Hi everyone,
I’m currently facing some frustrating restrictions with the public Wi-Fi at my school. It’s an open Wi-Fi network without a password, but the school has implemented a firewall (Fortinet) that blocks access to certain websites and services, including VPNs like Mullvad and ProtonVPN. This makes it difficult for me to maintain my privacy online, especially since I don’t want the school to monitor me excessively.
After uninstalling Mullvad, I tried to download it again, but I found that even a search engine (Startpage) is blocked, which is incredibly frustrating! Here’s what happened:
- The Wi-Fi stopped working when I had the VPN enabled.
- I disabled the VPN, but still couldn’t connect.
- I forgot the Wi-Fi network and reset the driver, but still no luck.
- I uninstalled the Mullvad, and then the Wi-Fi worked again.
- I tried to access Startpage to search for an up-to-date package for Mullvad, but it was blocked.
- I used my phone to get the software file and sent it over, but couldn’t connect.
- I searched for different VPNs using DuckDuckGo, but the whole site was blocked.
- I tried searching for Mullvad, but that was blocked too.
- I attempted to use Tor with various bridges, but couldn’t connect for some unknown reason.
- I finally settled for Onionfruit Connect, but it doesn’t have a kill switch, which makes me uneasy.
Ironically, websites that could be considered harmful, like adult content, gambling sites and online gaming sites, are still accessible, while privacy-tools are blocked.
I’m looking for advice on how to bypass these firewall restrictions while ensuring my online safety and privacy. Any suggestions or alternative methods would be greatly appreciated! (If any advice is something about Linux, it could be a Problem, since my school enforces Windows 11 only PC’s which is really really igngamblingThanks in advance for your help
edit: did some formatting
edit2: It is my device, which I own and bought with my own money. I also have gotten in trouble for connecting to tor and searching for tor, but I stated that I only used it to protect my privacy. Honestly I will do everything to protect my privacy so I don’t care if I will get in trouble.
edit 3: Thanks for the suggestions, if I haven’t responded yet, that’s because I don’t know what will happen.
Sounds like DNS blocking. Use DoH, won’t be as good as a VPN but it will stop the sniffing which allows them to block domains
Whats DoH? Department of health?
DNS over HTTPS
Have you tried the “Stealth” protocol option ProtonVPN has?
It’s intended to bypass VPN blocks. Sometimes it works.Windscribe has a Websocket tunnel option. Haven’t been on a network that’s been able to block this mode yet.
DNS over HTTPS is your best bet because they can’t Man In The Middle and replace it (DNS Poison) like good old DNS. They will still be able to see the IP addresses you are connecting to unless you proxy those connections.
nativeproxyuses Chromium’s stack so it is much harder to detect. There are UI frontends for it if you prefer but I’ve never used them. ProtonVPN also has a stealth protocol that I’ve heard is good, though I don’t know too much about it.Good on you for trying to get around it. That kind of curiosity is a great way to develop your lateral thinking skills. You didn’t ask for a lecture and people giving you one should go back to stack overflow comments. If you want to take the risks of it, that is up to you and you are likely to fuck up. That being said, you aren’t the only person likely go get in trouble if you fuck up and, unlike you, IT will depend on their job financially. If you do it well enough and make sure you don’t get caught by someone seeing your screen or blagging around the school that you did it, that won’t be an issue.
IT departments also read comments in threads like this to find the current trends of how students are trying to get around their web blockers so keep in mind that you will need to keep your skills up to date.
Seems like Tor snowflake is a proxy that makes your internet traffic appear as a video call. Its purpose is to circumvent censorship, but it may get around firewalls as well. I have no experience bypassing firewalls using snowflake, but it may be a viable option (someone correct me if I’m wrong) https://snowflake.torproject.org/
You’ll need to download the client off-network (have you tried the local library for that?) and put it on your PC.
You can also try wireguard on a non-standard port if there are further blocks. OVPN can also go over 443 which might help.
Really though, it depends on how they’re blocking them. They could be blocking the protocol based on port or deep packet inspection, or they could just be blocking a list of VPN hosts. They could be doing both.
If they’re just blocking hosts, you could set up a vpn relay on a host somewhere else, but that won’t help if they’re blocking the protocol.
What worked for me at my old school was using a ShadowSocks proxy. Basically what this does, is it takes all your traffic and just makes it look like random https traffic (AFAIK).
I believe multiple VPNs support this, for me with PIA VPN it’s in the settings under the name “Multi-Hop” (PIA only supports this on the Desktop App, not on mobile).
