ISPs and government censors are motivated to detect OpenVPN flows in order to enforce traffic policies and information controls. Our findings demonstrate that tracking and blocking the use of OpenVPN, even with most deployed obfuscation methods, is practical at scale and with minimal collateral damage. The belief that obfuscated VPN services are unobservable is misleading and potentially dangerous for users in countries where VPN usage is illegal.
The ease of fingerprinting makes OpenVPN susceptible to throttling or blocking. Previous research indicates that censors already employ sophisticated two-stage pipelines, with one stage for detection and another for blocking, which highlights the effective strategies being used against VPN users.
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