this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't know what they actually do but one possibly is to look for (absence of) the TLS handshake. Or maybe they simply infect all devices on the Chinese market with MITM certificates to be able to decrypt all TLS encrypted traffic. Should be easy to force companies to do that in such a country.

[–] Shan 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The port isn’t their focus, they’re looking at the protocol that is being used, regardless of the port. The protocol is still visible when not doing deep packet inspection. That’s why there suggesting a socks proxy for Russian citizens, because that uses HTTPS to tunnel traffic, so it wouldn’t be caught up in protocol analysis.

[–] binom 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

can you maybe link some ressources on how the protocol used can be detected? i did not know about this and would like to read into it some more :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Look up NBAR for the basic idea. Each vendor has their own 'secret sauce' implementation, Palo Alto only needs 9 bytes of payload for disambiguation, iirc.

[–] binom 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

thank you! so it is basically looking at identifiable patterns in the packet flow and matching them to protocols. i also found this paper about traffic identification interesting.

[–] meldroc 2 points 1 year ago

Time to up the spoofing game. Maybe some AI-generated traffic to throw off the packet analytics.