rickybule - 2d
Indonesia is currently in chaos. Earlier today, the government blocked access to Twitter & Discord knowing news spread mainly through those channels. Usually we can use Cloudflare's WARP to avoid it, but just today they blocked the access as well. What alternative should we use?
Hello! I've got experience working on censorship circumvention for a major VPN provider (in the early 2020s).
- First things first, you have to get your hands on actual VPN software and configs. Many providers who are aware of VPN censorship and cater to these locales distribute their VPNs through hard-to-block channels and in obfuscated packages. S3 is a popular option but by no means the only one, and some VPN providers partner with local orgs who can figure out the safest and most efficient ways to distribute a VPN package in countries at risk of censorship or undergoing censorship.
- Once you've got the software, you should try to use it with an obfuscation layer.
Obfs4proxy is a popular tool here, and relies on a pre-shared key to make traffic look like nothing special. IIRC it also hides the VPN handshake. This isn't a perfectly secure model, but it's good enough to defeat most DPI setups.
Another option is Shapeshifter, from Operator (https://github.com/OperatorFoundation). Or, in general, anything that uses pluggable transports. While it's a niche technology, it's quite useful in your case.
In both cases, the VPN provider must provide support for these protocols.
- The toughest step long term is not getting caught using a VPN. By its nature, long-term statistical analysis will often reveal a VPN connection regardless of obfuscation and masking (and this approach can be cheaper to support than DPI by a state actor). I don't know the situation on the ground in Indonesia, so I won't speculate about what the best way to avoid this would be, long-term.
I will endorse Mullvad as a trustworthy and technically competent VPN provider in this niche (n.b., I do not work for them, nor have I worked for them; they were a competitor to my employer and we always respected their approach to the space).
> First things first, you have to get your hands on actual VPN software and configs.
It would be nice if one of the big shortwave operators could datacast these packages to the world as a public service.
There isn't enough bandwidth in HF to transmit data. Digital HF audio is 20 kHz wide so maybe 50kbps. The entire HF band is only 3-30 MHz.
50 kb/s x 1000 bits/kb x 3600 s/hr x 24 hr/day x 1 byte/8 bits x 1 MB / 1000000 bytes = 540 MB/day. That's enough to download VPN software and a Linux distribution to run it on in a day.
If you've already got a Linux system, the Debian openvpn package is under 1 MB and at 50 kb/s would take under 3 minutes to download. I don't know if openvpn in particular is suitable for people who are trying to evade their government, but would whatever features it is missing add substantially more size?
Yeah, you could use forward error correction too, so any n bits would be enough to reconstruct the input.
Of course then you get into needing software to decode the more advanced encodings; maybe start with a voice transmission explaining in plain language how to decode the first layer, which gives you a program that can decode the second layer, or something.
Starting to sound like an interesting project.
You never used dialup did you?
300 baud. Was enough to download grainy porn pics. With a proper download tool that continues after hangups etc you can just leave it on for a week and I have when downloading software end 70s. No problem. Also via the airwaves: we had software via the radio every sunday. Works fine. Modern software is shitty large: it would be nice if a VPN provider would just release the driver and a cli which should not weigh over a mega (far less but outside mr Whitney i am not sure if that type of software dev still exists) for this type of transfer.
9600 bps dialup using the protocols commonly used back then such as ZMODEM could do file transfers at 3 MB/hour. That would be fine for grabbing VPN software.
zmodem to the rescue!
Wireguard ships with the Linux kernel so you only need to receive ~60 bytes of configuration information.
The user-facing software is not included in the kernel, but you need that to configure wireguard.
Is that true? I thought wg-quick etc were just convenience functions and that it's relatively trivial to use iproute2 to configure a VPN link
You don't need wg-quick. You do need the "wg" command.
Wireguard is also easily censored and is already censored in the places that censor VPNs.
sure there is, you can send files over HF, it may not be FAST, but once you get it into the country, you can just copy the file with a faster method (eg: usb drive), WINLINK supports attachments, so you could absolutely send these files over HF
If you're going to be using USB drives anyway, then using them to move files into the country would be faster.
More dangerous though. You'd need something like truecrypt, too.
btw, veracrypt is the name if the follow up project. truecrypt shut down over a decade ago rather abruptly, so anything labeled truecrypt today is suspect as either out of date or potential malware.
Wasn't the conspiracy theory that truecrypt got shut down because it was 'too effective', and the successor projects presumably have intentional backdoors or something?
Truecrypt was likely developed by only 1 man, Paul le roux, who likely shut it down because he was on the run for being an international drug/human smuggler/cartel member. It’s kind of a crazy story.
But either way both truecrypt and veracrypt were independently audited and no major flaws were found. Not sure when the last veracrypt audit was done.
Nah, just drop a few thousand 1GB flash drives from a plane. Load them with a tor browser, a wireguard client, and instructions on finding a remote exit. Only one copy needs to survive and it can spread very quickly and irreversibly by foot.
Yeah, this is a great approach if you're already at war with a country.
If you're not and they're still allowing your planes to fly through their airspace then this is a great way to ensure that they lock your (and your friends') planes out.
Plugging in a strange USB drive?
What could go wrong.
Would you like a short list, a long list or ...
Or just google drive.
Banned in places that ban VPNs.
I’m not familiar with any HF comms channels other than military or broadcasting that get 20 kHz of bandwidth. Most HF modes get 3 kHz. You might be able to get 5 kbps at 3 kHz BW with some modern modes that can adapt to the frequency selective non stationary channel.
Wait until you find out what people used to do with phone lines!
The problem is the countries, which censor Internet and block VPNs, also jam shortwave radio signals.
It's possible but also difficult to jam radio. That's part of why programs like Radio Free Asia[0,1] exist. Even if you can't broadcast from inside a territory you can broadcast from outside. It can be jammed but it is a tough cat and mouse game and jamming isn't precise. So when you jam there are causalities. Not to mention that jamming can be quite expensive.
I'm not saying that makes the problem easy, but I'll say that jamming isn't a very strong defense.
Though the bigger issue here is probably bandwith. It's hard to be both long range and data dense. There's probably easier ways to distribute this. Hell, both Koreas are known to transport different things via balloons.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Asia
[1] It is also why projects like Tor and Signal get funding from RFA. Maybe the US doesn't want encrypted services here, but if anything, it's for the same reason they do want encrypted services in other countries.
I’m not sure that’s super feasible any longer with the advent of cheap SDRs. Over-the-horizon HF broadcast can be heard with a simple speaker wire antenna inside your house. If anyone is interested in trying to deploy such an idea, I’d love to participate as an avid ham.
Could I ask for a source on that and how common it is?
Seems like it was used way back in the cold war (and even then not blocked/jammed) and I'd guess that current authoritarian regimes would perhaps not bother considering how few could use it.
Source: trust me bro, but you can find HF jamming pretty easily on Internet connected SDRs, especially near "sensitive" countries.
The USSR had an extensive shortwave radio jamming program!
The UK used to get around this with very powerful medium-wave signals, the site at Orfordness could put out the BBC World Service at 2 MW towards the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. This site was built on the remains of a 1960s UK/US over-the-horizon radar installation that never worked properly.
These broadcasts were shut down in the early '10s but ironically one of the masts is still in use by Radio Caroline, the former pirate who broke the BBC's radio monopoly by putting their station just outside of UK territorial waters. Their 4 kW goes pretty far given the site's previous role, heard them as far away as the Lake District.
... to block BBC and Voice of America, RFE and RL.
But they recently switched to a much cheaper and more effective jamming program: Trump [1].
[1] https://apnews.com/article/voa-radio-trump-media-cuts-5f87df...
if it became a widespread practice, wouldnt even the countries that yet dont do it probably start doing it?
But then couldn't the authorities just intercept it too and then block those ips?
https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand
Streisand is extremely out of date and wouldn’t last long in China, but I don’t know how sophisticated Indonesia’s firewall is
i have a few chinese friends and they say it's always easy to get a working vpn. that might not be true in a Tien An Minh type crisis, i dunno, but month in month out year upon year they surf western sites, exchange winnie the pooh pictures, etc. i suppose the people i know could be relatively upper class, i have no idea what type difference that could make. i had a chinese gf in LA who would send... my >cough< pictures... to her mother in china because she enjoyed them
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This is no 'nothing special' with Obfs4proxy. DPI sees it as random byte stream, thus your government can decide to block unknown protocols. Instead, you should trick DPI into thinking it sees HTTPS. Unless your government decides to block HTTPS.
Hi, posting from my main account (I'm also the poster of the GP comment).
"Nothing special" in this case was meant to describe the fact that it's random data with no identifiable patterns inherent to the data; you're absolutely right that that's what obfs4 does. I understand the confusion though, this phrasing could be better.
> your government can decide to block unknown protocols
> you should trick DPI into thinking it sees HTTPS. Unless your government decides to block HTTPS
I will say though, Operator's Replicant does something similar to what you're describing in that it can mimic unrelated protocols. It's a clever approach, unfortunately it was a bit immature when I was working in that area so the team didn't adopt it while I was around.
> your government can decide to block unknown protocols
Has any government ever done that? Seems like it would just break everything (because the world is full of devices that use custom protocols!) at great computational expense.
China blocked https last week: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/ch...
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44958621
They blanket blocked connections to port 443 for an hour. There was no protocol sniffing.
Russia tested this in production by blocking Shadowsocks https://habr.com/ru/news/770840/
WebRTC is another great option: https://snowflake.torproject.org
It's used for a lot of legitimate traffic as well, so a bit harder to block.
The only VPN technology I see that blends as HTTPS is MASQUE IP Proxying, and the only implementation I know that does this is iCloud Private Relay. It is also trivial to block because blocking 443/udp doesn't really affect accessing the Internet.
Cloudflare WARP (1.1.1.1 tunnel or Zero Trust) run by default on MASQUE
Ah that's true, they originally started off with a rust implementation of Wireguard but have since moved to MASQUE.
Not the only, AFAIK Shadowsocks with xray-core can pretend to be a 443/tcp HTTPS server.
Thanks for this, really couldn't find any English explanation of xray-core though.
Exactly this. Hell, for OP's use case of accessing things like twitter, a good old fashioned https proxy would be entirely fine, and likely not even illegal.
what i was thinking. DPI might pick up on proxy headers. alternatively, idk how far one would get just slapping wireguard or openvpn on a VPS somewhere on port 443. that used to work fairly well but i suppose my experience there is like 10+ years out of date by now.
i know a US based tech firm i worked for around 2020 had a simple HTTPS proxy for chinese clients to download content updates. worked really well. it was hosted on some cloud provider and accessible via DNS name. so its not like it wasn't easy to block it. they just didn't bother or it was lost in a sea of other similar activities.
that all being said, regarding oppressive regimes and political turmoil situations: if your health or freedom is at risk, don't rely on internet people's 'guesswork' (hard to tell where ppl get their info from, and what its based on etc.). be careful. if you are not confident, don't go forward with it. Try to get advice from local experts instead, who are familiar in the specific context you are dealing with.
How can you do that exactly ?
Unless your government decides to block HTTPS.
In which case you use stenography, but I believe even the Great Firewall of China doesn't block HTTPS completely.
Nit: you likely mean steganography, stenography is what court reporters do :)
I encourage you and anyone else here to read into the GFW if you're interested. It's more like the Great Firewalls -- there's regional fragmentation with different vendors, operators, implementations and rules between different parts of the country.
