Encrypting Encrypted Traffic To Get Around VPN Bans
VPNs, Virtual Private Networks, aren’t just a good idea to keep your data secure: for millions of people living under restrictive regimes they’re the only way to ensure full access to the internet. What do you do when your government orders ISPs to ban VPNs, like Russia has done recently? [LaserHelix] shows us one way Gopniks cope, which is to use a ShadowSocks proxy. If you’re not deep into network traffic, you might be wondering: how can an ISP block VPN traffic? Isn’t that stuff encrypted? Yes, but while the traffic going over the VPN is encrypted, you still need to connect to your VPN’s servers– and those handshake packets are easy enough to detect. You can do it at home with Wireshark, a tool that shows up fairly often on these pages . Of course if they can ID those packets, they can block them. So, you just need a way to obfuscate what exactly the encrypted traffic you’re sending is. Luckily that’s a solved problem: Chinese hackers came up with something called Shadowsock...