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by walrus01 1688 days ago
The parent poster who thinks they're saved from Saudi arabian domestic intelligence agencies by using tor is probably overly confident about how much tor is doing for them. The saudis absolutely have lots of money to pay for good quality DPI boxes from China. Using tor by itself stands out.

Since it doesn't look like saudi arabia is blocking traffic to/from major cloud hosting providers (obviously, they'd break most of the internet), this person could simply run a remote desktop session as something like VNC-over-https-by-TLS1.3 (apache guacamole or similar, lots of things).

Or use any of a number of US-based companies that will sell you a cloud-hosted remote desktop system you can use via an HTML5 client inside chrome, firefox, edge or safari, again, over TLS1.3

If the saudis are breaking TLS1.3 in an up to date browser in a client workstation that doesn't have some kind of APT/rootkit on it (also a high risk), we have other problems.

And then keep the saudi workstation as basically a thin client only.

It would look indistinguishable from any ordinary company persistent TLS session used between a workstation PC and some business application hosted in the "cloud".

All of the above doesn't help much if subject to rubber hose cryptanalysis.

2 comments

> If the saudis are breaking TLS1.3 in an up to date browser in a client workstation that doesn't have some kind of APT/rootkit on it (also a high risk), we have other problems.

They wouldn't need to break TLS 1.3 if they have access to root certificates, they could use them to perform MitM attacks.

> They wouldn't need to break TLS 1.3 if they have access to root certificates, they could use them to perform MitM attacks.

It's trivially easy and almost undetectable for any nation-state to perform targeted MitM against HTTPS. It wouldn't be legally possible in most of jurisdictions, but Saudi Arabia isn't exactly "rule of law" country.

Uzbekistan tried, because they wanted zero-risk mass surveillance.

For a while Uzbekistan was trying to get retail computer stores to install a root CA on all computers sold, for convenient mitm purposes.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Saudis have access to the root signing certificates themselves. They wouldn't have to put new certificates in computers' trust stores, as computers would ship from manufacturers already trusting certificates that were signed with those root signing certificates.
Aren't obfs4 Tor bridges undetectable as of now?