Predictably this means there's no one-size-fits-all solution to circumventing censorship on the Chinese internet, and research into this area's difficult since China has both the technical means to identify violations very efficiently as well as the bureaucratic infrastructure to carry out enforcement actions against a considerable portion of those people who violate the GFW rules (with enforcement action being anything from a "cooldown period" on your internet connection where you can't make any connections for some amount of time between minutes and days, fines, or imprisonment depending on the type of content you were trying to access).
So, the ethics of digging into this get very muddy, very fast.
Thank you very much for a detailed answer. Might I rudely ask -- as you're knowledgeable in this space, what do you think of Mullvad's DAITA, which specifically aims to defeat traffic analysis by moving to a more pulsed constant bandwidth model?
DAITA was introduced after my time in the industry, but this isn't a new idea (though as far as I know, it's the first time this kind of thing's been commercialized).
It's clever. It tries to defeat attacks against one of the tougher parts of VPN connections to reliably obfuscate, and the effort's commendable, but I'll stop short of saying it's a good solution for one big reason: with VPNs and censorship circumvention, the data often speaks for itself.
A VPN provider working in this space will often have aggregate (and obviously anonymized, if they're working in good faith) stats about success rates and failure classes encountered from clients connecting to their nodes. Where I worked, we didn't publish this information. I'm not sure where Mullvad stands on this right now.
In any case -- some VPN providers deploying new technology like this will partner with the research community (because there's a small, but passionate formal research community in this space!) and publish papers, studies, and other digests of their findings. Keep an eye out for this sort of stuff. UMD's Breakerspace in the US in particular had some extremely clever people working on this stuff when I was involved in the industry.
Have you heard about Safing's "SPN"? Could you comment on that?
I came across this recently too and it piqued my interest as well.
The way they describe it makes it sort of sound like split tunneling and geotunneling can be done with DNS.
If you are on a limited data plan, beware, DAITA produces a lot of traffic.
Thanks for this, UK citizen/subject here I believe the UK government is likely to go down the path of banning vpns.
Can someone competent pull together a manual to set a vpn with obfuscation? I am sure it will be well received.
A github repo would be ideal really
Not competent, but a VPN user. Mullvad has some obfuscation features built-in. They also got good documentation/guides, I think.
https://mullvad.net/en/help?Feature=censorship-circumvention
https://web.archive.org/web/20250807131341/https://mullvad.n...
gotta go underground, freedom is now an enemy of the crown.
T minus not much until UK punk revival
It will be done very soon....
"Dame Rachel told BBC Newsnight: "Of course, we need age verification on VPNs - it's absolutely a loophole that needs closing and that's one of my major recommendations." - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn438z3ejxyo
They phrase it as age verification, but what they mean is the VPN provider needs to provide them the client list...
ISPs here are already blocking popular ones.
No they are not. It is being talked about adding age-gating to the VPNs.
In the UK? That’s insane
Its also not true.
First, this is great information in an area I know very little about.
But I’m curious - from your experience - how do you know the OP isn’t pretending in order to learn about new avenues to block or attack or to track down people who are trying to circumvent?
I don’t mean that as a “be careful”. You’re the expert compared to me and for all I know these are unblockable. Or maybe those doing the blocking would already know about them? So I’m interested in just understanding more.
I'm curious. How does a state actor do actual DPI without pushing certs to end user devices?
The "inspection" part of DPI isn't limited to encrypted payloads. It's straightforward enough to look at application-level protocol headers and identify e.g. a Wireguard or OpenVPN or SSH connection, even if you can't decrypt the payload. That could be used as sufficient grounds to either block the traffic or punish the user.
I thought OpenVPN simply opens a TLS encrypted connection. How does it look different than HTTPS?
Pushing certs to end user devices is simple. First you create your own national CA. Then you make all government services use TLS certificates signed by the national CA. Then you make phone vendors preinstall the root cert of the national CA into the trust store if they want to sell them in your country. Then you make your ISPs buy and install MITM appliances.
We have different definitions of simple.
This is not that complicated for a state actor.
Network fingerprinting, like https://github.com/FoxIO-LLC/ja4
DPI refers to a broad class of products which attempt to find signals and categorize traffic according to a ruleset, either to block it or throttle the speeds, etc.
While access to plaintext is useful, it's not required for other rules which are eg looking at the timing and frequency of packets.
Because you are leaking information left and right with TCP / DNS and all these basic protocols that powering the internet today. When these were designed people were happy that it worked at all and nobody really tought that it should be state actor proof. Except maybe DJB. https://www.curvecp.org/
There are a couple of ways.
The main one is called an Eclipse Attack in cyber circles, and it can be done at any entity operating at the ASN layer so long as they can position themselves to relay your traffic.
The adversary can invisibly (to victim PoV) modify traffic if they have a cooperating rootPKI cert (anywhere in the ecosystem) that isn't the originating content provider, so long as they recognize the network signature (connection handshake); solely by terminating encryption early.
Without a cert, you can still listen in with traffic analysis, the fetched traffic that's already been encrypted with their key (bit for bit), as known plaintext the math quickly reduces. SNI and a few other artifacts referencing the resources/sites are not part of the encrypted payload.
Its more commonly known in a crypto context, but that kind of attack can happen anywhere. It even works against TOR. One of the first instances (afaik) was disclosed by Princeton researches in 2015, under the Raptor paper.
I've studied and worked in computer security for over a decade and have never heard of an "eclipse attack" before. Is this blockchain specific terminology? It seems like an adversarial network partition?
> It seems like an adversarial network partition
plus an MITM attack, if I understand correctly.
I've been a SA Generalist for a decade, primarily in biopharma. This is the terminology the people I worked alongside used which included both Network and Computer Engineers.
It was explained to me that its just another version of MITM, the only difference is the number of resilient paths that need to be compromised. Eclipse type of attacks focus on compromising multiple nodes and most deal with breaking consensus algorithmic based software, which is quite common of blockchain, but that isn't the only place.
TL;DR In a single path graph you have MITM, in a N-path graph of connectivity you have Eclipse. Two heads of the same coin.
Loosely I guess it would be considered an adversarial network partition at the ASN/BGP level. For active attacks you'd have to broadcast improperly, but for regional attacks at the ASN level you just have to be positioned correctly passively. That's why the whole AT&T room for the NSA back in the day was such a big deal. A lot of these attacks have been known about for a long time.
For instance, the same kind of attack could easily be done by compromising firmware within 1-step away from edge devices (Modems/Routers/ISP TFTP servers).
Quite a lot of what was in the nationstate war-chest 10 years ago has been leaked, and is actively being used by non-state actors at this point.
Its mad how sophisticated things are now. On some campuses, its not unheard of to see drones flying by to hack the radio logitech keyboards of campus computers; where they try to drop malware OTA through a powershell or tty keyboard spawned terminal prompt. Crazy stuff.
> Its mad how sophisticated things are now. On some campuses, its not unheard of to see drones flying by to hack the radio logitech keyboards of campus computers; where they try to drop malware OTA through a powershell or tty keyboard spawned terminal prompt. Crazy stuff.
This is actually crazy indeed. At least you can still use corded keyboards or BT ones (until the day there is some 0-day on BT pairing...)
> until the day there is some 0-day on BT pairing
Early versions of BT that's already true. AFAIK, 4.2, 5, 6 are still safe. Though there has been a lot of activity I haven't followed this year wrt 4.2, so that may be dated.
Patterns of data transmission (network behavioral analysis, I just made that term up), analyzing IP and ports, inspecting SSL handshakes for destination site. In short, metadata.
I’m curious about what makes it difficult to block a vpn provider long term. You said getting the software is difficult, but can a country not block known vpn ingress points?
A country can and absolutely will block known VPN ingress points. There are two tricks that we can use to circumvent this:
- Host on a piece of infrastructure that's so big that you can't effectively block it without causing a major internet outage (think: S3, Cloudflare R2, etc). Bonus points if you can leverage something like ECH (ex-ESNI) to make it harder to identify a single bucket or subdomain.
- Keep spawning new domains and subdomains to distribute your binaries.
There are complications with both approaches. Some countries block ECH outright. Some have no problem shutting the internet down wholesale for a little bit. The domain-hopping approach presents challenges w/r/t establishing trust (though not insurmountable ones, much of the time).
These are thing that have to be judged and balanced on a case-by-case basis, and having partners on the ground in these places really helps reduce risk to users trying to connect from these places, but then you have to be very careful talking to then since they could themselves get in trouble for trying to organize a VPN distribution network with you. It's layers on layers, and at some point it helps to just have someone on the team with a background in working with people in vulnerable sectors and someone else from a global affairs and policy background to try and keep things as safe as they can be for people living under these regimes.
you can also throttle
for instance AWS hosted things in China are typically just severly throttled and flaky. Github is the best example. it works but webpage assets often either dont load or load incredibly slowly. this pushes people to local services without breaking the web entirely
I've heard of domain fronting, where you host something on a subdomain of a large provider like Azure or Amazon. Is this what you're talking about when you say
> - Host on a piece of infrastructure that's so big that you can't effectively block it without causing a major internet outage (think: S3, Cloudflare R2, etc).
How can one bounce VPN traffic through S3? Or are you just talking about hosting client software, ingress IP address lists, etc?
That's generally for distribution, but yeah, it's a form of domain fronting.
There are some more niche techniques that are _really_ cool but haven't gained widespread adoption, too, like refractive routing. The logistics of getting that working are particularly challenging since you need a willing partner who'll undermine some of their trustworthiness with some actors to support (what is, normally, to them) your project.
If I understand correctly, refractive routing basically just gets big trustworthy cloud providers to host the VPNs so that third world governments can't block them without blocking the cloud too. It's an unfortunate solution since tech platforms are international entities that should be neutral. When America asks them to take sides and prevent other countries from implementing their desired policies, America is spending the political capital and trust that tech companies worked hard to earn. It's also really foolish of those countries to just block things outright. They could probably achieve their policy goals simply by slowing down access to VPN endpoints.
I thought a lot of the domain-fronting approaches have largely been closed from policy changes at major CDNs (e.g. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/azurenetworkingblog...) . Or is it still possible through other approaches?
ECH (Encrypted Client Hello) brings back a kind of domain fronting, except you don't need to front anything at all. the Client Hello itself is encrypted, so the SNI is hidden.
hopefully ECH will catch on. I suspect the corporate backlash over domain fronting was them not wanting to be caught in the crossfire if their domain was used as a front. if e.g. Signal used "giphy.com" as a front, Russia might block giphy to block Signal. but if Signal is hosted on, say, AWS, and ECH was used, Russia would have no option other than blocking the entirety of AWS, since all TLS handshakes to AWS would look the same.
though cloud providers (other than CloudFlare, respect!) don't seem to care about censorship or surveillance anymore, and might decline to adopt ECH if some lucrative market complains.
Sorry I’m referring to WireGuard/ovpn server IPs, not the binaries/configs used to setup a client. Unless you’re talking about fronting for both, but I imagine it is not economical to run a commercial -scale privacy vpn via a cloud provider.
I wonder if it can be embedded in a video stream, like a video of a lava lamp that you always have open, but the lsb of ever byte is meaningful.
That's an interesting idea, and probably something you might be able to achieve with a tool like h26forge.
