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.
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.
Don’t use the WiFi if you don’t like the rules
Thank you, Supernintendo Chalmers
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
It might be your computer, but it’s their network - they get to set the rules as to how it gets used.
Ask for it especially if you are getting in trouble
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.
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.
Have you tried wireguard on a non-standard port? 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.
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.
- 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.
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.
There’s nothing suspicious about that. SSH is perfectly normal.
In a business? Sure.
In a school? Not so much.
Here are some good rule of thumbs for work and schools:
-
do not connect to their networks with your personal devices, ever.
-
Only use work/ school devices on their own network.
-
Do not do anything personal on those networks. only do work/school related tasks. This means don’t log into any non school/work accounts.
-
If for some reason they don’t have a device for you but require you to use their network, then leave your personal devices at home claiming you don’t own one and make them accommodate you.
You cannot expect privacy in these situations, and by going to the extreme lengths to try to get it then you will ironically just paint a bigger target on your back if any network admin cares. In some cases this can cost you your job or get you in trouble with the school.
-
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
Please read Charger8283’s reply. It’s the best one. You’re thinking small, how do I break out of their system, that will only land you in trouble. You should think big like how Charger8283 thought and break the system altogether.
If you first find vulnerabilities and report them to your school, later when you find another one you don’t tell them about it until they ask. Keep it a secret and use it for a while. Just pretend like you weren’t ready to tell them because you didn’t understand it yet.
Sometimes it pays off to play nice and stupid.
Well it certainly would be cool to break the system but I honestly don’t have the skills for that. I don’t even know how I could possibly do that.
Yeah you already do. I’m assuming that you’re in a public highschool. This advice becomes bad advice when there is any money on “the table”. NEVER do this at a university, private, chartered school, and absolutely NEVER do this to the person who will be giving you a paycheck.
I’ll repeat this to be clear to everyone reading this. Do not do anything on a computer or network someone else owns that they don’t allow when money you have, or money you could have gotten could be taken away.
When I said break the system I didn’t mean become so smart at computers that you can just walk past any barrier in any code. That’s impossible. Breaking the system means learning to understand the people who enforce it and working with them to get yourself around it. It means talking to the IT person, getting them to like you, then getting them to show you how to get around a firewall or tunnel out of a network or at least letting you try without getting into huge trouble.
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/
If you try to browse to the tailscale website does it work?
If it does you could setup tailscale with an exit node at your house and tunnel your connection that way? Everything would then be coming from your home internet. I have had good success with tailscale being able to punch a hole through some pretty filtered firewalls.
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.
