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Investigating TLS Blocking in India

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Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#11

Post by djsumdog »

I remember visiting India as a kid with my family, and one of my cousins telling me about an America TV series that was banned. I didn't think much of it at the time, but as I've grown older, I've really come to appreciate the freedom of speech we have in America. I just wrote a post about it:

https://battlepenguin.com/politics/why-i-no-longer-hate-amer...

India is literally the largest democratic country by population in the world. Despite its issues, it has a functioning democracy, yet its freedom of speech is limited.

I've lived in a few different countries, and one thing that still amazes me is that America still has some of the strongest court prescient when it comes to speech laws. We have restrictions of course, like all countries do, but I've never seen the US ranked high on the free speech indexes I've seen. My own research leads me to believe the US and Japan stand out as the two nations with some of the strongest free speech laws (although Japan's have some challenging issues with copyright and fair use).

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#13

Post by kwesthaus »

ignoramous wrote: post #4

And here's the latest in SNI and ESNI censorship bypass: https://geneva.cs.umd.edu/posts/china-censors-esni/esni/ https://getintra.org/ which is a DoH client for Android bypasses Indian censorship, btw. Ref: https://twitter.com/vinifortuna/status/1304189371688660992

Fascinating, thank you for sharing. I'm impressed they were able to find so many ways to essentially confuse the GFW as to the current state of the connection. Looks like any company which wants to do business in China will just avoid implementing ESNI for the foreseeable future.

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#14

Post by wtmt »

saagarjha wrote: post #2

> In the absence of a publicly available official list of blocked hostnames This is the icing on the cake right here. It's just awful that not only do websites get censored largely arbitrarily, there is no insight into the process and what is even blocked–the fact that someone had to literally check sites to see if they are being blocked (via a variety of different methods largely indistinguishable from a malicious a…

Yes, it’s frustrating to see the lack of transparency and the sheer futility in some cases to find who issued an order for what purpose in which jurisdiction affecting which ISPs.

DuckDuckGo was blocked a couple of o this ago. The nebulous words “national security”, without any context, are used as the justification for blocking many sites.

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#15

Post by ignoramous »

wtmt wrote: post #9

This is a great, detailed report. I use one of these providers and see somewhat similar results (I do not use my ISPs DNS, but another one with DoH). Am I right in concluding that these blocking methodologies can be thwarted to a greater extent by the user using Tor (or a VPN outside the country) and/or the websites in question using ESNI (and the user also using a non-ISP DoH provider that doesn’t have legal presenc…

You don't really need tor or any other VPN for that matter, https://getintra.org/ a DoH client for Android works just fine [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/vinifortuna/status/1304189371688660992

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#16

Post by wtmt »

aravindet wrote: post #3

Does anyone have insight into why College Humor (referenced in the article) is blocked in India? This seems unusual and I wonder what (if any) reasons were provided.

You have to understand that reasons aren’t provided for blocking, because the blocking orders may come from different authorities and may not be disclosed due to “national security” reasons. All that we can glean from a site being blocked is that someone influential (not necessarily from an arm of the government) got offended by the site and used some means to get it blocked.

One can construct a list of hundreds of URLs and get a blocking order, with a few innocent ones slipped in between. Nobody will investigate the claims, and nobody can contest the claims before it’s ordered, but the order for blocking will be issued.

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#17

Post by wtmt »

ignoramous wrote: post #15
wtmt wrote: post #9

This is a great, detailed report. I use one of these providers and see somewhat similar results (I do not use my ISPs DNS, but another one with DoH). Am I right in concluding that these blocking methodologies can be thwarted to a greater extent by the user using Tor (or a VPN outside the country) and/or the websites in question using ESNI (and the user also using a non-ISP DoH provider that doesn’t have legal presenc…

You don't really need tor or any other VPN for that matter, https://getintra.org/ a DoH client for Android works just fine [0] [0] https://twitter.com/vinifortuna/status/1304189371688660992

As stated in my comment, I am using a DoH provider outside the country, but see similar blocking results as the article. Handling DNS alone isn’t going to work all the time, which is what the article detailed out.

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#18

Post by ignoramous »

wtmt wrote: post #17
ignoramous wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't really need tor or any other VPN for that matter, https://getintra.org/ a DoH client for Android works just fine [0] [0] https://twitter.com/vinifortuna/status/1304189371688660992

As stated in my comment, I am using a DoH provider outside the country, but see similar blocking results as the article. Handling DNS alone isn’t going to work all the time, which is what the article detailed out.

Did you try https://getintra.org/ (hint: it isnt your typical DoH client)? You're in for a surprise.

Source: Work extensively on an Intra fork.

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#19

Post by pacificleo12 »

djsumdog wrote: post #12
httgp wrote: post #10

It isn’t clear from the article, but how do we circumvent this? Would a VPN work?

Judging from the details, a Proxy/VPN to another nation should work.

Noob question : How is that effective if "SNI travels on the network in cleartext"

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#20

Post by ignoramous »

httgp wrote: post #10

It isn’t clear from the article, but how do we circumvent this? Would a VPN work?

You can use https://getintra.org/ and its numerous forks to overcome censorship as implemented by Indian ISPs today.

Then there is Tor on Android https://guardianproject.info/apps/orbot/ and VPN services like https://getlantern.com/ and https://psiphon.ca/ that exclusively focus on anti-censorship measures. Check their privacy policies before committing to use them.

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