i am in a university running the eduroam wireless service. if i use a VPN will the university be able to trace it back to me that I am using a VPN?
CS Major at Cornell University here (also using eduroam and Cornell’s campus-wide RedRover network). If you use a VPN, all of the traffic leaving your system is encrypted before it reaches your campus’s router where is is forwarded to their ISP. From here it is then forwarded to your VPN service provider where the request is decrypted and finally forwarded to the site you are trying to reach. On response, the data is sent from the website to the VPN provider where it is once again encrypted. Then, it is sent from the VPN provider to your campus’s ISP, then to your campus net, then back to you where it is decrypted and processed on your machine. In effect, this means that while the University can see encrypted packets coming in and out of your machine (hence allowing them to infer the use of a VPN or TOR), they cannot determine what the traffic is or where it is going.
I highly recommend using a VPN as it is your right to privacy and I GUARANTEE you the University keeps and tracks all network logs for law enforcement purposes. If you are all concerned about this, I would recommend using a Russian based 256 bit encrypted VPN from nVPN.net. The company is offshore and Russia does not have an extradition treaty to the United States.
Edit: Some Universities specifically block traffic on port 1194 making a VPN harder to use. If you notice that your IP does not change when the VPN establishes a connection you will need to request a change from your provider to send all traffic through port 443 which they cannot block (HTTPS). nVPN has this option.
tl;dr. Yes, but that’s it. All traffic is encrypted, you can torrent on it safely.
If I understand correctly, yes they will know youre using a VPN but cant exactly see what youre doing. They will basically see that you’re using a “tunneled” connection, but wont be able to see whats going on in that “tunnel”.
If you’re using OpenVPN that is tunneling traffic through port 80 with obfsproxy then not really. It just looks like normal web traffic.
Yes because university IT sept will see that a login account belonging to “kar111” is establishing an ( insert: ipSEC , L2TP, wireguard connection)
So they won’t know where you are going but they will know it’s you using a VPN
Thanks. My ip address does change so I don’t think my university blocks that port. My university is quite lax but they get very serious when they receive any copyright infringement notice. But now that that’s impossible I’m free sailing 
thanks. so they can trace me back to my account that I used to log in to the wifi?
Don’t know what some of those words mean but I’m using openvpn and my provider is frootvpn
Yes, but that shouldn’t really concern you unless VPNs are banned in the terms of service. I would be surprised to see such language in their agreement.
They will just see encrypted traffic related to your account. They can notice that you are using a VPN, but whether you are allowed to use or not depends on the university policy. I doubt the university will do anything though.
Make sure you go to https://www.dnsleaktest.com/ and do a test. If any host names come up relating to your university, they can see which websites you have visited.
I’ve been currently using PIA without a problem for 2 months in the campus.
Its something that a VPN service provider has to specifically set up, not all OpenVPN services have it, but they can make your traffic look like its normal web traffic rather than specifically for VPN. Its often used for people using VPNs in China, because their national firewall blocks many types of normal VPN connections.
Hmm okay. Well as long as they don’t get any copyright infringement notices I don’t think they care too much so it’s all good.
thanks a lot. ill check it out
Not sure if you’re using PIA or another, but for a situation like this you need to be using vpn killswitch and the different leak protection tools.