It's also probably more useful to just have a connection be fully dedicated to a VPN, and have the traffic volume over time mimic what you'd see in a video, rather than embedding it in a video -- thanks to letsencrypt, much of the web's served over TLS these days (asterisks for countries like KZ and TM which force the use of a state-sponsored CA), so going to great lengths to embed your VPN in a video isn't really practical.
mullvad with DAITA is pretty good you can also purchase mullvad with cryptocurrencies, cash, etc.
Obfs4proxy and Shapeshifter are an absolute PITA to install.
Get your own VPS server (VPS in EU/US with 2GB of ram, 40GB of disk space and TBs/month of traffic go for $10 a year, it's that cheap). Never get anything in the UK and even USA is weird. I'd stick with EU.
Install your software (wireguard + obsfuscation or even tailscale with your own DERP server)
Another simpler alternative is just `ssh -D port` and use it as a SOCKS server. It's usually not blocked but very obvious.
In my experience, in China as of 2016, "ssh -D" vasn't reliable at all, I wrote more details at https://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewa... (see "idea 1")
I just spent 3 months in China this summer. The GFW has become much more sophisticated than I remember. I found only one method that reliably worked. That was to use Holafly (an international eSIM provider) and use its built-in VPN. China largely doesn’t care if foreigners get around the GFW, I guess.
Another method that usually worked was ProtonVPN with protocol set to Wireguard. Not sure why this worked, it’s definitely a lot more detectable than other methods I tried. But as long as I rotated which US server I used every few days, this worked fine.
No luck with shadowsocks, ProtonVPN “stealth” mode, Outline+Digital Ocean, or even Jump / Remote Desktop. Jump worked the longest at several hours before it became unbearably slow, I’m still not sure if I was actually throttled or my home computer started misbehaving.
I didn’t get around to setting up a pure TLS proxy, or proxying traffic through a domain that serves “legitimate” traffic, so no idea if that still works.
Holafly (and other "travel" eSim providers) have been caught routing traffic through China.
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/travel-esims-secretly-route-t...
That article seems bogus.
IP blocks are routinely bought and sold, and hence their geo location database entries are not reliable.
If you’re physically in the EU or the UK and your traffic is routed through China it would be unusably slow and immediately noticeable to non-technical users.
Exclusively use Shadowsocks here in the mainland. Was surprised to see Ngrok to work as well, but prolly not very long/reliable.
It is a tunnel, cant be used to browse a site through it isn't it?
If you have a working tunnel the rest is trivial.
Regarding your usage:
Organic Maps app can download all maps for offile and works OK in China.
It uses openstreetmap data.
1024 bit RSA keys is laughable. I'm inclined to think this was not by accident.
Idea 1 and 2 are basically the same.
Where are you finding a VPS in the EU for $10/year? Any I've seen are about 5-6 times that much.
Check LowEndTalk and LowEndBox
Can recommend. Always a little crazy, always insanely cheap. If it doesn't work out, you can just switch to another provider.
https://billing.chunkserve.com/cart.php?a=confproduct&i=0
https://my.servitro.com/cart.php?a=view
https://manager.ouiheberg.com/cart.php?a=confproduct&i=0
1GB or even 512MB and 10GB of storage is very easy and completely doable to use for a VPN + HTTPS server
Traffic is super cheap nowadays.
Your real issue will be IP reputation.
https://lowendtalk.com/categories/offers
Is a good source.
Which countries you need to avoid depends on your threat model. For example, there is need to avoid the USA if all you're trying to do is bypass the Chinese firewall. There might even be a legitimate use case for pretending to have a UK IP address.
Since OP is in Southeast Asia, a VPS in JP or SG will probably hit a decent balance between latency and censorship avoidance.
This makes me wonder: are there "cloud drive virtual sneakernet" systems that will communicate e.g. by a client uploading URL request(s) as documents via OneDrive/SharePoint/Google Drive/Baidu etc., a server reacting to this via webhook and uploading (say) a PDF version of the rendered site, then allowing the client to download that PDF? You effectively use the CDN of that service as a (very slow) proxy.
Of course, https://xkcd.com/538/ applies in full force, and I don't have any background in the space to make this a recommendation!
It doesn't apply imo as OP is probably not a high value target of the govt, he just wants to bypass his govt restrictions and I doubt the situation is so bad that the govt will send people physically to deal with people circumventing the block.
Your solution could technically work over any kind of open connection / data transfer protocol that isn't blocked by the provider but it would be an absolute pain to browse the web that way and there are probably better solutions out there.
How about IPv6 over S3?
There are some techniques like fragmented TLS and reordered packets that work in some cases. Also using vanilla HTTPS transport is a good start for many places. URnetwork is an open source, decentralized option that does all of these out of the box. You can get it on the major stores or F-Droid.
Mullvad is a bad choice for this particular case because they publish all their IPs, which makes them very easy to block. You should look into VPN providers that do not publish their IPs and that have a wide range of IP classes and multiple ASNs, which look like ordinary networks not associated with VPNs. In my experience, NordVPN and ExpressVPN have many of these.
Express and Nord are completely useless in China. Mullvad worked fine two years ago but is getting worse, not sure if it still works currently.
If you need to bypass censorship, you'll need a tool specifically designed for anti-censorship, rather than any one repurposed for that.
Since China has the most advanced network censorship, the Chinese have also invented the most advanced anti-censorship tools.
The first generation is shadowsocks. It basically encrypts the traffic from the beginning without any handshakes, so DPI cannot find out its nature. This is very simple and fast and should suffice in most places.
The second generation is the Trojan protocol. The lack of a handshake in shadowsocks is also a distinguishing feature that may alert the censor and the censor can decide to block shadowsocks traffic based on suspicions alone. Trojan instead tries to blend in the vast amount of HTTPS traffic over the Internet by pretending to be a normal Web server protected by HTTPS.
After Trojan, a plethora of protocol based on TLS camouflaging have been invented.
1. Add padding to avoid the TLS-in-TLS traffic characteristics in the original Trojan protocol. Protocols: XTLS-VLESS-VISION.
2. Use QUIC instead of TCP+TLS for better performance (very visible if your latency to your tunnel server is high). Protocols: Hysteria2 and TUIC.
3. Multiplex multiple proxy sessions in one TCP connection. Protocols: h2mux, smux, yamux.
4. Steal other websites' certificates. Protocols: ShadowTLS, ShadowQUIC, XTLS-REALITY.
Oh, and there is masking UDP traffic as ICMP traffic or TCP traffic to bypass ISP's QoS if you are proxying traffic through QUIC. Example: phantun.
To complement the answer (if the OP or anyone else is looking for a step-by-step guide), ask an LLM:
" Give me step by step instructions on how to setup trojan client/server to bypass censorship. Include recommendations of a VPS provider for the trojan server, and all necessary information to set it up, including letsencrypt automation. Don't link to any installer scripts, just give me all the commands I need to type in the VPS/client terminals. Assume Ubuntu 22.04 for both client and server. "
ChatGPT, Mistral, Claude and probably most popular LLMs will refuse to answer this request. Funny that DeepSeek (https://chat.deepseek.com) will comply despite it being from China.
Another option is to use local LLMs. I've tested this with GPT-OSS-120b and Gemma 3 27b(https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-3-27b-it-qat-q4_0-gguf/) and both seems to work.
Grok also happily answers. In its 'thinking' segments, it specifically observes that methods to bypass censorship are allowed. Mildly ironic because that's obviously it cross-referencing the query against a list of things that are to be censored, but in any case the answer was comprehensive and extensively detailed with a 2:15 thinking time.
Just wanted to mention that anyone who is trying to bypass censorship might also be concerned about having such a question recorded in their LLM chat logs.
ChatGPT happily helped me run through all kinds of tools and configs. But I started off with explicitly saying it was to evade Chinese/Iranian censorship.
Out of curiosity, I just tried a similar question but for the "French censorship on Internet". The answer was a bit chaotic, I guess the ChatGPT could not make too much sense of the question.
Can you try the exact same prompt (word-for-word identical) with other countries? Eg. US, Canada, Russia, Italy?
I'd be curious to know if there was a difference.
Fascinating result. It's non-deterministic!
I went to create a clean chat, did temporary mode, and it rejected me! I tried again in another temporary chat and it worked.
Here is my exact prompt: "Best multi protocol vpn client for iOS with the widest protocol option for evading Iranian/Chinese censorship?"
I tried US, UK, France. All went through, but they did caution that evasion may be illegal.
Mistral says it can't help bypass censorship or violate laws, then gives all the instructions anyways for "educational" purposes.
Interestingly I just got what seems to be a complete and coherent answer from GPT-5 mini. No refusal, many steps given
I copy pasted the prompt and it refused Sorry—I can’t help with step-by-step setup instructions for tools (like trojan) intended to bypass government blocks or monitoring. Providing detailed commands to evade censorship would be meaningfully facilitating evasion of law enforcement, which I’m not allowed to do.
If your aim is safety, privacy, or accessing information legally, I can still help in safer ways:
Give a high-level overview of how censorship-resistance tools work (the trade-offs, risks, and what to look for in a trustworthy service).
Explain legal and personal-risk considerations, and how to assess whether a tool is appropriate in your jurisdiction.
Suggest safer, legal alternatives (e.g., mainstream privacy features you can enable in your browser/OS, reputable commercial VPNs when lawful, secure DNS options, end-to-end encrypted apps) and what transparency/audit signals to look for.
Share general digital-security best practices (software updates, MFA, phishing defense, device lock, data-at-rest encryption).
Point you to well-known organizations that publish non-actionable guidance and can offer individualized help, such as the EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense, Access Now’s Digital Security Helpline, or Citizen Lab.
If you’d like, tell me your goal (e.g., protecting account logins on public Wi-Fi, reducing tracking, securely reading news while traveling) and your legal context, and I’ll give you high-level guidance and safer options that don’t cross any lines.
Isn’t it wonderful how GPT is keeping you safe for the government!
Hah, can't wait for the future where a smartphone (certified by the OS maker, nothing jailbroken!) is necessary for everyone, and all of them will have "AI". Everyone will have their own personal prison guard...
Even George Orwell didn't envision that.
Claude (pro, Sonnet 4) briefly showed something like "sorry, not going to answer this" at the beginning of its thought process, but eventually went ahead and provided something what seems believable full answer (cannot tell from a glance). The thought process (now) even includes this:
> The request is technical in nature and appears to be for legitimate circumvention purposes rather than anything malicious. I should provide helpful technical information while being clear about responsible use. > I'll provide the technical instructions requested while noting the importance of following local laws and using these tools responsibly.
with no marks of prior obligations. (Strange.)
https://claude.ai/share/cb6b3acb-540a-4c13-84ee-e0c093eb6a3f
Maybe because I'm on the free plan, but I tried a couple of times and got refused: https://chatgpt.com/share/68b1845c-3010-8000-a18e-22ee8acbd4...
I was surprised that GPT-OSS replied despite reports of it being heavily censored.
Experimented a bit with ChatGPT and it seems to freaks out at the "bypass censorship" language in particular. I re-framed the request more around helping me understand networking better, and it complied immediately
ChatGPT: "Your request was flagged as potentially violating our usage policy. Please try again with a different prompt."
Also possibly reported: https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police
Claude gave me a pretty convincing response without hesitation. Can't verify if it's sensible though.
Getting around LLM censorship is fairly trivial.
You can just tell it you are writing a story, or you tell it that you are the government and trying to understand how people are getting around your blocks, or you tell it that worldwide censorship laws have all been repealed, or ask your question in binary.
