This needs some clarification, which was not covered in earlier posts.
gso wrote:If the login password of an OpenVPN provider is not kept secure, is the encryption of the openvpn Internet connection then also potentially breached?
No. The username/password is used to authenticate you as a user. If that information is leaked, other persons may only connect to the same server using your credentials. The user credentials is never used as a key for the encryption keys on the VPN tunnel.
Further, when using username/passwords the use of TLS mode in OpenVPN is required. TLS mode ensures that the tunnel data is encrypted with an ephemeral session key, and unless renegotiations have been disabled by the service provider, that encryption key will be rotated at regular intervals. The default in OpenVPN is to renegotiate every hour.
gso wrote:A second part to this question also - tech. support for an OpenVPN provider have just said to me, in respect of keeping an Internet connection secure where a wire tap may have been put in place: "If some one wire taps you, there is almost nothing you can do." Is there any reason OpenVPN software should not keep data encrypted even under these conditions?
A properly configured VPN tunnel which have enabled encryption (which is default in OpenVPN), then the tunnelled network traffic will
always be encrypted. If the data is transmitted unencrypted, then the encryption must have been disabled explicitly before the session started. And OpenVPN will complain in the logs if this happens.
Yes, some can wiretap your connection between you and the VPN server. What they will see is a lot of encrypted traffic. That alone is no security statement. The strength of encryption is critical (key length, cipher algorithm used). Further what kind of traffic you submit inside the tunnel may also be revealed based on if the tunnel uses compression (normally not recommended) and if the resulting packet shape fits some patterns. Now, this is quite advanced encryption forensic techniques, and it does not necessarily break the encryption. But this information, when applied, can give enough clues to guess what kind of data exists inside the tunnel - and that can again be used to enhance and speed-up the bruteforce attack on the encrypted packet. But, since the tunnel is renegotiated at regular intervals, such attack will only make it possible to crack the encryption for a single "time window". So if someone have captured 3 hours of your encrypted network traffic where the tunnel is renegotiated every hour and an attacker somehow manages to crack the encryption, it will only work for the packets inside the same block of one hour. The other two hours needs to be cracked independently.
There are several steps you can take to further try to protect yourself. But remember, encryption will never protect your data for infinity. You need to choose an encryption setup which is considered most unlikely to be cracked within a time window where this information is critical and sensitive. For most users, that means 1-5 years - perhaps even down to 6 months. With today's knowledge about ciphers, AES encryption is considered secure. And with OpenVPN v2.4, you get AES-GCM which is even faster and more secure. Combine that with enforced tunnel renegotiation and another new feature in OpenVPN v2.4, --tls-crypt, and you will most likely be able to have your data protected for at least the next 5 years, probably even up to 10 years - unless there is a big breakthrough in quantum computing which provides a reasonable amount of qbits available. (And yes, there is some work happening on encryption in OpenVPN which considers the post-quantum era).
So the bottom line is: use OpenVPN v2.4 on client and servers, ensure the tunnel uses the AES-256-GCM cipher (happens automatically if both sides are v2.4), avoid using --compression/--comp-lzo, ensure --reneg-sec is not disabled and use --tls-crypt. Then you'll be fairly safe for quite some time.