It's common knowledge that Wi-Fi, or other Internet connections, should be encrypted via a VPN to be secure, and to hide our real IP address from intermediary network observers. However, one can't trust one's VPN provider to be an exit point for all of one's Internet activity, because not all websites support HTTPS, and a VPN provider can observe any of your HTTP transactions. For example, I'm posting this question over HTTP now.
To solve this problem, I purchased my own VPS to run my own VPN. A good start, but there's still a problem.
In China, most of the VPN protocols are blocked. L2TP, OpenVPN, and SSH are recognized, and blocked, by the port or handshake they use, and additionally, some of them are very difficult to set up on a server. So I'd like to try a custom Tor Bridge, because it's very easy to set up, and the Obfsproxy project promises protection against DPI -- so it can't be blocked by Chinese ISPs.
My questions are,
- Does Tor really provide VPN security features similar to an OpenVPN connection?
- Is it possible to use one server to provide a Tor proxy, or do I need additional servers?
- Can I really trust Tor Obfsproxy Bridge? By that I mean, what is the encryption method? Which authentication method is used?
To me, it just looks like a proxy which anyone can use to execute a man-in-the-middle attack, as with PPTP VPNs.