I’m a sophomore in high school and, it seems, my school blocked ProtonVPN. I can’t connect on my phone or laptop. Last year, it worked fine, and I can still connect at home, so, I assume, it’s my school. I don’t get good enough data inside the building to use that. I have a paid proton subscription. I’ve tried using different protocols but nothing works. Furthermore, I tried connecting to WireGuard and then trying to connect, but it still didn’t work. This may be from me setting it up incorrectly.
Before you comment, something like, “You’re only there a little bit”, or “Just deal with blocked websites.” I have my reasons for wanting to do this beyond just, “I want to play games in class.”
It’s not too difficult to block every server associated with a commercial VPN service. There are companies that specialize in identifying and providing updated lists of VPN server IP’s specifically for this purpose. Corporations subscribe to these lists to prevent employees from circumventing corporate security controls, and streaming services providers use them to enforce regional licensing and copyright requirements. You might chance upon a new server that won’t be on the list for a few weeks, but it’s a cat-and-mouse game and the cats ultimately win.
I won’t get into the philosophical or legal discussion about the use of VPN in school or circumventing your school’s acceptable use and security policies. But the only way you’ll reliably get around this block is to setup your own private VPN server on a VPS or your home network, configured to listen on a port the firewall allows. One such way would be to configure OpenSSH configured to listen on TCP port 443. Just be aware that if your school’s IT department is on the ball, they will also likely detect and terminate persistent connections to port 443. You also might find that using an overlay network such as Tailscale or ZeroTier, or a self-hosted equivalent such as Headscale, might be successful.
I used to be able to “jump start” the VPN UDP socket by connecting first with my phone’s internet and then hot swapping to the school Ethernet. You can also try Proton’s stealth protocol. If everything else fails, try Tor with bridges. It’s free and a robust tool against censorship. Their anti censorship techniques such as “pluggable transports” will get you past even Iran’s overzealous firewall, so I think it should work for any bloody school firewall.
Off topic: What’s the point of having internet in school if the firewalls make it unusable? Any competent network administrator should be able to setup an open and free internet access for everyone. I understand auto-blocking automated port scans and BitTorrent, but that’s it. What’s the point of blocking VPNs? It should be just beneficial for the administrators if everyone used a VPN as the blame for something potential bad gets passed to the VPN. What’s the point of keeping kids in a draconian China style internet cage when the rest of the society is free and open?
You’ve highlighted the reasons why I feel like VPNs are becoming less and less useful. Maybe it’s just me but I feel like it’s just a matter of time before so many websites/services are blocking VPN IPs that it will render VPNs ineffective for their intended purpose. Maybe I’m wrong though.
Off topic: What’s the point of having internet in school if the firewalls make it unusable? Any competent network administrator should be able to setup an open and free internet access for everyone. I understand auto-blocking automated port scans and BitTorrent, but that’s it. What’s the point of blocking VPNs? It should be just beneficial for the administrators if everyone used a VPN as the blame for something potential bad gets passed to the VPN. What’s the point of keeping kids in a draconian China style internet cage when the rest of the society is free and open?
I believe all K-12 schools and public libraries are required to have web filtering, at least if they want federal funding. Furthermore if kids are able to look up guns, drugs, and self-harm content, it opens up the school administrators to liability, whether they agree with such a rule or not.
It’s different for colleges and offices because those places are intended for adults, not minors. There the main concern is network security rather than blocking content.
In short they can make an open network, but they likely aren’t allowed to because their hands are tied by legal concerns.
Shot in the dark here, but I too had trouble getting Proton VPN to work on a particular Wifi network, presumably due to VPN blocking, and going into Advanced Settings and toggling off “LAN connections” fixed it for me. I have no idea whether or not this will make a difference for you, but it took me a while to realize this was the problem, so wanted to share just in case.
No such thing as blocking “VPN IPs”, you mean they can block major VPN providers that allow users to proxy through them. You say VPNs are becoming less useful because of proxy providers getting blocked, but VPNs are useful for MUCH more than this 1 use case that those providers sell. VPN technology’s intended purpose is not specifically related to VPN providers helping you bounce your IP.
Using a VPN alone to anonymize your website access is not effective. There are many other ways websites and nation states can identify and track visitors. A VPN is only helpful for protecting your IP traffic from the local network operator and ISP, and even that isn’t absolute. And as you point out, more and more sites just reject access from commercial VPN servers.
That’s not to say that VPN has no value. Depending on your privacy and security needs, a commercial VPN might be one of several layers to meet your goal.
I’m not sure why you got offended by my post. Yes, a VPN can serve many different purposes. However, each VPN provider has IPs associated with that service and those can be put on a block list, so yes, it is possible.
IP blocking
With IP blocking, a company or person will collect a list of IP addresses connected with VPN services. All of these IP addresses will then be blocked on the network.
Sorry if I sounded offended, I’m not. You’re saying a whole technology is becoming useless just because proxy providers who happen to use the technology to offer a proxy are being blocked. What you’re talking about has nothing to do with it being a VPN, you’re really talking about public proxy providers getting blocked. Its unrelated to the usefulness of the technology they used to provide you with a proxy.
Another useful example for a VPN is accessing your home lan while away, or working remotely, or remote lan gaming (at least back when this required bcast), etc. You don’t need to redirect your gateway for a VPN to be useful, which is the only thing the VPN providers you’re talking about offer as a service. The underlying technology we’re talking about can do far more than what those providers offer.
I don’t believe that a VPN is useless. For this particular case (a proxy provider as you call it), it is indeed becoming harder to use because of IP blocks. Yes, I realize there are other uses of a VPN. I use WireGuard to tunnel into my home network. I was referring more to all the services that are blocked while connected to a commercial VPN, not a site-to-site connection.
Sounds like we agree. You were talking about the usefulness of proxy providers not of VPNs in general. I also wish people still meant cryptography when they say crypto lol