Originally Posted by
nolimitholdem
I don't wish this to devolve into a geekfest mud-slinging, but...
Deep Packet Inspection does not enable decryption of data being carried over a VPN. Some sort of decryption is still required and requires pretty heavy artillery, cryptographically speaking. Think NSA, not UAE.
Encrypted connections are used all the time. All online banking uses some form of it, as well as many commercial sites such as Gmail and so on. Heck even EK's portal uses encryption. (The "S" in https is for "secure".) Not much reason in having passwords and so on if everyone can see them.
The point is, your data can't be read, but the encrypted data stream can be seen. In other words they may not be able to see inside the tunnel, but the existence of the tunnel itself may now get people in trouble. My guess is the UAE gatekeepers will start cracking down on users connecting to known VPN servers. But they can't just block all encrypted connections or most of the Internet would grind to a halt, given how much traffic travels encrypted. Then again they do seem to want to revert to some sort of Dark Ages so who knows.
China expends an enormous of money and resources attempting to block VPN's and still is unable to do more than make it mildly difficult to circumvent. I seriously doubt the UAE will do better.
how likely is someone to get caught? and what would you do if you arrived in the UAE from summer vacation and used a vpn a few times in the last 2 days from their phone.