XMPP Service Operators - 2021-03-18

hello, maybe stupid question: is there a XEP for s2s network censorship circumvention? maybe something like BOSH for S2S?

someone was asking about that on lemmy.ml in a thread about nation-wide censorship of networks

southerntofu, if your sole censorship threat is that some ports are blocked, you can run an XMPP service on port 443.

SRVs to the rescue? southerntofu see XEP-0368

yes i'm aware (though i don't think s2s on port 443 would work?) the question was more about chinese great firewall type of censorship, eg. my server can't communicate with yours

ah ok 443 is possible for s2s with SRV thanks :)

(southerntofu, why wouldn’t it?)

southerntofu, with the chinese great firewall, not even a VPN rescues you

you’re lost there, they’re experts in traffic analysis

they can distinguish facebook vs. google even when tunneled through a VPN just by traffic patterns

though i'm not sure it would be indistinguishable from HTTPS trafic

they’re really open about that, you can read their papers :)

But they don't seem to care about xmpp yet. It just worked without any VPN when I was in China.

southerntofu, it would, easily. HTTPS connections don’t live that long, the packet sizes, rates and reply/response correlations differ

jonas’, yeah there's still quite a lot you can do especially for a two-directional protocol like XMPP.. i mean people still use something-thats-like-a-VPN in China to access the rest of the network :)

btu sure correlation attacks are a thing

so my question was more like is BOSH for S2S possible? eg. REAL HTTPS for s2s connections?

southerntofu, this wouldn’t solve the issue jonas’ is mentioning.

indeed no, just make it harder

barely, at the cost of making everything else terrible

i'm not familiar with details, but i heard tor project had good experiences with maskerading trafic as WWW to circumvent censorship (snowflake?)

I’d then rather look into similar measures on the s2s layer, instead of making s2s go over HTTPS and making everything terrible

anyway thanks for the answer in my view the real answer is to run some censorship-circumvention on top of existing services, not try to integrate imperfect solution in every service :)

See "shapeshifting" https://www.pluggabletransports.info/transports/ (I've never tried it.)

do you know of any reactions XEP?

xorman: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0444.html

thx

I saw a discussion days ago about cryptocurrency integration talking mostly about payments, but really chat-currencies integration happens mostly around (monetizing) reactions