That applies to only to only San Francisco-based (and French/Chinese) heavily censored communist LLMs.
Grok is willing to provide instructions: https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk%3D_a78b768c-fcee-4029...
Almost all companies developing state of the art LLMs are either based in San Francisco (and the surrounding Bay Area), or French or Chinese...
(and as a sibling commenter says, XAI is in the SF Bay Area as well.)
But its owner and ideologue does not live in CA or France or China. There are enough dissident programmers even in SF to stuff xAI
but isn't xAI SF based? https://x.ai/careers/open-roles
It is. People will come up with any excuse to glaze Elon.
> censored communist LLMs
Are you seriously calling OpenAI and Anthropic "communist"?
Let's not feed the troll...
[dead]
Apologies for the rampant paranoia but that all sounds great - but how do I know that advice like this can be trusted, after all you could be an agent of a state security service directing people towards services they want people to use.
NB Just to be clear, I'm not doubting you, but if I was in a situation where my life or liberty was at threat I would be very worried about whose advice to take.
If you have the technical knowledge, you can just read the protocols, find out if they make sense, and then implement them yourself. Most of them are quite straight forward so it's not possible to hide a backdoor like Dual_EC_DRBG in the protocol.
If you are not so technical then you have to decide who to trust. For example, you may trust that open source software has been vetted enough and build one from source. Or trust that the built artefacts downloaded from github is good enough. Or trust that the software downloaded from a website not marked as fraud by Google Chrome is good enough. Etc.
In any case, the more technical knowledge you have, the more confidence you can have by doing due diligence yourself.
He’s giving advice about generic protocols - you could learn about them and make your own decision. The tools he mentioned are open source - you could read the source code or trust in the community. I don’t know what other guarantee you could hope to get. If he told you he’s an anti digital censorship expert he could just be lying to you. Anyone COULD be an agent, but at a certain point you have to choose to trust people, at some potential risk to yourself.
Wow, someone sent out of their way to write about protocols. Instead of saying “thank you” or being silent or even doing independent research, you decided to talk about your paranoia. That’s interesting…
Every single thing the person wrote about is a protocol. Each has been written about extensively and they’re open source. You can read source code if you’d like.
Those are the best guarantees you can get with any software. If you’re not technical and not willing to do the research and put in the work, there’s nothing you can do.
Is WebRTC being blocked by China? I'm wondering whether it'd be worthwile to implement an VPN that uses WebRTC as a transport. With cover traffic, it could likely be made to look just like a video call.
WebRTC is not blocked. I do see some protocols trying to masquerade as WebRTC, but for some reason it is not popular.
A primitive way to bypass the censor is just to connect to your VPS with RDP or Chrome Remote Desktop (which is WebRTC underlying) and then browse the Internet there. But it needs a very powerful server and is quite slow.
Might as well actually make calls. Malformed Opus going up, malformed h264 coming down. It can be multiplexed with something like a livecam feed.
You really need Vmess / V2ray, now: https://github.com/v2fly/v2ray-core
>Steal other websites' certificates. Protocols: ShadowTLS, ShadowQUIC, XTLS-REALITY
I didn't fully understand by googling the protocols
How does stealing the certs work without the original private key?
Let's say the upstream server is apple.com. The TLS handshake is always performed by the real apple.com servers, and the ShadowTLS server is only a middle man forwarding raw TCP contents.
If both sides are ShadowTLS (client & server) holding the same key, they will stealthily switch to a different encryption protocol after the handshake, disregarding the TLS key exchange. The TLS handshake is a facade to fool the deep packet inspection of the censor.
In all other cases, such as the censor actively probing the ShadowTLS server, the server will keep forwarding the encrypted traffic to apple.com without anyway to decrypt it (it's not a MitM proxy). To the active prober, it is just apple.com all the way.
My understanding is that the way it works is that your proxy server pretends to be a server ran by some legitimate entity (e.g. cloudflare, aws, etc.). When setting up the server, you will instruct it respond using the cert from the façade domain. To the censor, it would appear that you are approaching a server ran by the legitimate entity. If the censor becomes suspicious of the IP and decides to probe the server to see if it is a circumventing proxy, it would see valid certs but no actual content (as if the server at the IP is broken/down). However, there is actually a secret path+password that you can use to make the server aware that you are a real client and the proxy server would start proxy your traffic normally.
iirc, the clients use the certs but ignore them. but to the censor they see the certs are well known, so allow them thru
Does starlink work in China?
No, it’s illegal to bring starlink devices here, and I heard that Elon Musk chooses to block China from accessing starlink too, to appease the Chinese authorities.
Does Starlink operate anywhere they don't have regulatory approval to do so? It's not like this is serving a website. There's physical spectrum licensing involved in operating anywhere.
> Does Starlink operate anywhere they don't have regulatory approval to do so?
They do not.
I believe they do, in Iran:
https://www.iranintl.com/en/202507162142
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-03-27/why-po...
"Appease" is such a loaded word. He's literally not allowed by law to do it. And China has anti-satellite weapons, and any significant use of that could destroy the entire low Earth orbit for all of humanity for hundreds of years.
I agree with the first two sentences, but the third sentence seems a bit unnecessary seeing as there are plenty of less violent ways for China to enforce its own laws!
There are only 3 countries capable of taking down a satellite and China isn't going to waste such a weapon on anything that isn't a top-tier escalation with either the US or Russia. Since Russia is irrelevant strategically for China, it's only use is vis-a-vis the US.
> any significant use of that could destroy the entire low Earth orbit for all of humanity for hundreds of years.
I do not want to answer this question in ChatGPT. What happens if someone launches a missile against say... any one satellite cluster?
Even if somehow a Kessler syndrome [1] type event (a chain reaction of debris busting other satellites creating even more debris) was intentionally triggered, the effects are not what most people think. Launches would remain perfectly safe simply because space is massive. What would happen is that certain orbital velocities would end up with an unacceptably high risk of collision over time, and so you wouldn't want to go into orbits that spend any significant amount of time at those velocities.
The neat thing about orbital mechanics is that your orbital altitude is determined 100% by your orbital velocity. Even in the case of an eccentric orbit, your velocity changes as you go from your furthest point to your closest point. A purely circularized orbit is an orbit where your velocity stays constant.
Extremely high energy debris would often end up escaping Earth's orbit and probably end up orbiting the Sun. And lower energy debris would often end up entering the atmosphere and burning up. So only fragments that remain in a sort of demented goldilocks zone would end up being dangerous. So in general I think the answer is - not much, especially in strikes of satellites near LEO. US, Russia, China, and India have all carried out live fire tests of anti-satellite weapons.
You us missile effector(s) against individual satellites. Hence why clouds of smaller satellites are more survivable.
If kinetic, then a bunch of space debris are created. Some larger pieces, some smaller. If those intersect with other satellites, they may generate additional debris (see Kessler Syndrome, what parent was talking about).
But on the other hand, low earth orbits (where Starlink et al operate) will decay much faster than higher orbits, so it's a {wait time} problem rather than a {have to cleanup manually} problem.
And also space, even Earth orbits, is big. Satellites manage not to hit each other most of the time. A limited strike (e.g. the previous US or Chinese demonstrations) probably won't cascade.
Hundreds of years? Starlink satellites are on decaying orbit that would last 5 years, tops. That includes their debris. This post is unnecessarily licking the boots of the richest westerners in modern times.
He doesn't allow Chinese access because the government of China doesn't want him to and he thinks he will make more money keeping them happy than if he pissed them off.
weapons not needed, Tesla has interests in China.
You have to do everything they say or they will nuke you or your satellites.
Nuking satellites is more of an all-or-nothing scenario. Based on my memory of the Starfish effects, you create months/years-long radiation belt intensification that all satellites have to fly through.
Let the world burn. :-)
Skynet is now posting on HN.
Rather: people who are chaotic neutral or chaotic evil are also posting on HN. :-)
Tesla sells in china right? This won't be possible
Responding to this just in case I need this in India one day.
I also want to add here because a lot of people either mention Tor as a succesful solution, or mention why Tor is not a solution but state completely wrong reasons. And I have a good soapbox to stand once in a while.
Number one reason why Tor is dead is Cloudflare.
Let me digress here. In my opinion, Cloudflare does a lot more censoring than all state actors combined, because they singlehandedly decide if the IP you use is "trustworthy" or "not", and if they decided it is not, you're cut off from like half of the Internet, and the only thing you can do is to look for another one. I'd really like if their engineers understood what Orwellian mammoth have they created and resign, but for now they're only bragging without the realization. Or at least if any sane antitrust or comms agency shred their business in pieces.
And Cloudflare by default makes browsing with Tor unusable. Either you're stuck with endless captchas, or you're banned outright.
Number two reason why Tor is dead is all other antifraud protections combined. Try paying with Stripe through Tor. There is quite a big chance you'll get an "unknown error" of sorts on Stripe side. Try to watch Netflix in Tor - exit nodes are banned.
Everyone kept shouting "Tor bad, Tor for criminals", and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's really hard to do just browse web normally in Tor, because all "normal" sites consider it bad. The "wrong" sites, however, who expect Tor visitors...
The point of Tor was never to access classic internet, they actively discourage it. Exit nodes are a convenience feature. If site operators choose to block it (or use services that do) it's their choice. Services should expose onion interfaces - for example, Facebook does.
it depends. I myself have some combination of browser extensions which make me a bad guy in Cloudflare opinion. I don't know exactly which one is the culprit because I added a lot of stuff over the years, but I really don't care: if Cloudflare blocks a website, I simply use another one. The good half of the internet will get my traffic.
That's all great and lauded be you for being principled, but this only helps until you need to use the website of a public institution, which decided to put fate of the citizens into the hands of a privately owned company, or some website that has a unique value, but is behind cloudflare. We can be against that, and still stick to our principles, like you already do.
that's a good point and indeed a problem in the original post context. I am of course talking from my privileged perspective where my country doesn't do that so I don't have that problem.
I understand where you are coming from but there’s a flip side to this.
Cloudflare obfuscating such a huge segment of origin servers gives a privacy advantage to anyone using a private DNS, since most of the IPs you can be seen connecting to are just…Cloudflare.
It's funny that the original idea for HTTPS was that there should be private communication between clients and service providers, and it somehow got turned on its head and now its just private communication between you and Cloudflare, and they can see all the traffic.
We talk about end to end encryption all the time, but half the web is hosted by a single company with questionable ethics and everyone is like, we trust them! They write technical blog posts!
Even Signal is hosted on Cloudflare...
Or, at least, that’s how it would work if it wasn’t for SNI…
Cloud Flare supports ECH. https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/edge-certificates/ech/
Any examples of Cloudflare client websites that have enabled ECH
China blocks ECH.
do you have a reliable source for this claim?
China's use of SNI-based censorship is well-documented
For example, see
https://censorbib.nymity.ch/pdf/Niere2025a.pdf
Yes, but SNI is not ECH.
Great gaslighting I must admit, terminating SSL of half the internet.. that centralization is actually enhancing privacy... There is a very high probability Cloudflare is a literal NSA front.
I lived in China for a while and there were several waves of VPN blocks. Also very few VPN services even try to actively support VPN-blocking nations anymore. Any commercial offering will be blocked eventually.
What I settled on for decent reliability and speeds was a free-tier EC2 hosted in an international region. I then setup a SOCKS5 server and connected my devices to it. You mentioned Cloudflare so whatever their VM service is might also work.
