Wireguard is blocked in my country, so I no longer can use Tailscale or other Wireguard-based solutions. My home server is behind a NAT. What other ways of secure private connection can I use?
Could use SSH tunnel to an entry point
Sing-box is a VPN tool built to evade censorship https://github.com/SagerNet/sing-box . It is extremely resilient and stealthy.
See also, xray and v2ray, which are similar, but in my experience sing-box is a bit better documented (at least in English) and has better maintained client apps.
Setting any of these up can be complicated, but LLMs can get you pretty far if you have safe access.
Best solution is to organize revolution to kick out the fascist that censored the internet by protocol
Run ssh on an Onion Service.
So this has been interesting to me as I’m travelling at the moment and wireguard has been blocked on the guest wifi I’ve been on across the hotels, I’ve had to rely on cellular instead.
I’ve just tried Teleport on my Unifi router and that works. I believe it uses wireguard, and it is taking up to 20secs to connect, but I’m now curious as to what it’s doing to bypass the VPN restrictions that are blocking plain wireguard.
Wireguard is blocked in my country
RIP
OpenVPN in TCP mode wrapped around Stunnel. That’s the thing that works.
I have it set up to bypass VPN restrictions in some networks, but it also serves to bypass a lot more stuff if you know what you’re doing.
DPI will only see TLS traffic, and assume it’s HTTP. You can even try to fool it by modifying the packet headers, so dumb enough DPI will think you’re connecting to the site you choose.
AmneziaWG is a Wireguard fork built against deep packet inspection, try that.
Neat, I might have to set this up for myself. It sounds like it could get around some of the VPN blocking I’ve seen while traveling through airports.
First, you need to verify whether you actually have a public IP or if your ISP has you stuck behind CG-NAT, because that dictates your options.
If you’re behind CG-NAT, Cloudflare Tunnel (cloudflared): This is usually the easiest path if you are mostly trying to access web-based services (HTTP/HTTPS) on your server. Your home server initiates the outbound connection to Cloudflare, so CG-NAT doesn’t matter. You just set up a domain (or subdomains) for each service you want to reach. If you need full network-level or SSH access rather than just web apps, check out ZeroTier.
If you have a direct public IP (even a dynamic one), you can run a reverse proxy like Caddy paired with a free DDNS provider like DuckDNS or FreeDNS. One nice thing about Caddy is that it handles getting and renewing real, valid Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates automatically, so you don’t have to deal with manual or self-signed certs at all.
Dealing with the WireGuard block, if your country’s ISP is using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) to identify and drop WireGuard traffic, traditional VPNs like OpenVPN might get blocked pretty quickly too. If you still want a true VPN setup, look into AmneziaWG (it’s a fork of WireGuard specifically modified to scramble packet signatures and bypass DPI) or obfuscated proxy protocols like V2Ray / Xray or Shadowsocks.
I’m new to all this, how is wireguard banned and enforced? Seems odd
WG is not meant to be a stealthy protocol and is easy to detect at the ISP level. It has distinct characteristics that packet inspection tools can use to identify it by examining the traffic and block or flag it. Blocking it completely is trivial for any ISP, much less a nation.
There are modified versions like AmneziaWG that make it stealthier, or alternative protocols built to evade traffic inspection like xray or sing-box (these two are really more like protocol frameworks that have multiple protocols you can use). It’s a bit of an arms race for packet inspection tools to be able to reliably identify these intentionally stealthy protocols, but the advantage is generally in your favor as long as you are using your own servers and not public VPNs. Though even then you need to take care to camouflage your traffic to be truly safe, like if you are shoving all of your traffic through one remote server that has approximately the same amount of traffic going out immediately etc that is something that can also be identified.
How much precaution is actually warranted depends on where you are and what the potential consequences are. You don’t have to go to a full tinfoil hat paranoia level setup to avoid most blocking.
I’m an expert at nothing, but I would imagine that different VPN like WireGuard have different detectable signatures, much like different browsers have different signatures that can be detected. Also, for commercial VPNs, the IPs that the VPN company uses are easily identifiable.
https://github.com/erebe/wstunnel seems like the obvious solution.
Or maybe OpenVPN over normal TLS on port 443.
You could try to run Wireguard on a different port which would be otherwise used by some very common service, maybe there’s some general exemption for port 21, 22, 53, 80, 443…
OpenVPN is my current method. Got it running on port 443 with user certificate authentication, and tls-crypt on top of that to completely mask the protocol from VPN detectors.
Also technically prevents DoS attacks, but that wasn’t my primary goal.
Does netbird run on wg on on ovpn as well? Maybe that’s an option…
I’m not really an expert on VPN, but I believe solutions like Tailscale, Netbird, Pangolin all leverage the Wireguard protocol.
Yeah, WG is by far the best way to do this kind of networking.
NetBird is Wireguard yes.
Self hosted networking! Legitimately one of my favourite topics
You won’t get around the requirement of a publicly reachable endpoint. That can either be a small server with a public ip or dynamic DNS to your home with port forwarding for the VPN.
A classic option is OpenVPN. You can run it on Port 443 in TCP mode and while it won’t be performant, it has a better chance of bypassing most simple blocks
Other than that I’m a fan of completely decentralized mesh VPNs.
The one I use and am most familiar with is Yggdrasil. Connections can be established over TCP, TLS or QUIC on any port you want.
I’ve written a somewhat lengthy comment under this post. One advantage to Yggdrasil would be its existing public network. If you can firewall of your home lab to the point where joining the public network doesn’t expose a security risk to your local network, you could use that to transport your traffic instead of having your own public node or port forwarding.The same post also mentions Anywherelan, it’s intended to have better NAT handling out of the box by using community nodes.
Then there’s also EasyTier mentioned at the bottom, it is a Chinese project and those tend to have good censorship resistance.
Finally I’ll mention Nebula, it requires at least one coordination server but might also be an option
Thank you for your info, I’ll be checking out these projects.
Nebula might actually work as it doesn’t use Wireguard
Port forward your SSH-server. You can forward ports through SSH to access web services or others running on the server or anything else in the network.
But only allow access through keys. And maybe try to use a different port than 22. That usually gets hammered a lot, trying to find accounts with weak passwords.
Yep, that a good option. But only with a key ! Not with a password.
Bot from everywhere will try to forcebrut attack with many password attempt.
I got in this situation in the past. Nothing wrong happened, but it was stressfull.
Changing the port doesn’t actually accomplish much
Best practice is to just harden SSH so that not traffic gets nowhere
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System ISP Internet Service Provider NAT Network Address Translation SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL Unifi Ubiquiti WiFi hardware brand VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
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If you get a Mikrotik router it comes with a back to home VPN server and a dedicated DDNS.
You need to know a bit about network configuration, although the setup wizard is sufficient for most use cases.
When you enable to BTH VPN, it does all of the configuration for you. And it works for me behind a double NAT
