I have a question regarding VPN usage in South Korea and Saudi Arabia. I may go for short term work in either South Korea or Saudi for a few months. Does anybody have any idea, how safe it is to use a VPN as a foreigner in these countries? Worse case scenario, can I use a VPN in a Azure VM and scp torrent downloaded files or something?
SK is a non-issue. I personally wouldn’t step foot in SA though. I don’t think they block vpn but they will ruin your day if they think you’re possibly related to a known objector.
SK would only be an issue if you have reason to believe they would be interested in you for some reason.
What if I use a VPN inside a cloud VM and scp the files? Would that raise any flags?
VPN usage is simple to detect. I don’t know how SA deals with it. If it’s like China you may get throttled considerably and “raise flags”
I never had issues with SK but it’s been a minute. I doubt it will be an issue.
How do they detect it?
Are we talking commercial VPN like Nord or Proton? What about something like Tailscale to connect to your home network?
VPN and any other encrypted app traffic has telltale signals. You might not be able to decode the content, but you can see who is talking to who, how often, how long, how much data, etc.
My firewall, Palo Alto, and my dns service, Cisco umbrella, has no problem identifying people using VPNs on my networks.