I have a question regarding VPN usage in South Korea and Saudi Arabia. I may go for short term work in either South Korea or Saudi for a few months. Does anybody have any idea, how safe it is to use a VPN as a foreigner in these countries? Worse case scenario, can I use a VPN in a Azure VM and scp torrent downloaded files or something?
VPN and any other encrypted app traffic has telltale signals. You might not be able to decode the content, but you can see who is talking to who, how often, how long, how much data, etc.
My firewall, Palo Alto, and my dns service, Cisco umbrella, has no problem identifying people using VPNs on my networks.
I wonder if someone could set up some form of tunneling through much more mundane traffic, perhaps even entirely over a legitimate encrypted service through a regular browser interface (like the browser interface for services like Discord or slack or MS Teams or FB Messenger or Zoom or Google Chat/Meet) where you can just literally chat with a bot you’ve set up, and instruct the bot to do things on its end, and then forward the results through file sending in that service. From the outside it should look like encrypted chat with a popular service over that https connection.
Things like that have existed. There are Reddit communities that are flooded with obfuscated comments that are used for communicating with bots. There’s probably one in the fediverse by now.