're doing dash dash contact to specify the config file and my config file is called config.
That old VPN I'm going to hit enter.
And as you can see it's going to ask me for the password.
This is your password to connect to your VPN server not the password of the system.
So I'm going to input mine right now here and there.
And perfect.
If you see initialization sequence completed this means that the connection has been established.
Now you will also notice that the Onion icon in here will have an X as if you're not connected to anything.
Don't worry about this.
You're seeing that because right now the traffic is forced to go through the VPN server.
Like I said and that's why the system thinks that it's not connected but it is actually connected to
the VPN server to confirm this.
I'm gonna go and run my tor browser.
And I'm just gonna go to check the Tor Project dot org and perfect as you can see it's still announced
that my browser right now is configured to use data or browser.
So right now what's happening is we're connecting to the VPN first and then our traffic is routed to
the TOR network and then like I said we can bounce through three nodes and then go to the Internet or
stay within the Tor network and access on hidden services.
Now just to make sure that this is the way our computer is set up and it can't access the terror network
directly or the Internet directly.
What I'm going to do in here I'm just going to go back to my terminal window and I'm going to press
control and see to quit the running program right here and now if I go back to my Tor Browser and refresh
the page you will see that I do not have connection and that is perfect because while I just did right
now I disconnected from the VPN server and because I did that I can't access anything.
And this is exactly what we want.
We want our computer to be configured in a way that it forces all traffic through the VPN server if
you want to go back to the previous configuration where traffic is forced through the Tor network directly.
All you have to do is simply restart tails.
Tails is amnesiac.
All of these configurations will disappear and you will be connected to the TOR network directly.
As usual now this could be a feature and can be something annoying if you always want to connect to
a VPN because every time you restart tails you will have to do this you will have to do all of the steps
that I showed you previously in order to connect your VPN provider because your settings will be reset
every time you restart.