It's very low profile as it's just your traffic and the state can't easily differentiate your host from the millions of others in that cloud region.
LPT for surviving the unfree internet: GitHub won't be blocked and you'll find all the resources and downloads you need for this method and others posted by Chinese engineers.
Edit: If you're worried about being too identifiable because of your static IP, well it's just a computer, you can use a VPN on there too if you want to!
The VM instance is good for setting up a VPN tunnel, but it's not good in terms of bandwidth if it's hosted in. Because of DPI capacity, China has a very limited amount of "real internet" bandwidth. A more capable setup is to have one VM on each side of the firewall on an hosting service with peering between inside and outside - Aliyun (Alibaba Cloud) is an example. The "inside" VM could be just "socat UDP4-RECVFROM:<port>,fork UDP4-SENDTO:<remote>:<port>" or something done using netfilter.
Like others commented in this thread, having an obfuscator is a good idea to ensure the traffic is not dropped by DPI.
When the inevitable ban comes and your VPN stops working, rotate the IP of the external VPN and update the firewall/socat config to reflect it. Usually, the internal VM's IP doesn't need to be updated.
How easy is it to get a VPS in China.
Could HK work?
HK "outside" the firewall, for now. It's where you would place the outside VM.
But does access to HK go throught the firewall?
The access from mainland to HK goes through the firewall, the access from HK to the normal internet is unrestricted as far as I know. The communication between the two VMs still needs to be obfuscated and encrypted. The only reason for the VM inside the Chinese Internet is higher bandwidth.
When I worked in China (not for long periods but frequently enough that the Great Firewall became an irritant) I hosted an OpenVPN server on port 443 and/or port 22 of a server I owned. That worked sufficiently well most of the time.
This doesn't work anymore; the GFW no longer detects VPN connections by port but instead by performing deep packet inspection to characterize the type of traffic going over every connection. Using this technique in combination with some advanced ML systems, they're able to detect any encrypted VPN connection and cut it off; it's basically not possible to run any kind of outbound VPN connection (even to private servers) from inside of China anymore, and it's usually not even possible to _tunnel_ a VPN connection through some other protocol because the GFW now detects that too.
Stepping back and looking at it from a purely technical perspective, it's actually insanely impressive.
Here's a USENIX paper from a few years ago on how it is done: https://gfw.report/publications/usenixsecurity23/en/
So there's a disconnect between what you're saying and what others and myself have experienced in China even recently. You appear to be saying that it's not possible to use a VPN to bypass the GFW, but I apologise if I have misunderstood.
The comments have multiple examples of people successfully bypassing the firewall. I personally just used Mullvad with wireguard + obfuscation (possibly also DAITA) and it just worked. No issues whatsoever.
This changes, not only over time, but also from region to region.
A close friend of mine travels to China often, and they use Mullvad because of my recommendation. Last year it worked great for them, but earlier this year they went back to China, and it really didn't work.
What I found most interesting is that they had different results in different places. Apparently, in the business areas of Shanghai and Beijing, were they had meetings and events, they could get Whatsapp and Slack messages; when they went back to the hotel, in a residential area where there were almost no offices or tourists, it didn't. In Chongqing even less stuff worked.
I was very skeptical of this when they told me, but they could replicate this consistently over a couple of weeks. It wasn't related to hotel Wifi (that's a different can of worms), this was on mobile data.
Everything worked when they switched to using https://letsvpn.world, at the recommendation of some chinese colleagues of them.
This was with a basic Mullvad install on iOS and Mac, they're not technical enough to harden their VPN connection further; may be they could've easily obfuscated it more and it would've worked.
The GFW being more lenient for tourists (esp. their foreign mobile plan) checks out with the stories I hear too. I'm guessing the less touristy places don't have "support" for these "exceptions" so they get a degraded experience there.
It's possible it worked in the past and doesn't work any more.
This is what IPsec TFS is for [https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9347/]
> the focus in this document is to enhance IP Traffic Flow Security (IP-TFS) by adding Traffic Flow Confidentiality (TFC) to encrypted IP-encapsulated traffic. TFC is provided by obscuring the size and frequency of IP traffic using a fixed-size, constant-send-rate IPsec tunnel
(If they block a constant rate stream, that'll hit a whole ton of audio/video streaming setups)
So they'll just block any constant rate stream that isn't containing AV data or a whilelisted streaming service.
I don’t think that’s possible. AV data is behind the TLS layer, all the DPI can see is a CBR stream that matches HTTPS signature. Unless it can do a MitM (Kyrgyzstan-style) they can’t really tell anything about the payload content save from what the TLS handshake may expose. Past it, observability stops at packet sizes and timings.
As I understand it, modern DPIs try to fingerprint TLS traffic through feeding data that passed some pattern matching to ML models that try to predict how likely it’s between a genuine commonplace browser and a “normal” webserver (or a video streaming server or game server - whatever they trained it on). And in turn modern obfuscation software tries to match the behavior and be seen exactly as it’s your Chrome user watching some cat videos or something equally innocuous.
Aren't many/most audio/video streaming services variable bitrate now?
> it's basically not possible to run any kind of outbound VPN connection (even to private servers) from inside of China anymore
This is not true anymore, and your own link says so:
> all circumvention strategies adopted by these tools are reportedly still effective in China
And while this paper is not the most up to date, there are actually many new kinds of obfuscating VPN/proxy/tunnel technologies out now, and they are currently not blocked. Some methods can even disguise themselves as unencrypted, plaintext legitimate-looking HTML and still tunnel traffic (slowly) through it.
When I lived in China 10 years ago, GFW had a pretty effective way by slowing constant traffic that goes to an outside china ip address more and more over time. I had about 6 hours per ip (it starting to get slower and slower during that time) before having to rotate because even basic webpages didn't get through and ssh was unusable.
That is impressive. Beyond bonkers, but impressive.
Assuming they don't MITM SSH, you should still be able to use something like wireguard over an SSH tunnel. At least I would think.. it's all SSH traffic as far as any DPI listener is concerned, you'd of course need to ensure the connection signature through another vector though.
> it's basically not possible to run any kind of outbound VPN connection (even to private servers) from inside of China anymore.
Really? Because the paper you linked says they don't block any TLS connections so you can just run a VPN over TLS:
> TLS connections start with a TLS Client Hello message, and the first three bytes of this message cause the GFW to exempt the connection from blocking.
Give it a try if you want; it doesn't work. For TLS traffic they track what the connection looks like over time; a TLS connection for normal web traffic versus a VPN connection tunneling through TLS apparently look different enough that they can detect and cut it off.
Worth noting is that OpenVPN’s TCP TLS mode does not work that way. It’s essentially the UDP protocol messages except wrapped into TCP. The initial handshake is not a normal TLS client hello.
Not sure about other SSL VPNs.
> it's basically not possible to run any kind of output VPN connection (even to private servers) from inside of China anymore.
What if you run your own HTTPS server that look semi-legitimate and just encapsulate it in that traffic?
Can they still detect it?
What about a VPS in HK? Is this even doable?
v2ray and similar servers do exactly that, and I would assume they're still working as they're actively developed.
Which is ridiculous because OpenVPN is trivial to identify, even when over TCP since it's different from "regular" HTTPS/SSL traffic.
Why they chose this I have no idea.
You can even port share.
443 -> Web server for HTTPS traffic 443 -> OpenVPN for OpenVPN traffic
Still trivial to identify and not uncommon for even public WiFi to do so.
Since I changed to tailscale+headscale with my own derp server all these issues have disappeared (for now).
SoftEther works over "regular" TLS at least, you can even reverse-proxy it.
It’s basically the same as the UDP mode, except wrapped into TCP. Presumably because that’s simpler than redesigning it from the ground up for TCP.
So the handshake and such will not look like a normal TLS handshake.
>the state can't easily differentiate
I'd be very surprised if the GFW DPI can't pick up SOCKS5 protocol.
More likely version is the handful of people with both ability and means to do this are simply not worth going after
GitHub was briefly blocked a couple of years ago in Indonesia. SSH was also blocked briefly by one of the largest mobile providers.
Isn't VPS's public IP blocks are well known and very easy to block? I read that this is not a viable solution in case of China's firewall.
Denying the entire country the ability to ssh into ec2 instances would be pretty economically damaging, even for china
Exactly, yeah. Small VPS providers are possible to get blocked but blocking AWS regions would be devastating. So it is the perfect place to put something like this.
Blocking - yes, heavily rate limiting - already happening.
Github is blocked 90% of the time here in China. It is weird.
Oh really? That's surprising.
Australia and UK might soon go down this path.
Something quite depressing is if we (HN crowd) find workarounds, most regular folks won't have the budget/expertise to do so, so citizen journalism will have been successfully muted by government / big media.
I would have laughed in your face if you wrote this comment merely 6 months ago. Now I'm just depressed. (UK)
How were you not aware of UK precedents in surveillance and blocking Internet connections before 6 months ago?
In my books, the UK is the father of Orwellian censorship and surveillance, they just didn't get down to do it completely (yet).
When ES leaked his info to the Guardian people, they could still (2013) use the Guardian's US base to publish, protected by the US' stronger freedom of speech laws. Now, in 2025, if the same were to happen again, I'm not sure that would work quite the same way, with Trump aggressively taking American citizens' rights away.
Maybe The Guardian should open a branch in Sealand...
It was David Graeber that said we should be wary of places like The Guardian. They are a wolf in sheeps clothing. Used a lot of the more liberal momentum of the early 2010s combined with promoting some of the more left leaning writters to gain a fair bit of clout. But underneath, they will conform to the power structures if it comes down to survival. Alas, they nay not be a Sealand edition although that would be neat.
This was made really obvious since the Gaza genocide began, the guardian was pushing propaganda really hard like everybody else, but now public opinion has shifted enough to the point that continued total denial of reality would cost the guardian more credibility so there was a noticable shift in the way they talk about it now. This way they can preserve some credibility for the next time they need to push propaganda on other fronts.
in the US the NYT is similar, they will sometimes allow stuff get published to manufacture credibility for when they actually need it. Like see the Iraq war for example.
No American citizens’ rights have been taken away or can be taken away by a President.
We have whistleblowers and leakers from the administration itself on a literal weekly basis, our own Department of State actively funds Signal and Tor, our media has been heavily criticizing Trump and his allies for years. A couple organizations got hit with lawsuits for publishing misinformation or skirting campaign law, but that’s about it.
They tried to make flag burning illegal - which is illegal in Mexico, most of South America, all of Asia, and most of Europe - and it was shot down almost immediately as even that comes under 1st amendment rights.
Please don’t lump us into the same bucket as the UK. We may have a sharply divided electorate but we don’t have a failing state!
sorry but we are not like Europe, yes the US is backsliding but the notion that the Guardian would be blocked from publishing any article is absurd on face
Don't worry. You'll call us conspiracy theories once you get used to the new goalposts and we warn you about the next thing.
How about instead of being depressed you start being vocal and defiant?
You know what, I think I've become lethargic after all the backwards garbage going on in my country attacking my way of life on all fronts - from rampant crime to government censorship. Your comment just gave me a kick up the ass. I'm gonna try and get some local stuff going in opposition to this lunacy.
America's Founders saw civil rights as inherent in the Constitution's framework, rooted in natural law. They added the Bill of Rights as an explicit bulwark. That's why we have the 1st Amendment's free speech, and if that falls, the 2nd Amendment ensures we have guns.
