I used to live in a country who is also a customer of GFW
I used to live in a country who is also a customer of GFW. Before v2ray came out, I had figured out devising any random protocol would defeat it. I would pass my SSH connecting used for socks5 through ROT13 or any ROTn, then the firewall won't gradually slow it down towards total stall after a few kilobytes. OpenSSH yells its name and version in plain text upon connection. A few years later (still before v2ray) they got more aggressive: Unknown protocols were stalled after a few kilobytes. I then learned if I pretend I'm doing something legitimate (!) such as downloading favicon.ico within a proper HTTP channel, they won't touch my "packets" (the favicon content was my packet). I think there was also a Iodine project doing the same with ping packets but it was slower than favicon-as-packets for me. Today I see v2ray has taken it to the maximum extent, suggesting valid web page front for an IP, valid https certificates, etc. When I started making money I was thinking about renting many IPs and send my traffic as round-robin to them as the detection relied heavily on IP consistency. …
Original discussionGeedge and MESA leak: Analyzing the great firewall’s largest document leak137 source comments · at import