Site supplied "academy.ovpn" file doesn't work without modification

HTB Content Machines
1

Hi,

First post and such :slight_smile: Anyway, just started this and because I’m cheap, I blew my daily instance spawn and because I just had to blow £300 on a new washing machine (timing!) I decided to continue with my own Linux machine and use the OpenVPN file supplied by the site (academy.ovpn) to access the box I needed. Except, it doesn’t work as-is and bombed out with the error: -

Error: negotiated cipher not allowed - AES-128-CBC not in AES-256-GCM:AES-128-GCM:CHACHA20-POLY1305

Since I’ve never used OpenVPN before, this took a bit of work, but eventually I discovered that if you open the file and replace: -

cipher AES-128-CBC

…with…

data-ciphers-fallback AES-128-CBC

Is this a known issue? Something to do with my version of OpenVPN (running on Kali Linux 2022.3) ? Anyway, I hope this saves somebody 20 minutes research.