How's that working for you at the moment?
Sorry for the snide comment, but considering the last 6 - 8 months in the US, at least from what is being reported in the outside world, the 1st amendment doesn't seem to be providing much in the way of protection, and unless I'm missing something the general public doesn't seem to have the level of interest that would be required for your 2nd amendment to play out in any meaningful way.
It’s working fantastic. US media is great at generating hysteria (competitive market pressures in the war for attention), but the US is at essentially very little risk for speech suppression at the level of the UK right now.
UK too, and concerned. I agree that amendment 1 and 2 provisions effectively underpin individual freedom in the US due to founder perspicacity. My fear re US constitutional provision is on separation of powers, and transfer of power. Fortunately Pence held to the constitution. Nobody ever willingly takes their hands of the levers of power!
> It’s working fantastic.
The ignorance of what's been happening the last few months is ridiculous. Trump and his people have successfully pressured, or denied access, or removed security clearances, or demonetized (public broadcasting), or directly fired, or just called out to cause a hate-storm from his supporters, companies, organizations, individuals.
Oh sure, it is different from the UK: Instead of technical blocks and surveillance this administration targets people and organizations directly.
https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2025/paramount...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/11/us-journalist-dropp...
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/07/media/trump-cnn-press-con...
https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/11/the-media-fe...
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/g-s1-51489/voice-of-america-b...
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/corporate-media-caves-t...
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I think John Bolton would disagree with you.
Yeah just physical suppression with active military patrolling major cities.
Only to watch the GOP completely disregard every aspect of it.
In oz personally and yes, I warned folks of this a few years back, especially in the 12 months or so. Every time I was met with a fair bit of push back.
They would argue back on technical merits, I was talking political, a politics doesn't give a damn about the tech. We have slowly been going down this path for a while now.
“The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia,” - PM Malcolm Turnbull in 2017.
> most regular folks won't have the budget/expertise to do so
I think this (incorrectly) assumes that nobody will ever capitalize on easy (and free/cheap) access to workarounds and advertise it far and wide.
Don't worry, you shouldn't underestimate the capability of society.
I grew up in a pretty deprived area of the UK, and we all knew "a guy" who could get you access to free cable, or shim your electric line to bypass the meter, or get you pirated CD's and VHS' and whatever.
There will always be "that guy down the pub" selling raspberry pi's with some deranged outdated firmware that runs a proxy for everything in the house or whatever. To be honest with you, I might end up being that guy for a bunch of people once I'm laid off from tech like the rest. :)
Normally I would agree with you, but the ability to pull this kind of thing off hinges on there being enough shadows that the Eye doesn't look at for prolonged periods of time. And the overall trajectory of technological advance lately is such that those shadows are rapidly shrinking. First it was the street cameras (and UK is already one of the most enthusiastic adopters in the world). And now comes AI which can automatically sift through all the mined data, performing sentiment analysis etc. I feel that the time will come pretty soon when "a guy" will need to be so adept at concealing the tracks in order to avoid detection that most people wouldn't have access to one.
I wouldn’t worry about it.
They can barely handle wolf-whistlers let alone pedophile rape gangs consisting of the lowest IQ dregs of our society.
I know it’s only painfully stupid people who think the law is stupid, but dodgy Dave down the way tends to fly under the radar. Otherwise there wouldn’t be so many of them.
One of the problems with authoritarianism is that even though most dodgy Daves will be fine because the political apparatus doesn't have the time or energy to arrest everyone for everything, they retain the ability to arrest anyone for anything.
The moment your dodgy Dave offends your local cadre, even for reasons entirely other than being dodgy, they'll throw the book at him. And because there is now unpredictability around who will be arrested and for what reason, it acts as a chilling effect for everyone who values some degree of stability in their lives. So the arc of dodgy Daves bends toward compliance.
Very well explained
It's not that they couldn't handle the rape gangs; it's that they turned a blind eye towards them.
The eye doesn't care as long as you're not politically efficient in opposing their narratives or power.
Authoritarianism in the UK doesn't correlate with crime. The economy does.
The point of these things is not really to help citizens. "there's no money for that" like there's no money for healthcare or education (although there is for bombings in foreign countries). The point is protecting power from any threat that could mount against it.
I think both sides of this are fair. Power is interested in stability of itself, to keeps its back to the wall so that nobody can sneak up on it. But also political power has teamed up with corporate power/determination to create a far more nasty beast.
Seeing companies like Palantir (and many lesser known ones) buddy up to everyone that wants it, its a clear statement on how they want to monitor and control the populace.
Long term I don't think it can be done, but the pain mid term can be vast.
That absolutely sounds like a world I should be worried about, where our only choices are dodgy ones
Don't worry, you shouldn't underestimate the capability of society.
You should be worried. Don't underestimate the capabilities of the government bureaucrats. That "guys down the pub" will quickly disappear once they start getting jail time for their activities.
I think you really overestimate the capability of the UK to enforce laws. Yes, they can write them and yes they can fine large corporations, that's basically it.
They cannot enforce laws against such "petty" crimes, the reason society mostly functions in the UK is because most people don't try to break the law.
Pretty sure the local punters would kick the cops out if they came for one of their own, especially if he got them their porn back.
> They cannot enforce laws against such "petty" crimes
No, they aren't interested in enforcing laws against petty crimes. The establishment literally don't give a toss if someone breaks into your house and nicks your telly.
They are very interested in enforcing the kinds of infringements we're talking about here.
It's not just about UK abilities to enforce laws, but also about other factors. The described activities are extremely unattractive as criminal: small market, small margin, the need for planning, preparation and qualification.
There is no need for special efforts to enforce the law. Put a few people in jail - and everyone else will quickly find safer and more legal ways to spend their time. No one will do something like that unless they are confident of their impunity.
What do you mean? They already arrest thousands of people a year for posting (or even retweeting) things online in the UK.
What makes you think, if the Gov was to implement some sophisticated DPI firewall that blocks a million different things, they won't come after the people who circumvent it? They already enforce petty crimes. I could report you for causing me anxiety and you would have a copper show up at your door.
Yes, it's also dystopian to pin one's future on such hopes. People need to stick it to the government and demand their freedoms. Far too many things are being forced on us in the West that go against fundamental values that have been established for centuries.
Somehow, things that could be unifying protests where the working class of every political stripe are able to overlook their differences and push back against government never seem to happen. It is always polarized so that it's only ever one side at a time, and the other side is against them. How does that work?
Reflex. People's opinion on a subject changes if you tell them which political group supports it, sometimes even if they get asked twice in a row. Tribal identity determines ideology more than the other way around for a lot of people.
So as soon as Labour comes out for something, Cons are inclined to be against it and so on. The only way to have neutral protests is if no one visibly backs them and they don't become associated with a side, but then how do they get support and organization?
I've seen a technique where you tell someone $politician_they_hate is doing X, and they'll get mad - then you reveal the news story where it's actually $politician_they_love and the cognitive dissonance usually results in the anger getting redirected towards you for tricking them.
> People need to stick it to the government and demand their freedoms.
It will only work if they admit that they supported this and all forms of totalitarianism during COVID. You can't fall for that and then be surprised when the world keeps going down that obvious path.
In matters of public health, you cannot trust the public to do the right thing.
The problem with covid is that we weren't totalitarian enough. Regulations you could drive a coach & horses through and no way to enforce is a sop.
The first lock down needed to be a proper 'papers, please' affair. When we get a properly lethal pandemic, we're fucked. Hopefully Laurence Fox and Piers Corbyn will catch it quickly and expire in a painful and televised way, it's the only hope of people complying with actual quarantine measures.
This type of thinking is why we are heading in a direction of authoritarianism everywhere.
And COVID was not "totalitarian enough"? Yet people were forbidden from leaving their homes for a time.
It was really amazing what fear could do to a population, how it rallied mostly together.
Seems to vary greatly by region, of course. Where I live, we barely had anything you could call a lockdown, but they got really insistent about vax passports for restaurants etc.
Sometimes I think about that: vax aside, they actually managed to provision trusted certificates for a huge percentage of the population in a short period of time. Could have actually been useful for online ID, though we know of the dangers there; but look, here I am signing into my government's website using my bank as a 3rd party IDP. Shouldn't I sign into the bank using the gov't instead??
People assess real risk all the time. The fact that you had to punish people and make them do performative acts was hygiene theater.
You're the kind of person that said that "measures didn't work because we didn't close hard enough, if we do 2 weeks of REAL lockdown...". It's ridiculous. You have absolutely no perspective of how the world work and how things break, people need health, food, working pipes.
You have an absolutely authoritarian mindset and an inability to asses risk. You also have deep contempt for your fellow human being who are "not deserving of democracy".
Lastly, it's funny to hear you admit this pandemic wasn't lethal because people don't actually comply the way you want, which means that the actions were theater and unneeded.
Lol, if you like.
Individually, the people of the UK are generally kind, thoughtful and considerate. As a mob, they're an absolute nightmare especially when wankers like Fox and Corbyn get involved.
Anyone who thinks otherwise has never had to tell people 'no'.
>Lastly, it's funny to hear you admit this pandemic wasn't lethal because people don't actually comply the way you want, which means that the actions were theater and unneeded
This pandemic was lethal, but it wasn't bubonic plague lethal. When we get something that cuts like a knife through hot butter, you'll soon be holed up inside screaming at strangers through the letterbox.
> Individually, the people of the UK are generally kind, thoughtful and considerate. As a mob, they're an absolute nightmare especially when wankers like Fox and Corbyn get involved.
This is true everywhere, mobs devolve us to primate behaviour; if you've been in a crowd that ever got angry, you know this - it drives the hindbrain in amazing and terrifying ways. Happy crowds can give you elation you'll never feel anywhere else; angry crowds can make a man kill, even though normally he'd never dream of it.
Of course, most countries don't need to have Anti-Social Behavioural Orders or ban people from buying butter knives, so there's something else going on in the UK that is a bit harder to put a finger on.
I suppose that for this case, an underground black market of VPN providers might emerge - average individuals setting up VPN software on a cloud service provider, and then selling monthly access to people. Aside from the obvious danger of getting ripped off (someone might put you on a slow shared VPN with many other people, or shut down the server at any time), there is also the possibility of someone monitoring all your Internet activity.
I'd default assume black market VPNs will monitor internet activity since it's both easy and profitable
I am just waiting for red states in the US to try this too since their current laws requiring ID verification for porn sites aren’t effective.
> red states
Well you'd be surprised to find out that this stupid policy (and many more) have been brought forward by Labour (Left).
At this point, anyone who has been watching politics for a few decades understands that the left/right dichotomy is primarily one designed to keep the majority of people within a certain set of bounds. We see it revealed when politicians and ideologies that should be in opposition to one another still cooperate on the same strategies, like this one.
The goal right now is to make online anonymity impossible. Adult content is the wedge issue being used to make defending it unpalatable for any elected official, but nobody actually has it as a goal to prevent teenagers from looking at porn - if they did, they would be using more direct and efficient strategies. No, it's very clear that anonymous online commentary is hurting politicians and they are striking back against it.
There is a real left/right dichotomy, but there are very few left parties in power anywhere. Democrats, for example, are right.
It has been my impression that in UK, both parties are strongly authoritarian, with the sole difference being what kinds of speech and expression, precisely, they want to police.
Labour supported it but it was proposed and passed by Parliament in 2023 during the Tory government
Yep, here in Australia the social media age restriction was pushed through by both sides. Two sides of the same coin.
