Hi, there,
I use 100% of the time a VPN with Kill switch and I would like to know if it is useful according to you to use Orbot + a VPN on phone to reinforce even more its “anonymity”?
Orbot recommends use on messaging and social networks, Signal, Whatsapp, Discord etc…
What do you think?
Combining a VPN and Tor is counterintuitive and no longer recommended.
What I really want to know is if Orbot + Tor are useful together? And if so, how do I configure Orbot with a VPN and make sure it works?
It’s not useful since Tor has bridges which are designed to hide the fact that you use Tor from your ISP.
Most types of Tor bridges are identifiable by a unique fingerprint. If you don’t believe me, read the comments of the creator of the obfs4 protocol. obfs4/internal at master · Yawning/obfs4 · GitHub
There is one exception - WebTunnel bridges based on HTTPT. But they are fairly new, and it takes time to test them properly. https://www.usenix.org/conference/foci20/presentation/frolov
So if you need to hide the fact that you are using Tor, using Tor over a VPN is a good idea.
The link you sent is an obs4 developer ranting about obs4. Tor also provides meek-azure and snowflake in addition to webtunnel.
As I said before,
Combining a VPN and Tor is counterintuitive and no longer recommended.
I don’t have experience with Tor on Android, so the below is just general commentary on Tor+VPN, not Android/Orbot specific.
My recollection is that the Tor Project doesn’t recommend using a VPN, but they also don’t categorically recommend against using VPN --> Tor
I’m not an expert, but I personally usually use VPN then Tor, I haven’t (yet) heard a compelling broadly applicable reason not to. Do you have clear reasons why you think it is a bad idea?
I don’t see a problem with [You] --> [VPN] --> [Tor] --> [Web]
Don’t do this: [You] --> [Tor] --> [VPN] --> [Web]
Further reading on the topic for anyone interested in digging deeper:
SnowFlake uses the WebRTC protocol in a non-standard way, which also leads to a unique fingerprint. Read this issue for an example
Make Snowflake's DTLS fingerprint more similar to popular WebRTC implementations (#40014) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
Meek bridge is slow and very expensive for the Tor project. Moreover, azure has long warned about disabling domain fronting, so it may stop working at any time.
Unfortunately there is currently no way to use orbot via vpn on Android. However, it works if you use vpn on your router.
If you have the choice of using Orbot in VPN mode or not