Russia starts blocking VPN at the protocol (WireGuard, OpenVPN) level

In case anyone wondered how to potentially get around this...

• Pay for a server in another country that gives you SSH access
• Create SSH SOCKS tunnel: ssh -N -D 8008 your-server-ip
• Open your browser and set the SOCKS server to localhost:8008 (in Chromium/Firefox you can search for this in Settings)

Is OpenVPN not just SSL traffic?

They can block the default port and IP addresses owned by VPN service providers, but is there any way to block the protocol without block all encrypted web traffic?

Shithole country

using a vpn is also illegal in russia since 2017 😅

But how are their propaganda farms going to be able to pretend they are in your country now?

annnd another dictatorship box checked off the list... wont be long now

Proton vpn has a feature that can be turned on for oppressive governments, ‘alternate routing’ I believe. Would that be sufficient or no?

I live in Russia and I have vps with wireguard vpn in Netherlands. At the current moment it works for me pretty well except the some connection failures two days ago. But they were very short. But I don't know how long my vps will be accessible with these fucking blocking.

Now comes the Great Russian Firewall.

ProtonVPN has a "stealth" protocol. Does anyone know if that breaks through?

It was not working 2 day on mobile operators, now waiting full shutdown

I am pretty confused by the article.

What I'd expected based on what I've seen so far was that the Kremlin would not care what protocols are used, just whether the a given VPN provider was in Russia and whether it provided the government with access to monitor traffic in the VPN.

So, use whatever VPN protocol you want to talk to a VPN provider where we can monitor or block traffic by seeing inside the VPN. You don't get to talk to any VPN providers for which we can't do that, like ones outside Russia, and the Russian government will do what it can to detect and block such protocols when they pass somewhere outside of Russia.

But that doesn't seem to fit with what the article says is happening.

The media in Russia reports that the reason behind this is that the country isn’t banning specific VPNs. Instead, it’s putting restrictions on the protocols these services use.

According to appleinsider.ru, the two protocols that are subject to the restrictions are:

• OpenVPN
• WireGuard

A Russian VPN provider, Terona VPN, confirmed the recent restrictions and said its users are reporting difficulties using the service. It’s now preparing to switch to new protocols that are more resistant to blocking.

I don't see what blocking those protocols internal to Russia buys the Kremlin -- if Terona conformed to Russian rules on state access to the VPN, I don't see how the Kremlin benefits from blocking them.

And I don't see why Russia would want to permit through other protocols, though maybe there are just the only protocols that they've gotten around to blocking.

EDIT: Okay, maybe Terona doesn't conform to state rules or something and there is whitelisting of VPN providers in Russia actually happening. Looking at their VK page, it looks like Terona's top selling point is "VPN access to free internet" and they have a bunch of country flags of countries outside of Russia. So maybe Russia is blocking VPN connectivity at the point that it exits Russia, and it's affecting Terona users who are trying to use a VPN to access the Internet outside Russia, which would be in line with what I would have expected.

Russia is a terrorist state. #SlavaUkraini #ArmUkraineForVictory

Shadowsocks/ShadowsocksR/vmess/vless/trojan:

Is it possible to bypass this block? Say, embedding VPN packets within a different protocol?

Can someone explain from a technical standpoint how they can block OpenVPN running on port 443? my admittedly limited understanding is that port 443 is the common port for https. If they blocked that port wouldn't that mean that they would be blocking nearly the entire internet?

Couldn't you just use any server/droplet/AWS instance via SSH to get around this law? Seems much simpler.

Is this just address/port blocking, or DPI of some kind? I'm wondering what they can trigger off?

OpenVPN + obfs4proxy should still work. I've been using it in China for some time along with a VPN client on Android & windows that support obfs3.

Curious if anyone living there has tried Windscribe Stealth protocol?

This has been happening intermittently since 2012 or something.

Not wg, cause it wasn't popular then.

HTTP\HTTPS tunneling etc are not that hard, ya knaw.

Or encrypted GRE, ffs.

However will they get messages through??

!chapotraphouse@hexbear.net will love this.

After a discussion that lasted for way too long, it appears that they like censorship.

They think that this is a perfectly reasonable argument: https://youtu.be/QFgcqB8-AxE and that the government knows better and thus information should be suppressed.

Absolutely ridiculous...

Can this actually work? If you run Wireguard on a non-default port, is it possible to tell that it's wireguard?

Permanently Deleted

Use scramble features

how long before our beautiful UE thinks about doing the same?

It would only take 1% of the population to oust putler's fascist regime. 1%