Hm, does that mean other IMs gave their encryption keys to Russian government? A...

Vinnl · on April 17, 2018

Depends on the other IMs, but as far as I know, at least Signal and WhatsApp have no keys they can give the government. WhatsApp could potentially sneak a backdoor in their closed-source code, but I don't think that's something they'd have incentive enough to do.

leo250 · on April 17, 2018

Hello I’m from Russia. And yes, local authorities started blocking telegram IPs. It doesn’t work without proxy/vpn.

fehyjn · on April 17, 2018

Their DPI is so dumb that it can be easily bypassed just by editing `Host` to `HOst` in http header. BTW ipv6 adresses are not blocked.

degorov · on April 17, 2018

What does that even mean? Every ISP has it's own filtering system, some (or maybe even most of them) are custom built ones. There is no such thing as single government approved DPI.

icebraining · on April 17, 2018

Wait, assuming they're using TLS and certificate-pinning, the DPI shouldn't be able to read the HTTP headers at all. How does that work?

fehyjn · on April 17, 2018

That’s right, but basically dpi sends tcp reset in case of https or 302 redirect in case of http before target server response, since it’s located nearer. There’s a tool to bypass this, so you can read more there. https://github.com/ValdikSS/GoodbyeDPI

gbil · on April 17, 2018

If I'm not mistaken use of SNI reveals the target in plain text, big discussion these days with DNS over TLS etc.

floatboth · on April 17, 2018

Not all ISPs even have DPI, small ones just block IPs

degorov · on April 17, 2018

It's not possible to comply with RKN's requirements by banning IPs for quite a long time already.

foka86 · on April 17, 2018

In my case, proxy alone doesn't help. It only works with VPN now :(.

floatboth · on April 17, 2018

Maybe they just don't have enough balls to go after the biggest ones (WhatsApp and Viber). Plus, other IMs don't have public channels anyone can subscribe to. IIRC that was the original problem, "extremist" channels. Why did they ask for encryption keys instead of blocking channels? Who knows lol.

Telegram still works without (manually adding) proxies :D

EC2 Ireland (at least the subnets where my servers are) also works.

pmlnr · on April 17, 2018

> other IMs don't have public channels anyone can subscribe to

snap?