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Investigating TLS Blocking in India

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Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#41
post #31

Isnt' SNI based on the 'Host' header?! This is a news for me that SNI is not encrypted in TLS. Its a problem with the protocol not the ISPs then.

To determine which certificate to use the web server needs the client to send it the domain.

To send the domain securely the client needs to know the public key of the certificate the server is using.

This chicken and egg problem has gone unresolved for a long time, and only now are there efforts to fix it (see the work on esni).

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#42

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 populati…

The USA has more freedom of speech that many countries, but its heavily biased on certain ways. To show violence on TV is Ok, but to show a naked body makes people go all full censorship.

That a nip slip in 2004 generated news around all the country and intensified fines on "indecency" is just plain ridiculous. That level of censorship is very difficult to justify when other countries are much more comfortable showing nudity.

So, the USA is not in a bad place when come to censorship. But, it has a long way to improve.

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#43

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

Apparently the 1.1.1.1 DoH app bypasses censoring in India too, from what I've read elsewhere on HN.

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I read through https://support.getintra.org/s/article/How-Intra-works and it sounds exactly like any other DoH client with a denylist.

They leave out details: Read the tweet thread I linked to.

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#46

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.

Another peculiar one being blocked (at least on Airtel) is Newgrounds. Not really sure what was going on when they decided to ban it.

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#47

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

Apparently the 1.1.1.1 DoH app bypasses censoring in India too, from what I've read elsewhere on HN.

I wouldn't be surprised if 1.1.1.1 for Android was a Intra fork.

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#48
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

Intra also sets up a VPN connection, right?

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#49
post #33

I run a tech company that got randomly blocked in India. There's no way it wasn't some kind of mistake. It's been months and there's no way to find out why and there's no documented method to resolve the problem. While looking into this, it turns out it happens all the time and many websites have been blocked for years. If you're big enough then maybe you can get unblocked. Or you might just be SOL. Some examples: ht…

Which ISP are you using? Because alexa.com, trinet.com, behance.net, NYTimes are working for me.

I'm not in India, but as far as I know, at least alexa.com and behance.net were blocked for long periods of time. I think NYTimes got unblocked fairly quickly.

Somewhat recent report of Alexa.com being blocked (July 2020): https://twitter.com/anandakrsn/status/1284763939427905536?s=...

Report of Behance being blocked on Aug, 2020: https://twitter.com/prabhjotjolly/status/1295623006358650880...

As the article explains, the blocking is very inconsistent.

The article also links to a github repo with some of the blocked hostnames they recently detected: https://github.com/kush789/How-India-Censors-The-Web-Data/bl...

You can see that the list includes alexa.com and behance. It also includes lots of others like craigslist.co.in, ABC.net.au, bleacherreport.com. From personal experience, I know that these are just a tiny subset of legitimate websites that have been blocked (and perhaps later unblocked) for seemingly no reason and have no clear recourse.

Re: Investigating TLS Blocking in India

#50

I run a tech company that got randomly blocked in India. There's no way it wasn't some kind of mistake. It's been months and there's no way to find out why and there's no documented method to resolve the problem. While looking into this, it turns out it happens all the time and many websites have been blocked for years. If you're big enough then maybe you can get unblocked. Or you might just be SOL. Some examples: ht…

Alexa, Behance and Trinet are accessible to me on Jio's network. Do you have a better source for this? r/India is not a reliable source.
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