I know it isn’t specific to just Linux but I use Linux anyway so my question is,
Is there a way you could use a VPN without them knowing that? Or if they outlaw them is it really just game over?
If they made VPNs illegal I suppose stuff like TOR would follow except TOR is partly funded by the US state department and the US is one of my countries closest allies (one of the five eyes). So surely they wouldn’t shut down something the US funds directly… Would they?
I’ve read very very little about Gemini and other protocols like Gopher, would this be the way forward if they do this? And is that even remotely close to the security and potential anonymity you would receive from a VPN?
Say you rented a server at Amazon and ran your own VPN server software on it. Not that hard. The server could expose an HTTPS endpoint.
VPN software on your laptop connects to that.
From the network level, it appears you spend a lot of time connected to the same random website, hosted on some IP not owned by a VPN company.
Firstly, it depends on how illegal it is. Is it illegal like you shouldn’t do it and we will try to block you? Or is it illegal like if we catch you do it, you can get arrested or worse?
Scenario A:
- just try shit out, try different VPNs. Some of them provide certain obfuscation. You can see if they work. If they don’t work, you’ve got some more dedicated VPNs such as Tor with all kinds of Tor bridges (obfs4, snowflake, etc) Or psiphon
Scenario B:
- The risk is real and you might consider not doing it at all, but if you do, obfs4 is the only thing I can recommend, Psiphon is easily detectable (it’s just good at bypassing blocks)
mullvad has wireguard obfuscation making it harder to detect vpn traffiic
You could rent a VPS in a neutral country and use ssh to create a SOCKS proxy to it, then use foxyproxy to add the proxy to firefox/librewolf/whatever and either allowlist certain sites you don’t want your country knowing about or denylist websites you don’t care if your country knows about (especially higher bandwidth sites that aren’t controversial like YouTube).
At that point you’d have plenty of “real” traffic from the unproxied websites and any traffic the rest of your OS is using, and when you access the proxies sites you want to hide it’ll look like you’re using ssh and/or scp.
You could also create a proxy server with a tor connection on the server and use ssh port forwarding to access it locally. The Mullvad browser + foxyproxy would probably be your best bet for using that since it’s basically tor browser without tor.
EDIT: Additionally, if you wanted to proxy an application that doesn’t support SOCKS internally, you can configure proxychains with the proxy and then launch
proxychains applicationname.This, but I’d use separate browsers to keep seperate digital fingerprints. Otherwise your ad trackers would know it’s the exact same person going to site a directly and site b indirectly.
Also worth noting that Facebook has a back door on its mobile app, that keep listening on some port. When you use certain apps with meta code ( could be a newspaper that monetizes with Facebook ads ) or websites with meta code ( same “newspaper”), those apps/websites send your ad tracker id directly to Facebook app through that port. This de-anonimizes the shit out of your “anonymous” ad IDs. Other techniques rely on lots of data points and some degree of guessing, but this ways it’s mercilessly effective and accurate.
Until the “whitelist” principle is implemented for the network—you’re fine. You’ll be able to use stealth protocols, whose traffic is practically indistinguishable from regular HTTPS traffic to any website.
You might ask:
But won’t the internet censor notice that suspiciously large amounts of traffic are going to a single IP and block it?
you’d be right, but only in the case where your server is configured incorrectly. nothing stops you from finding a hosting provider whose subnet contains YouTube caching servers and disguise your traffic as coming from there. then, to the censor, everything will look natural, since traffic is indeed going to YouTube.
Once you have your own proxy server, you can create proxy chains to well-known services like Mullvad, IVPN, Proton, etc. Your intermediate server won’t see the traffic, so your privacy will be just as strong as when using these popular services directly—except with slightly higher ping.
You might say: what if they introduce those very whitelists, allowing access only to IPs within your country of residence? Like in North Korea?
I’ll answer: first, it’s unlikely to happen overnight, as it would be a fatal blow to the country’s economy. Second, even with whitelists, there are ways around them. In Russia, many people rent Russian CDNs (content delivery networks that reduce ping to services) and use them as an intermediate layer between a foreign server and themselves.
Why can’t the censor block them? Because large companies use them—so blocking these CDNs would also break taxi services, banks, and many other services included in the whitelist.
So it’s not that bad. The main thing is to have the will to fight for your rights, for your freedom. And methods, one way or another, will remain even under the strictest regimes :)
If you go to dark(.)fail, go to Dread forums and head to c/OpSec, one of the top posts has information on how to bypass all Internet censorship. It’s a super in-depth tutorial on bypassing censorship in countires like Russia, China, etc.
Most popular VPNs have some form of obfuscation options in their apps. But if you’re using e.g. raw Wireguard you won’t be able to use their obfuscation function.
