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Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

vpncentral.com

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Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#91

Post by throwaway473825 »

dijit wrote: post #35
baybal2 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While he maintained an office in Russia, for everyone to see, while denying that publicly.

Possibly the easiest thing to exist in error or for the state to fabricate and yet you didn’t even provide a citation. tsk Dude is literally living in exile , yet you claim allegiance by him being affiliated with Russia, when his only crime here was being born in there and thus having some ties. Seems crazy to me. Like, cold-war propaganda crazy. this idea that Telegram is somehow nebulously “the enemy” and signal is…

The point of Signal having end-to-end encryption is to avoid trust. Telegram, on the other hand, relies on trust. Obviously that's going to attract more criticism.

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#92

Post by pdimitar »

simfoo wrote: post #27
0xDEF wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have noticed many new security and privacy oriented projects use Go and even C/C++. Wasn't Rust supposed to be the language that should be used to write all security-critical software? What happened? Are crates like rustls/ring still intentionally sabotaging Rust's cryptographic ecosystem with their "we will always be pre-1.0.0 and never have a stable API" philosophy?

What if "C/C++" is not actually a thing and modern software engineering practices is what actually makes software safe? Writing modern C++ with good test coverage, sanitizers deployed and wrapping critical/unsafe parts into safe interfaces gets you _very_ far.

"Just don't write bugs", eh? :P

I don't necessarily disagree with you about C/C++ (or even Brainfuck) but some languages have the tendency to push you in the right direction and I've come to appreciate those more with time.

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#93

Post by dijit »

throwaway473825 wrote: post #91
dijit wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly the easiest thing to exist in error or for the state to fabricate and yet you didn’t even provide a citation. tsk Dude is literally living in exile , yet you claim allegiance by him being affiliated with Russia, when his only crime here was being born in there and thus having some ties. Seems crazy to me. Like, cold-war propaganda crazy. this idea that Telegram is somehow nebulously “the enemy” and signal is…

The point of Signal having end-to-end encryption is to avoid trust. Telegram, on the other hand, relies on trust. Obviously that's going to attract more criticism.

That argument doesn't work when you cant reliably distribute and run your own clients and given that they (Signal) have hidden updates for over a year to work on mobilecoin in the dark (proving their willingness and ability to do this) it leaves little left for that argument; theres also a bunch of other stuff but that is meaningless to get into. The point is that Signal mostly also boils down to: “trust us”.

On the other hand, while you are totally right about Telegram being quite a bit “trust us”; but they have better UX and are not at all hostile to third party clients and alternative implementations of their “secure” messaging protocol.

Which is also the subject of a lot of controversy of course, because (*puts on tinfoil hat*) it was originally handrolled and not US cryptographer approved.

(always get downvoted when I point out that Signal is doing weird stuff which only serves really to solidify my stance)

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#94

Post by goda90 »

Aerbil313 wrote: post #84
lifty wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't about cracking down on piracy or anything of that sort. It's about slowly getting control of the media and information channels that Russian people have access to. The same playbook that China has been using since forever. Authorities have been encouraging popular Internet celebrities to start posting their content on local networks/apps, so in time Western media sources like Youtube and Twitter will be bl…

I don't live in China. Yet I'd very much like my country having its own national software stack (OS, search engine, browser, social media apps). All is fine for you guys in the US, but you forget when our national interests conflict with yours or big tech corporations or when the privacy of our citizens is concerned, it happens to be a national security issue. I trust my own government to not spy on me unnecessarily,…

Why would you need a national software stack when there's open source solutions for everything?

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#95

Post by fnordpiglet »

miki123211 wrote: post #78
0xDEF wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have noticed many new security and privacy oriented projects use Go and even C/C++. Wasn't Rust supposed to be the language that should be used to write all security-critical software? What happened? Are crates like rustls/ring still intentionally sabotaging Rust's cryptographic ecosystem with their "we will always be pre-1.0.0 and never have a stable API" philosophy?

Go and Rust are better at different things. Go uses garbage collection, while Rust uses manual memory management with borrow-checking to ensure safety. Both are just as safe, but garbage collection is slower while Rust's manual memory management requires a lot more effort on the part of the developer. In particular, the performance of garbage collection is less predictable, making Go unsuitable for things like audio…

I don’t know what you mean by manual memory management. Memory management in rust is fully automated. The only manual thing is if you want to annotate lifetimes to ensure memory is available past implicit lifetimes, or if the line time of something can’t be automatically derived. Borrow semantics are not manual memory management. You don’t directly control when memory is freed in rust, but because it’s (often) stack based it’s usually pretty obvious memory is freed when the stack is unwound.

