New open-source VPN in Rust: “Blasts through censorship, or your money back”
I’m not affiliated with the project, but I think it looks cool. I won’t put much stock into it from the privacy perspective (you’re better off with WireGuard if you want that), but its censorship resistance does look very interesting. Here’s an overview of how it works.
mizaru, their zero-knowledege authentication protocol, is sadly not documented right now, but at least the code is quite compact.
Other reusable crates from this project:
The technical term for crypto that’s undocumented and lacks independent peer review is “snake oil”.
The website says “© 2019”, and I don’t know how long it’s been in production - documentation and peer review should have happened before going live. They claim to be undetectable by china’s firewall - your money back doesn’t even begin to cover the potential damages if those claims don’t hold.
mizaru is just an implementation of blind signing, and I’m not sure how that enables zero-knowledge authentication?
Yup, I also have my doubts about that part. Fortunately, it is just about the least interesting component of the entire thing. The transport protocol is what makes or breaks it.
They claim to be undetectable by china’s firewall - your money back doesn’t even begin to cover the potential damages if those claims don’t hold.
Is bypassing censorship now criminalized for individuals in China? Last time I checked (at around a year ago) it was being done quite routinely by a rather large number of people.
“Done frequently by many people” and “still technically illegal” are not mutually exclusive, though. Speeding in a car on the freeway or using recreational drugs are a few common examples we have in the US. People flout laws they don’t agree with or that they can get away with all the time.
I am aware that both Russia and Saudi Arabia do not criminalize bypassing censorship for individuals, even though they do impose heavy Internet censorship.
I’ve tried to do my own research on the topic, and it appears that a ban on VPNs has indeed started being enforced a few years ago, targeting individual users, although on a relatively small scale.
At least on paper, the obfuscation employed by sosistab should be superior to the commonly used Shadowsocks by being resistant to active probing and using dynamic bridges.
My though exactly: “Is smoking pot now criminalized for individuals in random country? Last time I checked (at around a year ago) it was being done quite routinely by a rather large number of people.”
I had the same thought lol.
Also pirating, literally terabytes if not petabytes of movies, tv shows, games, music and everything under the sun are being pirated daily