Comment on Movie industry demands US law requiring ISPs to block piracy websites
khorovodoved@lemm.ee 5 months agoHttps does not actually make difference here. You can still detect VPN usage by unencrypted clienthello, encryption-inside-encryption, active probing, obscure libraries that vpn protocol depends on, etc.
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
WTF? How are you going to look inside HTTPS?
Or is the word “encapsulation” (misspelled it first) unfamiliar to you in the network context? Maybe shouldn’t argue then?
What? Are you an LLM bot? Answer honestly.
khorovodoved@lemm.ee 5 months ago
At first, please, be a little bit more patient and no, I am not a LLM.
All https traffic is https-encapsulated by definition. And you can look inside https just fine. The problem is that most of data is TLS-encripted. However, there is so-called “clienthello” that is not encripted and can be used to identity the resource you are trying to reach.
And if you are going to https-encapsulate it again (like some VPN a proxy protocols do) data will have TLS-encription on top of TLS-encription, which can be identified as well.
And about libraries: VPN protocol Openconnect, for example uses library gnutls (which almost no one else uses) instead of more common openssl. So in China it is blocked using dpi by this “marker”.
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Yes, so how is it going to inform you that this is a VPN server and not anything else? You put your little website with kitties and family photos behind nginx on a hosting somewhere, and some resource there, like /oldphotos, you proxy to a VPN server, with basic auth before that maybe.
Ah. You meant fingerprinting of clients.
Banning everything using gnutls (which, eh, is not only used by openconnect) is kinda similar to whitelists.
Both applicable to situations like China or something Middle-Eastern, but not most of Europe or Northern America.
khorovodoved@lemm.ee 5 months ago
It is going to show the censor that you are trying to reach different banned websites (and, probably, google, facebook, etc), all hosted on your server. Your beautiful website is all fine, but in clienthello there is still google.
It is not necessary fingerprinting of clients, you can fingerprint the server as well. GnuTLS for this particular purpose is used only by Openconnect and that is just an example. This tactic is very effective in China and Russia and collateral damage is insignificant.
And various western anti-censorship organizations wrote articles, that such methods are not possible in Russia as well, but here we are. China’s yesterday is Russia’s today, American tomorrow and European next week. Here it all started in the exact same manner, by requiring ISPs to block pirate websites. And between this and blocking whatever you want for the sake of National Security (for example, against Russian hackers) is not such a long road as you think it is.