I feel like you’re confusing rust with c/c++ in this discussion.

I don’t find go faster to write in at all. I feel like they’re about the same, but I find go package management to be a mess and prefer cargo. Rust however does require you to be more aware of memory lifetime and ownership, and provides generally better performance in exchange.

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#96

Post by Aissen »

bogantech wrote: post #38
littlestymaar wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't Wireguard explicitly designed to avoid that? (IIRC it took lots of inspiration from state of the art data exfiltration methods used by malware)

IDK but Wireshark has no problem identifying it so there must be something that gives it away

They even have a nice comment explaining the heuristic: https://github.com/wireshark/wireshark/blob/ef9c79ae81b00a63...

     * Heuristics to detect the WireGuard protocol:
     * - The first byte must be one of the valid four messages.
     * - The total packet length depends on the message type, and is fixed for
     *   three of them. The Data type has a minimum length however.
     * - The next three bytes are reserved and zero in the official protocol.
     *   Cloudflare's implementation however uses this field for load balancing
     *   purposes, so this condition is not checked here for most messages.
     *   It is checked for data messages to avoid false positives.

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#97

Post by LegitShady »

Kretinsky wrote: post #54
tibbydudeza wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not very bright. Was wondering about those friendly fire incidents that keeps cropping up from Russian units - one unit got arty on them by the Ukrainians and then they requested counter-fire but their own side dropped it on them instead.

Or a Ukrainian unit could get access to a Russian telegram account and then send malicious requests.

9r they could get access to the requesting account and send artillery.

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#98

Post by fnordpiglet »

yuriizinets wrote: post #29
0xDEF wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have noticed many new security and privacy oriented projects use Go and even C/C++. Wasn't Rust supposed to be the language that should be used to write all security-critical software? What happened? Are crates like rustls/ring still intentionally sabotaging Rust's cryptographic ecosystem with their "we will always be pre-1.0.0 and never have a stable API" philosophy?

If we're talking about Go, the design of this language is perfect for writing a network related stuff, it's pretty easy, safe and stable. Language's stdlib is mature. As far as I know, in case of Rust you have to rely more on external libraries when you're writing network stuff to make development process less verbose and comfortable. Please, correct me if I'm wrong.

The std libraries in rust are sufficient for most things, but it’s definitely true there are very rich crates for networking with higher level semantics or specialized abilities (for instance async networking is generally done by bringing in tokio or something similar). In rust this isn’t considered bad, and in a lot of situations like embedded systems you don’t want or can’t use std because (for example) posix semantics aren’t available.

Personally I’m not a fan of batteries included languages because they inevitably suffer a Python heat death if standard libraries as the ecosystem improves faster without the baggage standard libraries carry intrinsically.

Hence, IMO the fact std provides a highly common and simple layer and external crates provide opinionated ergonomic interfaces is a feature, not a flaw, of rust. The crate ecosystem in rust is exceptionally good.

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#99

Post by coldtea »

plxx7733 wrote: post #45
coldtea wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wasn't Rust supposed to be the language that should be used to write all security-critical software? What happened? What does "supposed" mean in this case? There's no one dictating what language "security-critical" or other software will be written. So, if it was "supposed", it was incorrectly supposed, by people reading some enthusiast posts about Rust and thinking it's adoption is inevitable or that it applies to…

Who would use unsafe Java to write "security-critical" software?

In what context do the words "unsafe Java" even begin to make sense?

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#100

Post by ocal5 »

nabogh wrote: post #13

I'm a little confused what Russia has to gain from this. My impression was previously that Russia was somewhat of a wild west when it came to piracy and internet restrictions. To make things weirder, the article claims that only mobile networks are affected. I wonder why that is. Is this just the decisions of a handful of telcos and it's being reported as a state-imposed restriction? Edit: also in my opinion, "blocki…

> To make things weirder, the article claims that only mobile networks are affected. I wonder why that is.

This is easier, maybe, to follow where is going a wire than a wave.

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