[tuetuopay]

It will be interesting how robust this new protocol is against traffic pattern analysis. A regular HTTPS connection has different patterns over time than a VPN, mainly because it carries only HTTPS and not all of the machine’s traffic; and only for a specific "website" (simplification here) instead of bundling the whole web to a "single server". The latter may be easier to evade, but the former will be hard.

Anyways kudos to them, and I can’t wait to see how it fares against China’s GFW.

[elisbce]

Unfortunately it's not gonna work. The GFW periodically disturbs/resets any persistent or large-enough traffic to IPs outside of China and bans them. That's why even if you have the best obfuscation protocol (like setting up your own server outside with truly indistinguishable traffic like a normal HTTPS), you still cannot have stable connections with large traffic. The current reliable ways of evading GFW are using IPs inside China via non-GFW controlled IEPL connections. These are loopholes deliberately left by GFW in order for certain legit use cases to bypass them (like research / big international corps etc.)

[iforgotpassword]

Might depend on provider? I have a single endpoint and no such issues. Transferring multiple GBs on some days. I'm using a custom protocol though that's basically udp but with the tcp protocol number in the ip next protocol field. I'm simply ignoring any injected rst packets etc.

[elisbce]

Yes, depends on a lot of factors like provider (different telecoms have different network settings/policies), location (GFW is multi-tiered with at least provincial boundaries, certain cities/provinces might have tighter control/policies), time/date (e.g. sensitive periods), etc. But what I'm saying is that traffic analysis is really effective. A single IP with multiple GBs on a day is on the low end and thus probably fine. GFW target potential VPN-like services which have much higher aggregate traffic over a period of time. If you have higher traffic it could trigger IP bans regardless of your custom protocol. I had custom servers setup like yours before and they die mysteriously sometimes so I had to rotate once in a while on new IPs.

[iforgotpassword]

I very rarely had outages of half a minute to two or three minutes, and every time I feared it was an ip ban. Wouldn't be too bad though, I have access to most of an /24. I had silly ideas like load balancing across multiple ips, but as a custom protocol is already standing out, I wonder how much louder I could scream "here I am" :)

[codedokode]

Can VPN providers rotate used IPs faster than they are blocked or it is too expensive?

[elisbce]

I'm sure they have monitoring services to detect banned IPs and rotate on new IPs. However, in my experience, the most popular VPN providers are actually not specialized in evading GFW despite what they claim. During sensitive periods of time, most of the them couldn't be connected reliably. Those providers specializing in providing GFW evasion are called 'airports' or 'ladders' in the Chinese community and they use custom non-VPN protocols and tools for their services.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

How much is "large", ballpark?

[elisbce]

I had custom servers banned randomly in the ballpark of 100 GB / day, but your mileage may vary.