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Access Now's partners have confirmed that the Tor network — a widely used tool allowing users to browse the internet anonymously — was blocked in Venezuela last week over the government-owned internet service provider CANTV, by far the largest ISP in the country.
Direct access traffic on the Tor network steadily increased in Venezuela over the past two months, and even more sharply this month via Tor bridges — alongside a new wave of online censorship from the Maduro government. These most recent blocks have affected several major Venezuelan news outlets, including El Nacional and La Patilla, among others.
While previous online censorship in Venezuela could often be avoided by switching DNS settings from a local Venezuelan server to an international service (like Google's public DNS), this has not been possible for the most recent blocks. Instead, people have needed to rely on using virtual private networks (VPNs) and Tor to circumvent government censorship. This increased use of Tor to access blocked content is likely what triggered these new restrictions to the tool.
"It seems that the government of Venezuela has found out how to do a very sophisticated block for the Tor network. It's not only on the direct access channels, but also the bridges Tor provides to bypass that blocking," said Melanio Escobar, Venezuelan technologist and journalist, and founder of Redes Ayuda. "The government is moving forward to be as closed as China or Iran."
"This is the latest escalation in Venezuela's internet censorship efforts, as it blocks higher-profile sites with more sophisticated methods. This is one of their boldest internet censorship actions yet," said Andrés Azpúrua, Director of Venezuela Inteligente, an organization documenting technical evidence of the Tor block and other censorship events in Venezuela through its project VE sin Filtro. Reports further analyzing the technical details of the Tor network block are forthcoming.
Source: https://www.accessnow.org/venezuela-blocks-tor/
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday June 29 2018, @03:20PM (4 children)
How is this possible? Does Tor traffic not look like regular https traffic? Why not?
As another question, how does a youtube stream look (or fave streaming service)? Does that look different to regular https traffic? I don't know enough network architecture, so apologies if the question is naive.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @04:06PM
Internet traffic is in the form of "packets" which have source and destination addresses--IP addresses. To block YouTube, you have your routers reject packets addressed to or from the addresses of the YouTube servers. To block Tor, you have your routers reject packets addressed to or from the addresses of the Tor relays. The Tor project tries to make this difficult by not providing a complete list of the relays, but instead giving out the addresses of "bridges" a few at a time.
And yes, Tor can use the same ports as HTTP or HTTPS traffic (80 and 443).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by loonycyborg on Friday June 29 2018, @05:47PM
It does not, but tor has optional support for ferrying information via bridges and steganographic transport proxies. This requires extra setup though. So for example, tor can be made work in China but with significant extra effort.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @08:49PM (1 child)
I bet you can find it via deep packet inspection, and or traffic patterns. ( would be pretty heavy use.. and that may be really unique there.. )
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Saturday June 30 2018, @08:43AM
That's why I compared to e.g. youtube.