Live data from Hacker News

Iran Shuts Down Major Websites and Https Protocol

news.ycombinator.com

111–120 of 151 posts

Re: Iran Shuts Down Major Websites and Https Protocol

#111
post #87
post #77

Moreover, SSH has stopped working, too. But, finally I found a way to circumvent it. A simple twist in the client side, could simply bypass the filtering. I wrote a simple script to do this, and I would like to share it with all of my countrymen: https://launchpad.net/~mohammad-sepent/+archive/ppa/+package... To use it, just replace ssh command with issh like this: issh user@hostname [other-ssh-options]

Where is the link to the required changes? Binaries = scary. Also, an SSL link doesn't seem useful?

To install it under ubuntu:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mohammad-sepent/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install issh

For other distros you can grab the .deb or the source package from the given link.

Re: Iran Shuts Down Major Websites and Https Protocol

#112
post #107
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. You need to look up "Electronic Countermeasures". There are plenty of chunks of real info out there on it. Pretty much any form of it is plainly described despite the usual expectation that it's top secret or classified. There are handy forms of point to point encryption which can be easily used on paper and via voice as well. Nice read here on it: http://users.telenet.be/d.rijmenants/en/onetimepad.htm Also, rem…

A onetime pad would be a good example of something I would not like to have on me if got grabbed by some oppressive regime. That is the kind of problem I mean. Tor is not a solution, because it could be found on your computer. Radiowaves - I don't know, I would also expect them to be easily detectable, but I'll look it up.

A one time pad can be easily hidden amongst other text i.e. a book printing with some rules applied (third letter of every alternate sentence).

Re: Iran Shuts Down Major Websites and Https Protocol

#113
post #108
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that easy and there are simple anti-triangulation countermeasures you can use. It's possible to drop decoy transmitters/relays, which are easy enough to knock up and are cheap. You can also use refraction to "bounce" HF radio waves off the ionosphere to mask the source. You can scramble the signals. You can disguise the signals as legitimate but include carrier data. There are lots of ways of hiding what you…

Umm, you make it look like a trivial problem to solve, which IMHO is not the case when you take the fact you can risk life in prison or death in to the account. I'm from ex-communism country - where a lot of successful broadcastings happened, nevertheless, they got always identified at the end of the day - and then, guess what happened. When you are facing such restrictive conditions, even signal itself is good cause…

It's not trivial - but it's not unsurmountable.

Regarding triangulation, it's about finding the source. The source is hard to track reliably if it moves, especially away from the detection devices or rapidly out of range. Try tracking a broadcast source from a vehicle driving around you in a circle. If it's omnidirectional you'd have to be in the line of sight. If there is interference across the band, selectivity of the RDF recievers is compromised. Radio direction finding is surprisingly painful.

Hint: The anti-triangulation measures are actively used on Clansman radio sets.

Re: Iran Shuts Down Major Websites and Https Protocol

#115
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but it's easy to triangulate the broadcaster and take measures (imprison, torture, kill). I lived through the communist era in Poland. Amateur radio stations were banned and prosecuted (you would go to jail), even possession of a CB radio was a crime. Things may be similar in Iran.

It's not that easy and there are simple anti-triangulation countermeasures you can use. It's possible to drop decoy transmitters/relays, which are easy enough to knock up and are cheap. You can also use refraction to "bounce" HF radio waves off the ionosphere to mask the source. You can scramble the signals. You can disguise the signals as legitimate but include carrier data. There are lots of ways of hiding what you…

I think I saw this on Max Headroom.

Re: Iran Shuts Down Major Websites and Https Protocol

#116
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deep packet inspection allows you to block any well known protocol.

TLV ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type-length-value ) isn't recognisable as a protocol. It is something you'd have to hand-roll, i.e. serialize to. The resulting byte array would be encrypted using anything you like (I'm using RSACryptoServiceProvider), so it'd be unrecognisable to DPI. Not being familiar with specific DPI implementations I would imagine if such filtering was white list -based then anything unrecogn…

The obvious workaround is to uuencode your TLV data and then wrap it in
.  If it's properly formatted HTML, and the body isn't recognizable as, say, a ZIP file, DPI will pass it.

Granted, someone could do entropy detection, and e.g. pass only things that look statistically like valid English/Persian/etc. text. But that needs more compute power, and can be worked around as well using statistical methods similar to Huffman coding.

Re: Iran Shuts Down Major Websites and Https Protocol

#117

I haven't checked yet whether they're using layer 7 filtering or just blocking ports, but assuming it was a lame combination of the two, you can try tunneling through HTTP on port 80. Download proxytunnel and follow this guide to set up Apache (or whatever server you prefer) to http proxy ssh connections to port 22: http://dag.wieers.com/howto/ssh-http-tunneling/ Then run ssh with proxytunnel as the ProxyCommand (as…

I would love to read that paper.

Re: Iran Shuts Down Major Websites and Https Protocol

#118
post #101
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have more resources on that? Occasionally I think about the problem of censorship and free speech and wonder how to enable occupied people to report their plight. So far I could not think of a solution, because I assumed any kind of broadcasting would make the broadcaster an easy target. So what you say interests me (to be fair I am not building anything at the moment, and I am not a hardware person - yet).

Yes. You need to look up "Electronic Countermeasures". There are plenty of chunks of real info out there on it. Pretty much any form of it is plainly described despite the usual expectation that it's top secret or classified. There are handy forms of point to point encryption which can be easily used on paper and via voice as well. Nice read here on it: http://users.telenet.be/d.rijmenants/en/onetimepad.htm Also, rem…

I came to the conclusion some time ago that I would not work to build devices to harm or spy upon people until it became a matter of doing so or being irresponsible to my family.

Rather work at a Taco Bell than write a censorship program.

Re: Iran Shuts Down Major Websites and Https Protocol

#119
post #33

FYI, Jacob Applebaum just asked[1] people to set up TOR bridges using a new protocol called obfsproxy[2]. 1: https://twitter.com/#!/ioerror/status/167922546807812096 2: https://www.torproject.org/projects/obfsproxy-instructions.h...

Would a TOR exit relay be better than a bridge?

Re: Iran Shuts Down Major Websites and Https Protocol

#120
post #72
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So would this not be ideal for getting through government censors?

My impression is that it could be ideal - but it needs much more bandwidth on the client side, as well as server side - making it expensive to run

But perhaps for sites which are static (in animation) and not interactive like gmail and other email systems it may perform well.
Post reply on HN