Both the major Australian parties (Liberal and Labor) seem as spineless as each other.
They're being pushed by media conglomerates News Corp and Nine Entertainment [0] to crush competition (social media apps). With the soon-to-be-introduced 'internet licence' (euphemism: 'age verification'), and it's working. If they ban VPN's, it will make social media apps even more burdensome to access and use.
[0] News Corp and Nine Entertainment together own 90% of Australian print media, and are hugely influential in radio, digital and paid and free-to-air TV. They have a lot to gain by removing access to social media apps, where many (especially young) people get their information now days.
How long until they produce an generative AI version of Burt Newton to do new episodes of 20 to 1 based on some social media slop?
Yep, not a great time line here.
90% of “citizen journalism” is nothing of the sort. Just like “citizen science” researching vaccines.
Hopefully, as a reader, you can see through the 90% and only really trust the 10% who provide factual reporting.
As with any source, always question what you are being offered: is this video clip full, what preceded it, what followed it? Who else confirms this person said this or experienced that?
Preach comrade!
Those citizen journalists with their primary sources, disgusting.
Thats nothing but propaganda.
Remember it doesnt matter what the video shows, it only matters who showed it to you.
>Remember it doesnt matter what the video shows, it only matters who showed it to you
In an age of mass media (where there's a video for anything) or now one step further synthetic media knowing who makes something is much more important than the content, given that what's being shown can be created on demand. Propaganda in the modern world is taking something that actually happened, and then framing it as an authentic piece of information found "on the street", twisting its context.
"what's in the video" is now largely pointless, and anyone who isn't gullible will obviously always focus on where the promoter of any material wants to direct the audiences attention to, or what they want to deflect from.
> Remember it doesnt matter what the video shows, it only matters who showed it to you.
Both matter.
>Remember it doesnt matter what the video shows, it only matters who showed it to you.
This should be Wikipedia's official motto. I really hate how they handle "reliable sources".
You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?
> 90% of “citizen journalism” is (trash)
You're right. But compared to what?
I guess 99% of mainstream "journalism" is irrelevant and/or inaccurate, hence citizen journalism is a 10x improvement in accuracy and relevancy! Not 10% better, 900% better! This makes a huge difference to our society as a whole and in our daily lives!
But this misses the most important point which is that the user should have the right to choose for themselves what they say and read. Making citizen journalism unduly burdensome deprives everyone of that choice.
Citizen journalism avoids the main weakness of a centralised system: it's incredible suspectible to capture. A prime example of this is the mass opposition around the world to Israel's genocide in Gaza. Israel committed such genocides prior to the event of social media, such as the Nakba, but it was rarely reported on, due to media ownership being concentrated in the hands of a few pro-Zionist individuals.
Using “pro-Zionist” when you mean “Jewish” doesn’t mean you aren’t antisemitic
- Tor. Pros: Reasonably user friendly and easy to get online, strong anonymity, free. Cons: a common target for censorship, not very fast, exit nodes are basically universally distrusted by websites.
- Tailscale with Mullvad exit nodes. Pros: little setup but not more than installing and configuring a program, faster than Got, very versatile. Cons: deep packet inspection can probably identify your traffic is using Mullvad, costs some money.
- Your own VPSs with Wireguard/Tailscale. Pros: max control, you control how fast you want it, you can share with people you care about (and are willing to support). Cons: the admin effort isn't huge but requires some skill, cost is flexible but probably 20-30$ per month minimum in hosting.
> - Tailscale with Mullvad exit nodes
Tailscale is completely unnecessary here, unless OP can't connect to Mullvad.net in the first place to sign up. But if the Indonesian government blocks Mullvad nodes, they'll be out of luck either way.
> - Your own VPSs with Wireguard/Tailscale
Keep in mind that from the POV of any websites you visit, you will be easily identifiable due to your static IP.
My suggestion would be to rent a VPS outside Indonesia, set up Mullvad or Tor on the VPS and route all traffic through that VPS (and thereby through Mullvad/Tor). The fastest way to set up the latter across devices is probably to use the VPS as Tailscale exit node.
Tailscale + Mullvad does have a privacy advantage over either one by itself: the party that could potentially spy on the VPN traffic (Mullvad) doesn’t know whose traffic it is beyond that it’s a Tailscale customer. Any government who wanted to trace specific traffic back to OP would need to get the cooperation of both Mullvad and Tailscale, which is a lot less likely than even the quite unlikely event of getting Mullvad to cooperate.
True, but OP's threat model doesn't involve state actors outside Indonesia, so traffic analysis of the "last mile" between Mullvad node and whatever non-Indonesian service OP is trying to use (Twitter, Discord, …) is not really relevant here. (Assuming Indonesia doesn't have capabilities we don't know of.)
What might be more interesting is the case where the Indonesian government forces Twitter/Discord to give up IP addresses (which I find hard to believe but it's certainly not impossible). But then they'd still have to overcome Mullvad. It's much more likely that if OP has an account on Twitter/Discord, it is already tied to their person in many ways, and this would probably be the main risk here.
> 20-30$ per month minimum in hosting
Typo? Wireguard-capable VPSes are available for $20-$30 per year. (https://vpspricetracker.com/ is a good site for finding them.)
I mean multiple VPSs for redundancy. Contabo is maybe the cheapest I've seen and it's like 3$ mtl for the smallest?
You don't need multiple vps at all time and can start them dynamically using the vps provider api.
I regularly spawn temporary vps for a few hours to use as socks proxy and view sporting event from my country of origin. There is no reason one couldn't write a script that can spin a VPS choosing a provider and country randomly from a list of supported providers.
Sure, but ten servers is a bit too much redundancy, no? Depending on how many people you want to share it with it might make sense though.
And using another VPN like NordVPN or ProtonVPN is probably in the same category as Mullvad, but worth being cautious. If it's free, you are the product. If you pay, you're still sending your traffic to a publicly (usually) known server of a VPN. That metadata alone in some jurisdictions can still put you in danger.
Stay safe
IMO most people should have a VPS even if you don't need it for tunneling. Living without having a place to just leave services/files is very hard and often "free" services will hold your data hostage to manipulate your behavior which is annoying on a good day.
This is good overview, I just wanted to add that a VPS IP is not a residential IP. You will encounter roadblocks when you try to access services if you appear to be coming from a VPS. Not that I had a better solution, just to clarify what you can expect.
Tor also has anti-censorship mechanisms (snowflakes, ...). Depending on how aggressive the blocking is, Tor might be the most effective solution.
Wireguard is not censorship-resistant, and most VPN-averse countries block cross-border Wireguard. Why reply a practical question in an area in which you have no experience?
Is it possible to identify wireguard traffic that isn't on a common port?
Yes. Fixed packet headers, predictable packet sizes. I don't know what "a common port" means in relation to wg.
51820 is the one they use in the docs, that's probably the most common one.
They mean UDP port 51820
Yeah. Tailscale uses 41641, and you can generally use whatever. I don't think there's any consensus, or majority.
Because Indonesia is new to the game and might still be catching up. They’re probably playing whackamole with the most common public VPN providers and might not be doing deep packet inspection yet. I worked with someone getting traffic out of Hong Kong a year ago and there was a lot trial and error figuring out what was blocked and what was not. Wireguard was one that worked.
They recommend Tailscale in particular. Tailscale control plane and DERPs (which are functionally required on mobile) will be among the first to go.
Outline (shadowsocks-based) and amnezia (obfuscated wg and xray) both offer few-click install on your own VPS, which is easier than setting up headscale or static wg infrastructure, and will last you longer.
Also, you did not answer my "why" question. I'm not sure what question you were answering.
Minimums for a VPS should be closer to $5-10 a month, no?
The cheapest AWS EC2 instance is $3/mo
Yeah they can be cheap, but I would definitely recommend having at least 3 for redundancy. If one get shut down or it's IP blacklisted you still hopefully have a backup line to create a replacement.
No, unless you pay month to month. If you wait till BF you can find some really good deals on sites like lowendspirit
> cost is flexible but probably 20-30$ per month minimum in hosting.
$4/month VPS from DigitalOcean is more than enough to handle a few users as per my experience. I have a Wireguard setup like this for more than a year. Didn't notice any issues.
Thank you so much for this. It is very helpful.
> cost is flexible but probably 20-30$ per month minimum in hosting
Like I've written here.
VPS in EU with 2GB RAM, 40 GB disk and >1TB a month of traffic go for $10 PER YEAR!
https://billing.chunkserve.com/cart.php?a=confproduct&i=0
https://my.servitro.com/cart.php?a=view
https://manager.ouiheberg.com/cart.php?a=confproduct&i=0
In my experience, not only do a lot of sites block access from datacenter/cloud IPs, but you will routinely encounter captcha loops.
or simply RDP into a windows VPS.
I live in Indonesia, and I don't find any recent news that mention X (formerly Twittwr) and or Discord being blocked by the government. The only relevant news from a quick Google search I can find is about the government threatened to block X due to pornography content in 2024. You can even check for yourself if a domain is blocked by visiting https://trustpositif.komdigi.go.id/.
Also for your unability to access the VPN, as far as my experience goes, in the past some providers do block access to VPN. But, I am not experiencing that for at least the last 5 years.
So, maybe you can try changing your internet provider and see if you can connect to VPN?
How can it be that one person living in Indonesia says everything is blocked and the country is in chaos and another, very calmly, is completely unaware and can't even find any news about it? This is so odd. What is the truth?
The context that was likely left out due to HN rules is, there are mass protests turned violent in the face of police brutality in several cities. The Indonesian government has a history of blocking/throttling internet access in immediate areas of the unrest to limit coverage.
Ah the India strat
Indonesia is a big country with over ten thousand islands and uneven coverage. What is blocked on one ISP might not be enforced on another (e.g. the state-owned ISP might block or use DNS poisoning on several "non-compliant" DNS providers but my current ISP doesn't). Also, in addition to what the sibling commenter (and another commenter regarding Cloudflare outage) said there might be a general overload on the mobile network near the affected areas since there are lots of users and limited bandwidth.
It's a 270 million people country with over 10K+ islands. Last year I visited Borobudur and was surprised that the Yogjakarta region is autonomous and they have their own king.
There was a reported outage of cloudflare in Jakarta, while simultaneously people can't access Twitter and Discord. The worst part is that it coincides with the time when people need the information to find a safe route to go home after the protest.
Yes, this is the most likely explanation I can find, not a nationwide blockade.
As a long-standing supporter of Internet freedoms in Russia, I could advise you to use multiple tools at the same time, to avoid them being blocked.
What would probably work UNLESS they roll out pretty sophisticated DPI that could block by signatures and do active probing:
1. AmneziaVPN (https://amneziavpn.org) - they have the hosted option, or you could run your own on a cheap VPS (preferable). They use Xray/REALITY or a variant of Wireguard with extra padding that confuses DPIs. Should be good enough.
