In the beginning of December, the Tor Project support mailbox began receiving a number of anonymous messages from users claiming to be having difficulty finding an anonymous digital service. “It wasn’t just one or two, but if 10 people asked,” says Gustavo Gus, Tor Project team leader. At the same time, staff at the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), which tests and monitors online research, saw the signs indicating that Russian Internet service providers (ISPs) are blocking the Tor network.
Tor is used by people all over the world to hide what they are doing online, sometimes sexually but often to avoid monitoring in authoritative or independent countries. A 2020 education found 93 percent of Tor users logged on to the Internet for final reasons, not for unauthorized reasons. And in Russia, who have people Tor users’ second largest user In the aftermath of the United States, people used the practice to violate government bans.
What happened in early December, even those in the Tor Project were unaware of, was significant. Roskomnadzor, a Russian TV and telecommunications provider, has issued a directive to ISPs around Russia to prevent users from using it. Tor website. In Russia’s Internet development, ISPs have begun to take action. And access to other Tor network sites was limited.
On December 1, OONI saw 16 percent of Tor’s Russian connections record some problems. One day later, he was one of three. On December 8, it was back to 16 percent. Distractions seem to vary depending on the ISP and who is trying to get Tor. Some people are being sent banned page instead of the Tor Project page. Some seem to be submissive attack on the middle man on their TLS connection, which protects online data from end to end, in an attempt to connect. Many are still finding their own reconnect repeatedly when the TLS handshake begins, trying to block their access. The latter approach could indicate that Roskomnadzor used a deep packet forward (DPI) filtering package for Tor, meaning that it has been smelling a lot of traffic as it passes through ISPs, says OONI. (Roskomnadzor was contacted to comment on the matter.)
These three methods use some form of IP blocking. “In doing what they can do is enforce the law by arranging for firefighters to demolish all their vehicles at their destination,” says Arturo Filastò, an engineer at OONI. “Some modifications may choose to use the block for debugging and installing a configuration package.”
However, the problems, as well as the total blockade, OONI’s writings did not spread equally to ISPs in Russia. As of December 2, OONI has tracked 333 special networks in Russia. Forty-one of them have blocked Tor in some way, despite Filastò warning that 12 percent of ISPs have been shut down, as there are 4,671 autonomous system registry numbers (ASNs), operated by ISPs, in Russia. All of this offers a wide range of users. This was particularly difficult for some ISPs, such as VEON, where some users stopped Tor while others did not. “This may be due to the fact that the release of the log is not taking place equally in all of their areas,” says Filastò.