This technique is pretty much impossible to block, unless you ban every single VPN ShadowSocks Proxy IP. If that is the case for you (chances are practically 0), you could also selfhost ShadowSocks in combination with the Cloak module, however this method is a lot more complicated.
And if you host your own VPN, it’s identifiable as a single destination for your connection.
Shadowsocks doesn’t look anything like HTTPS traffic. It looks like a bare stream cipher over TCP connections to one host with bursts of traffic. HTTPS starts off with a TLS handshake (a client hello, a server hello, the server certificate, then a cipher negotiation and key exchange) before any ciphertext is exchanged. Shadowsocks just starts blasting a ciphertext stream. Even if you run it on port 443, it looks nothing like HTTPS.
Without any sort of cipher negotiation and key exchange, it’s obvious that it’s a stream cipher with a pre shared key, so this would be automatically suspicious. There’s also not really any plausible deniability here. If they probe your Shadowsocks host and see it running there, that’s all the proof they need that you’re breaking their rules. With a VPN, you could at least say it’s for a project, and with SSH, you could say you’re just transferring files to your own machine.
This technique is pretty much impossible to block
Yea, IIRC XRay is the most advanced solution for that now.
This seems to say it is blocked in China and Russia as well though
Obligatory “read your schools’ computer use policy before you get yourself in trouble for evading the firewall”
I don’t know where to find the policy regarding the network. The computer isn’t school property, I own it which is more frustrating because I have to uninstall (Just disabeling it and the Killswitch won’t work) any VPN to start using the network.
Ask for it especially if you are getting in trouble
It might be your computer, but it’s their network - they get to set the rules as to how it gets used.
Yeah, you probably don’t want to risk getting caught for that. There is a possibility you could be criminally charged (regardless of how stupid you might think that is, it happens) when the school finds out what you’re doing. And if you’re using school-issued hardware they’re very likely to find out what you’re doing.
I’m aware of a network that blocks Mullvad as well, but found a way around it. It went through just fine if I was using a custom DNS server. I used NextDNS for this, but I imagine it would work with Cloudflare or something as well (but I highly recommend NextDNS anyways). Hope this helps!
You can sign up for an AWS account, set up an EC2 instance (a free type, you get one free year) and pull an wireguard image on docker there and connect to that? Unless they are whitelisting IPs I’d imagine this would work.
https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-wireguard
You can also replace AWS with an external computer of your choice…
Putting this here,too:
Highly identifiable. Do not do this. Will it get you through the firewall? Yes. Will it get you in trouble when they see all your traffic going to one place? Also yes.
Yeah I wasn’t really thinking about obfuscating that he was using a VPN. Just assumed this was not breaking rules, and only thinking about getting around the blocks and having a working VPN.
If it’s any school like mine was, where people actively look at all the traffic going through their network, it’s a losing battle. And I say this as both a huge privacy advocate and a long-time network engineer.
Anything even remotely resembling a tunnel, VPN or proxy is going to make you stand out in their monitoring, because they will see constant traffic between you and the same host on the other end… traffic that practically never stops. In my day the school even force-reset SSH and RDP sessions after a while (or maybe it was actually ALL tcp sessions, not sure).
It doesn’t matter what protocol or technique you use at that point because they can either block whatever IP/ports you use, every time you change it, or threaten/shut off your service.
There are tools that can reasonably get around that technically. You just need to make it look like https traffic.
I say this as it is possible to bypass the great firewall in China which was likely build on a much bigger budget
too much https traffic could also look suspicious, which they could then block…
It wouldn’t be that much traffic. It would just be https going to random IPs which looks like regular browsing. If you start blocking thing you will create lots and lots of issues plus angry users.
I also doubt they have some guy watching every connection for an entire school.
Don’t use the school’s wi-fi? I’m sure there are other options to you.
If you don’t need a speed and full functionality of the Internet.
Try bridges for the Tor Browser.- Sign up for Digital Ocean.
- Get the cheapest VM (called Droplets on DO) you can get.
- Install Ubuntu on it.
- SSH into it with a SOCKS proxy (
ssh -D 8080 <yourdropletip>on Linux, PuTTY on Windows). - Configure Firefox to use
localhost:8080as a SOCKS5 proxy. - Win.
Bonus points if you set up Cockpit to manage everything over the web, that way you don’t need to learn all about
sudo apt whatever.hetzner.com is cheaper, I think.
netcup as well
That’s nice, for 0,50 monthly less you have more hard drive (14GB more) but you lose 2GB of RAM compared to Hetzner.
EDIT: For VPN over HTTP, you don’t need more than this.
