OpenVPN & uPnP

theamazingjmo

I'm a bit of a noob when it comes to VPNs, so I apologize in advance if something like this has been asked already. I couldn't find it if it has.

I use privateinternetaccess.com's VPN service. I'm using their proprietary program to connect to it at the moment, but they assure me its based on OpenVPN. I've connected with a regular openVPN client before as well.

I use Vuze to seed (legal) torrents. I use my VPN primarily to avoid shaping/monitoring/etc from my ISP. I noticed today that Vuze was reporting that I was receiving incoming connections. I found this odd at the time because I wasn't connected to one of PIA's gateways that supports port forwarding. Then I realized uPnP was on and it was mapping ports at the router here that I share with other roommates. My question is, does this uPnP traffic compromise my security at all? I don't really know enough about how VPN works to understand if it does. I have Vuze set to bind all traffic to the TAP adapter. So it is supposed to fail if the VPN fails and not drop back to the "clear" connection. For now, to be safe I've just turned off uPnP and I am only using the ports on PIA's side.

Is the uPnP traffic through the router somehow integrated into the VPN tunneling? If so, could someone explain to me how that works? It seems intuitively that it would exist "outside" the VPN but my knowlege is limited. Any help would be appreciated.

Traffic

theamazingjmo wroteMy question is, does this uPnP traffic compromise my security at all?

Steve Gibson @ Gibson Research calls it "Unplug and Pray":
https://www.grc.com/unpnp/unpnp.htm

UPnP was designed to manage your network without you having to .. so in my opinion, that is the dictionary definition of insecure.