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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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Blocking all encrypted traffic... fantastic suggestion comrade, I'll forward this on to the Kremlin. Also, you've been drafted.
I suppose with "comrade" you are hinting at Soviet customs, but Russia isn't the USSR and couldn't be further from being socialist
Settle down, it was a joke
what
Russia isn't the USSR but it is heading towards the USSR ways, and it's already there in many aspects. It's not just on a technical definition, a lot of pro-war and nationalist rhetoric is rooted in the old USSR culture.
The USSR wasn't socialist, it was communist. And yes I know, it wasn't real communism because real communism is a utopia.
Oh please. In all the ways that matter, it is identical.
It's a custom protocol that uses SSL/TLS for key exchange and such, so it can be detected. It's actually causing huge problems for many large Russian companies, as it's common to use those protocols for remote access, work, etc.
As mentioned in the article you need something like "Shadowsocks" to avoid protocl blocking, since it fully disguises the traffic as standard SSL/TLS. Which was created for, and is still used to circumvent this type of blocking in "the great firewall of china".
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/187649/is-it-possible-to-detect-vpn-in-the-network
tl;dr: You can infer that OpenVPN is used from the key exchange somehow.
It is, because they're inside an encrypted stream of data.
The way OpenVPN works is this:
OpenVPN establishes a TLS connection to the OpenVPN server.
Your computer's kernel generates an IP packet.
OpenVPN sucks that up, shoves it into the TLS connection. That connection is encrypted, so the network provider cannot see inside it, know whether the data is IP packets or anything else, though I suppose maybe traffic analysis might let one classify a connection as probably being a VPN.
The data in that connection is broken up into IP packets, went to the OpenVPN server.
The OpenVPN server decrypts the data in the TLS stream, pulls the original IP packets out.
So the original packets are always encrypted when the network sees them. Only the OpenVPN server can see the unencrypted packet you originally sent.
What @raltoid is saying sounds plausible, though I can't confirm it myself off-the-cuff -- that OpenVPN is detected by looking at somehing unique in the initial handshake.
Fair enough. I mean, there are ways around that too, like some port knocking scheme, but I assume that this shadowsocks thing solves the same problem in a better way.
But I do stand by what I was responding to on, the bit about the internal IP packets being encrypted and not readable.
Yes there is a difference between https traffic.
There's still headers and it's fairly trivial to block using packet analysis. Using other protocols such as SSH tunneling may work (until they try to ban that I suppose). There's always way around these kind of blocks, it's a cat and mouse game.