Highly identifiable. Do not do this. Will it get you through the firewall? Yes. Will it get you in trouble when they see all your traffic going to one place? Also yes.
It’s an open WiFi network. They’re probably not even able to identify which device is used by which person. Even if they could, why would they be monitoring everyone’s traffic looking for users who only visit one resource? That’s an extremely unlikely scenario.
The worst they’d see is that this device is using a lot of SSH traffic. There’s nothing suspicious about that. SSH is perfectly normal.
There’s nothing suspicious about that. SSH is perfectly normal.
In a business? Sure.
In a school? Not so much.
Again these are all assumptions. These are risks that do not need to be taken when there are better methods.
These aren’t assumptions. OP states it’s an open WiFi network in their post, and unless you name your computer after yourself, all the network admins can see is your MAC address. And what is suspicious about SSH traffic? And what better way is there? VPN traffic will look more suspicious.
What do you do for a living? I’m a software and network engineer, so this is in my realm of expertise. All the network admins will see is OP’s MAC and that they’re sending a lot of SSH traffic to a Digital Ocean IP (if they even bother to sniff their traffic). This is how I, as a network engineer, have personally bypassed content filters.
You, as a network engineer, at a business, where SSH is normal. This is not your realm, as schools look for very different signals. They are rarely actively monitored, but when they are, SSH will 100% look suspicious, and this individual already has a flag on them for tor, so yes they go beyond MAC and can identify them. You haven’t even asked what kind of school it is, how they access school content when on the network that could identify their machine, or what the risks are for getting caught, yet you want to push a method when others have provided better8 options for obscurity. I am looking out for this kid’s (or adult’s) well being.
Yes, your method works to bypass a firewall, I have even used it myself many times. But it is absolutely not the best option here. And before you ask for credentials again, yes, I have network security experience in multiple domains, including corporate provided POC exploits for software you would know the names of, threat modeling for highly sensitive data, and organization and management of certified systems, along with knowledge of school network infrastructure.
I helped out with my high school network and SSH absolutely would not have looked suspicious. I can’t say for this school, but that was a regular part of the curriculum in mine. Even if it wasn’t, what are you gonna do as a net admin? You have zero evidence that a student is doing something malicious.
I feel like you’re a script kiddy who got called out for being overly confident online, and now you’re grasping at straws. I literally gave you two outs, and you doubled down every time. There is nothing suspicious about SSH traffic, even in a high school network, let alone a college network, and if you think there is, you’re 100% brand new to the industry.
You still haven’t given any alternative that would look any less suspicious than SSH traffic, and you still haven’t given any method a net admin could use to identify your machine from the countless others that connect to an open WiFi network.
In fact, let’s test you. There’s something that old versions of Firefox will expose, even through a SOCKS proxy. What is it, and what did Firefox introduce to prevent that?
He literally said he had already been identified. Read.
Hi! Back in high school, me and a few close friends formed a small hacking group aimed at hacking the school WiFi. We succeeded, and reported the vulnerabilities we found along the way to the school. Our school had a policy where students who managed to hack something would be let off the hook if they reported exactly how they did it. I managed to land a job for the school district as a result of our fiasco. I don’t recommend anyone do that, but I managed to get lucky.
Anyways, once we had access to the WiFi we wanted to get around the network wide filter. Proton VPN worked for a while, but quickly got blocked. Dual booting into Tails on school computers didn’t work until the 6.0 update. To my knowledge, it still works.
However, for our phones, the thing that worked was changing the DNS. We found out the network wide filter the school boasted so highly about was only a DNS filter that resolved hostnames to a “blocked” page. Find a good PRNS and change your device’s DNS to match. If you want a search engine, try to find an unblocked SearXNG instance.
Good luck!
P.S. Don’t forget: Tor is portable on Windows devices :)
You want DNS over https
This is the best answer. You didn’t go charging through their system with complete disregard. You made the IT staff like you first, then broke through their system. That’s social engineering at it finest here people, and is the first skill any great hacker needs to learn. Please do good with this skill.
If your school blocks VPN connections, that usually means that they’re specifically blocking OpenVPN traffic and/or WireGuard traffic. So if you use a VPN provider that supports OpenConnect (which looks like regular HTTPS traffic over port 443 to your school, there’s a good chance that it will not be blocked.
That’s what I do when I’m on open Wi-Fi networks that block everything but HTTP or HTTPS traffic. It’s not as fast as UDP OpenVPN, let alone WireGuard, but it frees me from the restrictions of whatever Wi-Fi network I’m on.