Btw technically they can’t really outlaw VPNs as a whole, only commercial/“privacy” VPNs. They couldn’t really tell if you’re e.g. using your friend’s PC as a VPN to access their LAN, since it’s a residential IP. Unless they’re looking for Wireguard packets, but that seems like an unlikely law since it’d piss off a lot of businesses that use VPNs to let their workers access the company intranet at home.
There are VPNs that operate in stealth mode so they don’t look like VPN traffic as they’re being used.
Still illegal, but not detectable. No riskier than being a political activist antagonistic to the state.
I don’t see how any modern country could do it. It would close off all cloud things.
They could pass laws that made VPNs nearly useless (mandatory logging and law enforcement access), or could pass laws that made it nearly impossible to make money from running a VPN service (make VPNs liable for any “damages” they “facilitated”).
Not exactly since your VPN could be in a country that doesn’t give a shit about the laws in your country .
Yeah, I think they have ways to block payments. Could use crypto though. Would make them much less profitable, since less people would want to go through those hoops. I guess countries like China does pretty intense DPI, and starts throttling and blocking connections that just exhibit suspicious-looking patterns, not to mention blocking every known VPN, Tor bridge, etc.
ok. good point.
You could buy a webserver outside the country and set up your own VPN software or something. I think there are forms that look like https.
You should probably try to tell at least one person a week to never vote for those people again and try to resist your oppressive state in every way you can without getting yourself in trouble or hurt.
Also try to do anything you can that they don’t want. If the powerful people in your country want something, try to oppose them. Don’t let them just shit on you and get away with it.
You could buy a webserver outside the country and set up your own VPN software or something. I think there are forms that look like https.
Anyone used / got any opinions on Algo?
I’m not the most experienced with this but I’m sure someone could help you.
I don’t know how any company I’ve worked for would operate, especially when headquartered in another country. They’ll just have to fire everyone in that country rather than compromise their security
I’d assume they’d give companies an exemption if they made private VPN use illegal. Doesn’t China do something similar to this?
I’ve heard they have government-approved VPN providers. And companies there use VPNs for their job. They’ll also do business on platforms which are blocked on the regular Chinese internet. Of course business is guided by the communist party so you might have someone keeping an eye on your company VPN (mis)use. People who went there told me they’re more lenient with foreigners. Your European/American company’s corporate VPN might work well, you might also experience connections being dropped and the Great Firewall messing with it. And there are some attempts at circumventing blockage, like TOR’s Snowflake, though all of this is a cat and mouse game, some (illegal) thing works for a while and then they shut it down and you’ll move to the next one. Though as a citizen of an oppressive regime you’d better think twice before engaging in a cat and mouse game with authorities.
VPNs work fine in China. The point of the great firewall is to keep Facebook et al out, not to keep anybody in.
I think the Chinese VPN ban is a bit exaggerated
They don’t really ban them, but there is deep packet inspection where they may throttle the connection or in my experience, cut it off after a period of time. Sometimes they block them during national occasions. I could probably try something better than OpenVPN. I only use it for personal use anyway and I am a foreigner, so they really wouldn’t care (if anything, it’s kind of expected waiguoren behaviour). If you are roaming on a foreign sim card and using mobile data, there is no censorship from my experience. Just needed the VPN for wifi
To be fair, it’s Mullvad that simply rocks.
“Making VPNs illegal” doesn’t stop you from using them.
They would have to implement north korea/iran levels of restrictions in order to prevent you from using VPNs.
Can your ISP not tell you’re using a VPN?
Would it not be easy for them to block access to VPNs if they outlaw them?
What do you do then?
I guess a better way to phrase the question is if they are outlawed how can I use one without my ISP knowing.
If your ISP can tell you’re using a VPN then yes, making them illegal would prevent me from using them right?
Mullvad has many methods of obscuring the fact that you are sending VPN traffic, specifically designed to fight VPN censorship and firewalls.
A VPN wrapped in HTTPS would be basically undetectable. Yes, your ISP could start marking IP addresses as “VPN”, but that would be a wack-a-mole situation, and wouldnt scale at all.
A VPN wrapped in HTTPS would be basically undetectable.
are there any implementations doing this?
SSL VPN is the more general term to describe it, and there are definitely some vendors that do that. Not sure about standalone VPN software though.
I can see the UK doing this, they love to implement ludicrously restrictive and impossible to enforce anti-privacy laws. My working theory is that they’re lobbied to implement them by IT consultancy firms, who then get hired to consult on, say, banning VPNs, take 10 years to investigate it at eye-watering cost to the public, then go “Yeah turns out you can’t ban VPNs, I don’t know what the previous government was thinking” and then use that money to lobby the new government to ban encryption or some other nonsense, then repeat.
