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.
Obligatory “read your schools’ computer use policy before you get yourself in trouble for evading the firewall”
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 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
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.
-
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 :)
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.
You want 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.
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).ShadowSocks is just a proxy. The description fits the Cloak module, mentioned below.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
Seems like there is nuance 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.
Yep my mistake, I confused ShadowSocks with Cloak.
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.
i2p would stand
You’re going to get in trouble and it’s not worth it.
Don’t do personal stuff on their network. What are you even trying to look at via the school network?
If you’re concerned about privacy while doing school stuff, use another device, or maybe a VM. Do they provide computers for students?
You might get off with a warning because you’re young (I assume you’re like 16), but bypassing network security stuff as an adult at work will often get you fired.
I beg to differ. Everyone should have a right to access a free Internet. The censorship they are taking about is so broad that it cannot be accepted. In France the school could get highly punished if they dared to make comments on their harmless Internet activity
The rights everyone should have is irrelevant to the reality. You can’t steal a sandwich and be like “everyone should have the right to food!”. I mean you can, but you’ll still be punished.
Is this the hill for this kid to die on? Probably not. If they were trying to change the system for everyone to be more just, maybe.
You will not be punished for stealing a sandwich where I live. The judge would laugh at the plaintiff
That’s not the point? The school provides a service and is (probably) not obliged to do so. If the school sets rules on this services, it’s OPs choice to either use or not use that service. 🤔
Shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?
Noli equi dentes inspicere donati.
If this is public school and you are a citizen, you should
At the risk of sounding contrarian/lame, you should probably not be doing any of this especially if you don’t own the hardware you’re using (as mentioned by another commenter).
You don’t specify if this is university or middle/high school, but either way you are not entitled to and should not expect any privacy on a network you don’t control. Even if you are able to set up a VPN to mask your internet activity, your school’s network administrators almost certainly can tell that you are using a VPN, which itself sounds like it would be a violation of your school’s network policy and will most likely land you in trouble. Indeed, your repeated attempts to access blocked sites have likely already raised some flags.
Even the workarounds that others here have mentioned (like routing VPN traffic over port 443) are inadequate for a network that is being actively monitored. Believe me, it is very easy to tell when someone is connecting to a VPN this way.
I would quit while you’re ahead until you can afford your own hardware/internet connection, and then maybe worry about any notion of privacy. Use your school’s internet for what it was intended.
I have gotten in trouble for using a VPN I’m the past but it was just a little talk and then they were cool with it. The thing is, that it is my device and at the school I don’t have a strong enough signal for my phone. So I can’t just make a hotspot and use that as WiFi. I need to use the WiFi to get my things done but I will not use the WiFi if I can’t protect my privacy. I know that this sounds pretty stupid but I won’t comply with my school.
- Sign up for Digital Ocean.
- Get the cheapest VM (called Droplets on DO) you can get.
- Install Ubuntu on it.
- SSH into it and open a SOCKS proxy (
ssh -D 8080 <yourdropletip>on Linux, use 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 (
localhost:9090over your proxy), that way you don’t need to learn all aboutsudo apt whatever.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.
It very much is. I used it regularly in both high school and college. In high school it was just how I connected to other machines. One of my teachers taught me how to use it. In college we were told to use it by the professor, so at least one entire class was using it for every assignment. That’s pretty normal in any school that has programming or networking courses.
SSH is usually used for work, so it just looks like someone working. Tor is used for nefarious purposes, so it will always look suspicious. VPNs are used to bypass content restrictions, so they will always look suspicious.
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.
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.
There is also sshuttle if you want to route everything through SSH, but not tried personally.
You’ll need to download the client off-network (have you tried the local library for that?) and put it on your PC. If you know how to use docker, you could set up the client via docker and dockerhub which I doubt is blocked, but you’d need to set docker up on windows which I have no experience with.
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.
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
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.
I’m assuming you probably have a smartphone. In which case, I would just use your Wi-Fi hotspot instead.
Which means the mobile data plan, which doesn’t sound that easy anymore. Where I live (EU) mobile data plans are either quite limited in data cap or expensive, and for a lot of years now they are just shutting it down when yours ran out, instead of slowing it down.
I tried this but my signal isn’t strong enough to get thorugh the walls. In some classrooms it works, but it’s more like a 50/50 chance to stay connected.
Yeah, fair enough
Why does it need to go though walls?
Also if the signal is a problem just use a physical cable
Physical cable to the nearest cell tower?
What? WiFi doesn’t use a tower. Your phone is the access point.
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.
Don’t use the school’s wi-fi? I’m sure there are other options to you.
