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VPN or tunneling solutions are unlikely to work if severe network restrictions are in place. e.g. firewalls that only allow TCP ports 80 and 443.

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Nothing stops you from passing a VPN through a TCP connection on port 80 and 443. There are few protocols people haven't tunnelled IP over (DNS included...)

Actually, yes, packet inspecting firewalls do. Hence the SSH over TLS, to make things stealthy.

I often have to work behind "smoothwall". AFAIK, it only allows HTTP over port 80 and HTTPS on port 443 - any other protocol on any other port gets blocked, including other protocols over port 80/443.

To bypass this, I wrote a simple ruby script to tunnel TCP connections, while adding fake HTTP headers to get through the firewall.

Can you share that script?

obfsproxy with obfs3 as a pluggable transport does somthing similar, it's made for tor bridges but i'm sure you could use it for vpn traffic too.

https://www.torproject.org/projects/obfsproxy.html.en

https://gitweb.torproject.org/pluggable-transports/obfsproxy...

With only a bit of extra state-machine glue, you'd have a clean and standards-compliant websocket-based VPN.

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