Reports are emerging that Russia is blocking access to encrypted messaging app Signal.The crackdown comes from the Russian government regulator Roskomnadzor, which is citing the threat of terrorists and extremists relying on the app to communicate, according to Russian news agency Interfax. “User access to the messenger Signal is restricted…to prevent the use of the messenger for terrorist and extremist purposes,” Roskomnadzor told the news agency. Reuters also reports that numerous users in Russia have faced glitches while trying to access Signal. For example, registering as a new user will display an error message. Internet censorship watchdog NetBlocks adds that its own metrics show “Russia has restricted Signal messaging app backends on most internet providers.”Russia has also been throttling access to YouTube over claims the video-sharing platform promotes anti-Russian views.
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In a tweet, Ukrainian analyst Viktor Kovalenko suggested Russia is blocking Signal to prevent local users from sharing news about the Ukrainian military’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. Signal didn’t respond to a request for comment. But on Twitter/X, the messaging app said it was “aware of reports that access to Signal has been blocked in some countries,” a likely reference to how Venezuela is also blocking access to Signal, in addition to X.In response, Signal is advising affected users to activate the built-in “censorship circumvention” feature, which can be accessed through the app’s privacy settings under “advanced.” The feature uses a technique called “domain fronting,” which can make internet traffic appear to come from a different source. This can include routing traffic through a larger mainstream platform.
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In Signal’s case, the app can use platforms such as “Google, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon S3, Azure, Cloudflare, Fastly, and Akamai” to access Signal once the censorship circumvention features are triggered. “The idea is that to block the target traffic, the censor would also have to block those entire services. With enough large-scale services acting as domain fronts, disabling Signal starts to look like disabling the internet,” Signal wrote in a blog post explaining the feature.In Friday’s tweet, Signal also said it’s been working on other anti-censorship techniques. But one obstacle is how some platforms continue to use plaintext Server Name Indication headers, making it possible for an ISP to snoop on what sites users are trying to access. “Solutions like Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) remove the plaintext server name from the TLS handshake, which makes it far more difficult for hostile ISPs to block access to the sites and services you care about — but this isn’t widely supported yet. We hope that starts to change,” Signal added.Russia tried something similar with Telegram a few years ago, but eventually abandoned the effort. A mixture of VPN use from consumers and Telegram’s own efforts to host the app on third-party cloud providers reportedly managed to circumvent the censorship attempt.
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