WebRTC leak protection. What is it? And How do you prevent it.

Written By Lorenzo Vincent

Updated at August 28th, 2023

WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) is an open-source project that provides most browsers with a feature that allows voice, video chat, and P2P sharing to occur without any additional extensions or add-ons being used. If your IP address is leaked while connected to a VPN service, which makes it much easier for your ISP to track your activities, and cybercriminals to exploit your sensitive data. Not to mention it completely defeats the purpose of using a VPN in the first place.

How to test WebRTC leak?

  1. Run PureVPN and connect to a server.
  2. Visit this link and test WebRTC while connected to the VPN server.
  3. If you see your real public IP address displayed in the results, you have a WebRTC leak.

Note: your original IP usually begins with 10.xxx or 192.xxx or an alpha-numeric IPv6).

How do you prevent WebRTC leak?

  • Here’s what you need to do:
  • If you use Firefox, you can follow below steps to disable WebRTC.
    1. Start Firefox.
    2. Type about: config in the URL bar.
    3. Hit Enter and click on I accept the risk. Don’t worry about the warning.
    4. Now, type media. peer connection. enabled in the search bar.
    5. Under the Search bar, look for the Preference Name tab.
    6. Double-click the item that’s displayed to change the value to false.

Google Chrome on Android

  • Many users use Google chrome on their Android phones/tablets, you can disable WebRTC manually on it too. Just type in or copy the following URL in a Chrome tab:

“chrome://flags/#disable-webrtc”

  • Once the page is loaded, scroll down, look for WebRTC STUN origin header, and disable it.

Brave

  • The Brave browser is also susceptible to WebRTC leaks since it’s based on Chromium.  The easiest way to fix the problem is to do the following:
    1. Head to Preferences.
    2. Click Shields.
    3. On the right, look for Fingerprinting Protection.
    4. From the drop-down menu, select Block all fingerprinting.
  • But if you are using PureVPN then you may simple Enable WebRTC protection on our browser extension to prevent WebRTC leak.
  • Or you can simply follow these links to enable WebRTC leak protection on the PureVPN browser extension on google chrome and firefox.