Using Orbot to mask network traffic

Question

I have a problem with my ISP. I recently changed to a new 'chat-only' provider, which allows only chat applications (i.e. whatsapp, messenger) to be used on his network.

Is there any way to use Orbot to mask my traffic as if it were sent by Whatsapp? I know the other way around (enabling whatsapp / facebook on blocked networks) is relatively easier, yet all I tried did not work in my situation.

When I enable the Orbot VPN for my Android apps, nothing can connect to the internet (even Whatsapp does not work anymore).

Any help or suggestion would be much appreciated! I am kind of a network newbie, and have no idea of what is going on :)

Answer 1

Technically this kind of thing can be done through a pluggable transport.

I'm not aware of anyone actually having done this specifically. It probably wouldn't work very well, a curious observer would notice that you always send short messages and receive messages in orders of magnitude larger in response, which may not (I've no studies to back this up) be what chat looks like.

If you still wanted this, you could of course write your own pluggable transport, setup a whatsapp listener on a bridge and another on your local system and send your tor traffic across whatsapp itself, this is the beauty of tunneling. I'm unsure of how technically capable you are, and this may be beyond your current scope.

There are probably better pre-existing approaches to by-passing their censorship, most "chat" applications are going to need at least two things to work: DNS and TLS over TCP. By using tunneling like iodine (I've had a shelved project for a while to use the goptlib to make an iodine-like pluggable-transport, it has some fun advantages...), or by finding a CDN that some allowed "chat" application requires that you can also use as a domain front for a meek instance.