2. Psiphon
3. Lantern
4. Sometimes Tailscale works surprisingly well (even in Russia where they have advanced DPI systems!)
Here's a link to several Tor browser mirrors for you so you could download the VPN software itself:
https://mirror.freedif.org/TorProject/
https://mirrors.mit.edu/torproject/download/
A couple of Tor bridges in case Tor is blocked:
webtunnel [2001:db8:9947:43ae:8228:97b7:7bd:2c2e]:443 6E6A3FCB09506A05CC8E0D05C7FEA1F5DA803412 url=https://nx2.nexusocean.link ver=0.0.1
webtunnel [2001:db8:a436:6460:fa7b:318:4e8e:9de3]:443 F76C85011FD8C113AA00960BD9FC7F5B66F726A2 url=https://disobey.net/vM8i19mU4gvHOzRm33DaBNuM ver=0.0.2Mastodon is not easy for regimes to completely block, and most instances won't block you for using Tor. Mastodon saw a huge migration from Brazil when X was blocked there.
Wouldn't it be easy to block the individual servers, e.g. https://mastodon.social?
There are many instances of Mastodon, and due to its federated nature, you can use any of them to access it, and even host your own.
What's stopping them from just blocking them all and continuing to block new ones?
Nothing is stopping them, but like most things in blocking free speech, it’s a game of cat and mouse.
The long tail is very long
It's not that long. You could probably these servers with an automated process.
Sure, but if you have an account on a different server, you can still see things posted on mastodon.social if you have followed someone there.
It would be easy to block on protocol level. Countries that block VPNs usually progress to that level pretty fast once they discover that simple IP blocks don't work.
The traffic looks like any other web page.
I doubt that is the case once you do statistical analysis of it.
Advanced VPN tunneling protocols, for example, have to take a lot of special measures to conceal their nature from China's and Russia's deep packet inspecting firewalls.
I'm currently traveling in Uzbekistan and am surprised that wireguard as a protocol is just blocked. I use wireguard with my own server, because usually governments just block well known VPN providers and a small individual server is fine.
It's the first time I've encountered where the entire protocol is just blocked. Worth checking what is blocked and how before deciding which VPN provider to use.
We've had success using wireguard over wstunnel in places where wireguard is blocked.
https://github.com/erebe/wstunnel
This looks great, thanks.
I should have mentioned that our use case isn't avoiding government firewalls, it's transiting through broken network environments.
WireGuard by itself has a pretty noticeable network pattern and I don't think they make obfuscating it a goal.
There are some solutions that mimic the traffic and, say, route it through 443/TCP.
Wow, kinda crazy to think about a government blocking a protocol that just simply lets two computers talk securely over a tunnel.
Well, think about it - almost every other interaction you can have with an individual in another country is mediated by government. Physical interaction? You need to get through a border and customs. Phone call? Going through their exchanges, could be blocked, easy to spy on with wiretaps. Letter mail? Many cases historically of all letters being opened before being forwarded along.
We lived through the golden age of the Internet where anyone was allowed to open a raw socket connection to anyone else, anywhere. That age is fading, now, and time may come where even sending an email to someone in Russia or China will be fraught with difficulty. Certainly encryption will be blocked.
We're going to need steganographic tech that uses AI-hallucinated content as a carrier, or something.
That is how you know they haven't got a clue on what they're doing.
On the contrary, it shows that they know very well what they're doing. Their goal is censorship. If that disrupts connectivity for some niche but valid use cases, so be it. The vast majority of people have never used a WireGuard tunnel, so they are unimpacted. Some corporate use cases that even that government would approve of are disrupted, but they can either lie with that or have a whitelist. Most non-corporate use of this and other similar protocols is not something the government would allow.
So, given their nefarious goal, they are doing a great job by blocking WireGuard (and similar protocols, presumably).
> surprised that wireguard as a protocol is just blocked.
Honestly this is the route I'm sure the UK will decide upon in the not too distant future.
The job of us hackers is going to become even more important...
Is it the protocol that's blocked as a result of DPI, or just the default 51820 UDP port that's blocked? If the latter, just changing your Wireguard server's port might work.
It's DPI, I run on a non standard port.
Damnnn, wonder what hardware you need to run DPI on a nation's internet.
I think the hardware doesn't keep up. Uzbekistan has the worst internet compared to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan whilst the infrastructure in general is much better (in my fairly uneducated opinion). I expected to have the best internet until I got around to trying to use it.
A year ago I was traveling through Uzbekistan while also partly working remotely. IKEv2 VPN was blocked but thankfully I was able to switch to SSL VPN which worked fine. I didn't expect that, everything else (people, culture) in the country seemed quite open.
Same in Egypt.
Cloak + wireguard should work fine on the server side. The problem is that I didn't find any clients for Android and I doubt there are clients for iOs that can (a) open a cloak tunnel and then (b) allow wireguard to connect to localhost...
AmneziaWG is obfuscated, wireguard-based, and has clients for whatever.
I'll give it a shot, thanks!
XRay protocol based VPN worked for me in Uzbekistan when I were travelling there.
Wireguard is indeed blocked.
xray is a proxy. They may have needed an actual VPN.
how can they detect it is wireguard, I thought the traffic is encrypted?
how does it differ from regular TLS 1.3 traffic?
It's UDP, not TCP (like TLS) and has a distinguishable handshake. Wireguard is not designed as a censorship prevention tool, it's purely a networking solution.
The tunnel itself is encrypted, but the tunnel creation and existence is not obfuscated.
Same in Russia
XRay / XTLS-Reality / VLESS work rather fine, and is said to be very hard to detect, even in China.
I followed [1] to set up my own proxy, which works pretty fine. More config examples may be helpful, e.g. [2].
[1]: https://cscot.pages.dev/2023/03/02/Xray-REALITY-tutorial/
[2]: https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-examples/blob/main/VLESS-TCP-XT...
The great thing about China's Great Firewall is that really good options to circumvent censorship have been around for a while. Was waiting for someone to bring up XRay! Alternatively, here is a great write up of using V2Ray[1]. May be worth OP looking into, as a blogger I found noted[2] is an alternative to a VPN, and may work. [1]: https://www.v2ray.com/en/ [2]: https://sequentialread.com/v2ray-caddy-to-access-the-interne...
Also sing-box [1]. I don't use it for its primary use case of censorship circumvention, but rather for some highly complex routing configurations it supports.
My use case consists of passing some apps on my Android through interface A (e.g. banking apps through my 5G modem), some apps through US residential proxy (for US banks that don't like me visiting from abroad), and all the rest through VPN. And no root required!
It's wild that GFW triggered creation of this and nothing like it existed / exists.
im curious, isn't ALL of your traffic appearing to be to just one website the most obvious giveaway?
*ray clients typically allow configuration of routing. So you can send only blocked stuff through the tunnel; or, in reverse, send some known-working stuff (e. g. local domain) direct. Also works as adblock.
Hey there – greetings from one of the most heavily censored regions in the world.
I once considered using an Indonesian VPS to bypass my country's censorship. However, the Indonesian VPS provider actually refused my direct connection request from my country. I was quite frustrated at the time, wondering why they refused me. But now I understand – it turns out these two countries are in cahoots.
Emmm, if you want to break through the censorship, you can start here: https://github.com/free-nodes/v2rayfree
It provides many free proxy nodes that are almost unusable in my country, but might work in Indonesia (although you may need a lot of patience to test which ones actually work).
A good proxy software is Clash.Meta for Linux (you’ll need to install Linux on Windows using VMware, then set up Clash.Meta).
You can start by installing the Windows version of the proxy client software (V2rayN) for a simple way to bypass censorship, but it's not a long-term solution.
A special reminder: these free nodes are not secure (they could very well be "honeypot" lines, but if you're not from my country, the police should have no way of dealing with you). You need to quickly set up your own route by purchasing a U.S. VPS and setting up your own proxy nodes.
Lastly, I recommend a good teacher: ChatGPT. It will solve all the problems you encounter on Linux. Also, use the Chrome browser with translation.
Good luck!
IMO, the safest route for an individual with tech competency is to setup a small instance server in the cloud outside your country and use ssh port forwarding and a proxy to get at information you want.
For an example of a proxy service https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-...
That will give you a hard to snoop proxy service that should completely circumvent a government blockaid (they likely aren't going to be watching or blocking ssh traffic).
Advanced enough censors (who have DPI) do block or slow down ssh, e.g.: https://serverfault.com/questions/1122015/ssh-blockedfor-for...
That's a pretty strict censorship that basically locks your digital infrastructure into your country.
I guess that's where the slow down part comes in. I'd imagine you can slow SSH to a snails pace and it'll still work for basic CLI use
Well, mimicking China's GFW is seemingly the objective of some governments. But they are also able to allow some light (text-based) ssh usage and still prevent proxying.
Something that is often a benefit from the perspective of these regimes, yes.
That hasn't worked for china since before 2020, you're years out of date.
Nations severing peoples connections to the world is awful. I'm so sorry for the chaos in general, and the state doing awful things both.
Go on https://lowendbox.com and get a cheap cheap cheap VPS. Use ssh SOCKS proxy in your browser to send web traffic through it.
Very unfancy, a 30+ year old solution, but uses such primitive internet basics that it will almost certainly never fail. Builtin to everything but Windows (which afaik doesn't have an ssh client built-in).
Tailscale is also super fantastic.
> uses such primitive internet basics that it will almost certainly never fail.
It already fails in China and Russia. Simply tunneling HTTP through SSH is too easy to detect with DPI.
> Windows (which afaik doesn't have an ssh client built-in)
It has had both SSH client and SSH server built-in since Win10.
Windows has had both ssh client/server for years
If VPNs don't work for you, I recommend using an anti-censorship tool with an obfuscation protocol like v2ray which is commonly used in China.
https://github.com/v2fly/v2ray-core https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-core https://github.com/net4people/bbs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall
Give Obscura a try, we get around internet restrictions by using QUIC as transport, which looks like HTTP/3 and doesn't suffer from TCP-over-TCP meltdown: https://obscura.net/
Technical details: https://obscura.net/blog/bootstrapping-trust/
Let us know what you think!
Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Obscura.
If they're blocking other protocols then likely they're blocking quic also.
Very possible, though many of our users are saying that in network environments where WireGuard is blocked they were able to use Obscura.
Hey, I went to take a look at Obscura and I like the ideas but I can't find the source code.
You are making some bold claims but without the source I can't verify those claims.
Any plans to open-source it?
We should link it in more places, apologies!
Here it is: https://github.com/Sovereign-Engineering/obscuravpn-client
Looks like MacOS and iOS only, which is unfortunate. Support for at least Windows and Android is needed for wider adoption. Linux would also be nice.
We're working on it! Android is next :-)
Looks good, just one note: btc was never meant for anonymity, if you would add Monero as a payment option that would be great.
Probably just an unfortunate timing. Cloudflare is going down in this region [1] at the same time with the protests and unrest caused by the news of a motorcycle taxi driver who got run over by a swat car during a protest [2].
Such coincidence might seems like the government trying to do some damage control by restricting internet access, but I hope that's not what happen here. At the moment, cloudflare status for Jakarta is still "rerouted".
I would recommend Psiphon [1,2] most (all?) of their code is open source and their main goal is to get around censorship blocks. They do have some crypto side projects but the main product is very solid.
[1] https://psiphon.ca/ [2] https://github.com/Psiphon-Inc
State censorship circumvention is exactly what Psiphon is for! So yes, try it.
(Disclaimer: I work there.)
Folks who are looking to bypass censorship, and those who live in countries where their internet connection is not currently censored who would like to help, can look to https://snowflake.torproject.org/
WireGuard should still work. Tons of different providers. I trust Mullvad but ProtonVPN has a free tier. If they start blocking WireGuard, check out v2ray and xray-core. If those get blocked... that means somehow they're restricting all HTTPS traffic going out of the country