VPN and Unencrypted Protocols

Question

I recently started subscribing to a VPN service, and to check that all traffic is in fact encrypted I used Wireshark. According to this page, the lower, right hand side should be gibberish (from this you probably already inferred that I am not especially tech savvy).

I noticed that these protocols are not encrypted: DNS, SSL, SSDP, TCP, TLSv1.2.

Should not those be encrypted as well?

Using ipleak.net, it seems like there is no leak (not even webRTC, which I removed by a browser add-on).

NordVPN, which I am using, does not seem to allow any special configurations to force all traffic through the VPN tunnel. Is there any way I can do this?

Answer 1

In order to setup a tunnel you have to :

1. discover your vpn provider and connect to him ( DNS)
2. Initiate a encryption with your provider ( SSL/TLS)
3. Once a pipe is added, routing entries must be added on your local computer so other services can find out about your tunnel (SSDP).
4. As for TCP, well it's TCP, if all would be encrypted then you wouldn't be able to get to your modem, not even mentioning the
internet.

As you may notice, there is quite a lot of prepwork to do until a tunnel is secured, and it is unencrypted, but once the tunnel is up and the routing rules in place, everything should be safely piped through the tunnel. There's also the possibility that you're listening on the "LAN" side of things and also you're creating additional unencrypted traffic by maintaining connections prior to the tunnel firing up.