Þe absolute best feature of beaurocracy is how inefficient it is. The Principia Discordia tells us:
The thing about large organizations is that, while they do small things badly, they do large things badly, too.
Would it not be easy for them to block access to VPNs if they outlaw them?
Not necessarily. It’s reasonably easy to keep long lists of known IP address ranges of known VPN providers and block access to these, but VPN traffic to a not well known IP address is generally impossible to distinguish from perfectly legal encrypted traffic such as a VPN connection to a corporate intranet. (There are also VPN protocols that are made deliberately hard to identify at all.)
It is distinguishable via deep-packet-inspection, China uses this
If it just looks like a stream of TLS packets, so the content is encrypted, what would DPI be able to see? I feel like if it could detect it as a VPN, that’s just a bug that needs fixing, not an inherent weakness in the protocols involved.
Sometimes.
They can keep a record of VPNs and monitor if you connect to their servers, or block that connection altogether.
The problem with this is that new VPNs come and go all the time and active VPNs don’t always have static configurations. It would be impossible for them to reliably track all of them.
But if it were illegal as soon as you connected to one single blacklisted IP you’d be fucked, right?
That would be up to the courts to decide.
It’s very easy to accidentally connect to an unknown server, so it would depend on your state’s criteria for determining guilt.
There is some nuance to what exactly is banned.
I self host a vpn at my home that i use to connect to my home network on the go. This is a super common use-case and also cant be used to circumvent regional blocks.
Work also uses a vpn to securely tunnel company hardware to our servers.
A blanket ban on vpn software and technology would be ridiculously dumb. Almost as bad as blanket ban on encryption.
If they make exceptions and only ban vpn with intention to hide and circumvent the law, then you only need some legal excuse if someone comes asking and its more a morality guideline then a criminal law.
If they blanket ban “vpn technology” i would simply suggest ignoring it. Laws that stupid are too incompetent to take seriously. I recon its completely unenforceable.
Either way you’re unlikely to be investigated unless the government already has a reason to investigate you. In which case you’re probably fucked no matter how secure your internet.
Somewhat. They can certainly maintain a list of known IP addresses. Those IPs can be changed.
When they change, you as a user need to be able to find the new addresses. Whatever mechanism you can use, your ISP can likely disrupt too. For instance, they can DNS block the API that returns the list of possible endpoints (as sometimes happens to Proton where I live).
You can then counter by using private DNS. It’s a cat and mouse game.
P2P tunnelling could be a thing, but obv there are issues with having a stranger’s traffic coming out of your home network range. I guess they can’t really lock out all traffic from AWS and Azure, so cloud data centres are an option.
P2P tunnelling could be a thing
it is!
Deep-packet inspection exists. They can tell when vpns are being used generally. They kept shutting off my VPN in China ☹️
How does that work if the traffic is encrypted?
They can’t read the contents of the traffic but they can tell it’s a VPN
Does tor and i2p work?
Banning VPNs is on the list of braindead government restrictions up there with banning encryption. The latter is basically a ban on math, just like in that book where 2+2 is sometimes 3, sometimes 5.
As a person from the UK, I am fully expecting them to implement this in the next year or two, because ruining the internet seems to be the government’s top priority rather than say, fixing the economy or preventing Reform from taking over for some fucking reason.
just like in that book where 2+2 is sometimes 3, sometimes 5.
You mean
book1.xls?haha
Though to be fair whenever I encountered an issue in Excel/Calc, it was a user (me) error.
Aren’t they both the same thing? A VPN is just applied encryption.
You’re right though, banning encryption is a pipe dream. Encrypted data is not distinguishable from random noise. So you’re not allowing me to send around random numbers now?
Yes but they’ve done this before in countries like US. They went after the T Shirt producers printing the DeCSS on them and recently the whole tornado cash fiasco where they tried to make smart contracts illegal (although this was overturned).
Granted though I think DeCSS contained proprietary code so its a little different but unfortunately I view most governmental control and censorship to be braindead but I still fear they will do it.
They would have exemptions for corporate VPNs and encryption and for members of parliament and all that of course, but I could absolutely see them trying to fuck us all sooner rather than later.
I hope I’m just paranoid.
Off topic, but with DeCSS the problem wasn’t that it was proprietary or a trade secret. Once the algorithm got out, it was out. Since it had been a trade secret, there was no patent protection on it.
However, some laws and treaties prohibit distributing code that circumvents copy protection schemes, and this is where they ran into trouble.
And that’s why they were all those songs and t-shirts and other free speech items made with the DeCSS algorithm on them. Eventually the cases were dropped.
