Censorship circumventing VPN

Grants
1

Hello everyone,

We wanted to introduce ourselves and our censorship-circumventing VPN project that’s worked well during recent civil protests. We have done a lot of R&D in both identifying means of censorship, estimating the capabilities of DPI tools and finding methods to bypass the censorship. Thanks to that, we were one of very few VPN services which worked 100% uninterrupted during the protests and retained usable speeds in situations where all major VPNs were blocked and even generic internet traffic was heavily restricted by ISPs. It’s been great to see it make a difference for hundreds of users, some thanked it for its ability to enable reach to the community, some thanked it as a lifesaver for their small business to stay afloat when no other VPNs worked.

We are looking for a grant from IranUnchained to support our activities, so we can provide resilient VPN services to as many Iranians as possible. We believe that a well maintained VPN tailored specifically to circumvent Iranian censorship will remain important in the future as pretty much all major VPN providers haven’t been able to reliably circumvent the censorship even a year after the new wave of censorship started. You can see more on https://www.molethewall.com/.

Thank you for considering our application. Together, we can make a real difference.

Best regards,
MtW team

1 Like
2

Welcome to IranUnchained Forum,

Thanks for posting your proposal. This is one of the topics on our priority list to support.

I’m interested to know more about your solution. Some of the questions:

  • Do you have any data/analytics on the past use of your tech and the 100% success rate you mentioned?
  • Are there any technical details you can provide to assess the feasibility of the solution? (I understand some of the information might be tricky to share, but anything you can share helps with our grant assessment)
3

Following up on this. We successfully tested the VPN with several Iranians with the help of Free Internet For Iran group (our previous grantee). While it’s hard to test the resiliency without Iran experiencing system wide internet shutdowns, we also did our diligence on the technology itself and are optimistic that it will work as claimed.

We are proposing to purchase a few hundred VPN accounts each good for 1 year from the Mole The Wall team, to be distributed by the Free Internet For Iran group. Some of the accounts will be distributed immediately to Iranians who have the technical ability to install them as is (given that the app UX still needs work), and the rest will be distributed as the UX improves, over the next few months of 2023.