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”
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.
Here are some good rule of thumbs for work and schools:
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do not connect to their networks with your personal devices, ever.
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Only use work/ school devices on their own network.
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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.
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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.
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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’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.
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
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.
- 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.hetzner.com is cheaper, I think.
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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.
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.
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
Don’t use the school’s wi-fi? I’m sure there are other options to you.
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…
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!
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.
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/
Airvpn, then use their advanced config to create a 443 tcp tunnel out to a single server. Then use that server’s IP in your OpenVPN config file. Route all traffic including dns inside the tunnel.
Traffic will look like all other web traffic - encrypted on standard web ports. You won’t even need to do a DNS lookup to start with and airvpn uses generic rDNS so it’s not super easy to figure out from their perspective.
