Results of NordVPN security audit are now available

Nord Security, the company behind NordVPN and other products, requested an extensive security audit of NordVPN applications, add-ons, web services and APIs in June 2022. The audit was carried out by Cure53,  a Germany company specialized in security audits.

Cure53 was tasked to conduct a penetration test and source code audit against “NordVPN servers, infrastructure, and NordVPN desktop applications for Windows, Linux, and macOS”. The audit lasted from July 2022 to October 2022 and was compartmentalized into three work packages.

Note: Bitwarden, makers of the password management service, posted the results of a security audit of Bitwarden by Cure53 today as well.

The results of the audit have been published by NordVPN on the official company website. There, interested users find the two Cure53 reports.

The researchers identified a total of 6 vulnerabilities and 17 miscellaneous items with “lower exploitation potential”. While the number of identified items appears large, Cure53 notes that the scope of the audit was also large, as it involved applications, extensions, infrastructure, source code and web services that NordVPN operates.

NordVPN fixed all security issues that the researchers identified during the audit. Cure53 approved the patches and confirmed that NordVPN implemented the mitigations correctly.

Tip: you can check out our latest NordVPN review here.

NordVPN: the major security issues

One of the issues received a critical rating, two a high rating. The critical issue affected the NordVPN Daemon on Linux systems. The researchers noticed that it embedded “the environment variables of a foreign process into the command line” to send desktop notifications on KDE and Gnome systems.

The first security issue rated high affected NordVPN on macOS systems. The privileged VPN helper wrote logs to user-owned file locations. An attacker with user privileges could exploit this with symlinks to “write log entries to any root-owned file”.

The third issue, also rated high, affected NordVPN on macOS again. It could be exploited by an attacker to load an arbitrary extensions. The remaining security issues received a severity rating of medium or lower.

Other findings

Cure53 provides an extensive commentary on its findings in the reports. The conclusions include additional information on the applications, code and infrastructure analyzed during the audit.

The researchers found several areas in which default configurations were used. The Docker configuration, for example, relied on several default configurations that the researchers considered insecure.

NordVPN has addressed these issues in the meantime, which means that they should not be considered a potential security issue anymore.

Closing Words

NordVPN is a popular VPN service that is available in most regions. Third-party audits are carried out to identify potential issues and to fix them, but they are also used by companies to improve transparency and trust.

Internet users may be more inclined to trust an audited service, or one that is audited regularly by third-parties, than a service that has never been audited.

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