Russia wants to boost its censorship infrastructure and plans to spend almost 60 billion rubles (around $650 million) over the next five years to update its internet-blocking system.
This is the strategy outlined in the federal project ‘Cybersecurity Infrastructure’ as reported by Forbes. The Russian censor body, Roskomnadzor, aims to build a more effective filtering system for blocking VPN services in particular.
The Kremlin has long been battling against VPN usage across the country. That’s because a VPN (virtual private network) is security software that encrypts internet connections and spoofs user IP addresses, granting access to otherwise geo-restricted content – exactly what Russian authorities seek to prevent.
The end of VPN usage in Russia?
For the likes of Russia, China, Myanmar, and Iran – countries infamous for imposing strict restrictions on the internet – VPN usage has been a longstanding target. Over time, this has created an endless cat-and-mouse game between authorities and VPN providers to find a way to elude VPN censorship.
Technologies like VPN obfuscation and IP rotation are particularly useful at bypassing these blocks, with companies like Proton VPN continuing to invest in new anti-censorship tools. Now, the Kremlin appears ready to invest big money into reversing this trend.
“Russian authorities seem to be attempting to implement the Iranian model of internet censorship (even though we previously expected the Chinese model), which involves categorizing IP addresses into white, grey, and blacklists,” Stanislav Shakirov, CTO of Russian digital rights group Roskomsvoboda and founder of Privacy Accelerator, told me. “However, they have not yet been able to achieve this with the current infrastructure.”
Currently, Russia’s technical approach to countering threats (TSPU in Russian) filters all Internet traffic to block or slow down certain resources. Yet, as Shakirov explained, the implementation of DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) has technical limitations. For instance, “it lacks sufficient computational power to block VPN protocols and throttle YouTube simultaneously,” said Shakirov.
This is where the new strategy comes in. Between 2025 and 2030, Roskomnadzor plans to both modernize the current TSPU and install new ones. Censors expect this will increase the efficiency of VPN blocking by 96%.
In response to the censorship Russians are adopting VPN really fast. The government is blocking at least 42 providers, but smaller services and decentralised protocols are still available pic.twitter.com/EabxUDHUPnMay 16, 2023
Since 2019, all Russian telecom operators have been required by law to install TSPU software to allow Roskomnadzor censors to filter out unwanted online resources. The grip on the RuNet (Russian internet) became even stricter following the invasion of Ukraine. More than 100,000 resources were blocked in 2022 alone compared to around 7,000 during the previous year.
As censorship levels went up, VPN usage in Russia has been skyrocketing as well. Authorities then intensified the VPN crackdown that started back in 2017. The most recent move includes forcing Apple to remove at least 29 VPN apps from its local App Store. Plus, a law enforced in March now criminalizes the spread of information about ways to circumvent internet restrictions.
As data from the DPIDetector project suggests, major VPN providers are currently blocked by IP addresses and service domains – something that can be bypassed with an IP rotation feature.
Shakirov explained that, over the past year, authorities have also targeted VPN apps at a protocol level. WireGuard, for instance, is now blocked by mobile operators and, since August, on home internet connections. OpenVPN has also become challenging to use, but the blocking remains inconsistent. Plus, VPN software using more sophisticated anti-censorship technologies like Roskomsvoboda-developed Amnezia VPN continues to work well in Russia.
He said: “It is clear that the current technical resources are insufficient to block even a basic VPN protocol like OpenVPN, let alone more complex technologies. This is why these equipment purchases are a necessary step for Roskomnadzor, although we cannot say if they will be enough.”
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chiara.castro@futurenet.com (Chiara Castro)
