Can Kovri be blocked in e.g. China?

Question

And if so, is there a way around it with something like the meek pluggable transport from the Tor project?

Answer 1

With Deep Packet Inspection, you can filter/block almost any traffic you want. In the I2P projcet, on which Kovri depends, the devs are aware of blocking possibilities in restricted countries and they are working on solutions to make it as hard as possible to detect and block I2P traffic.

The mentioned "meek" is one of the Pluggable Transports (PT) to obfuscate TOR traffic, which will also be implemented natively in Kovri with even extended functionality (hidden mode + disabled inbound) for restricted countries. In addition to that, I2P is working on a new NTCP 2 transport which makes automatic identification of I2P traffic even harder. According to the roadmap it's currently one of the main focuses.

You can see the current list of "Bad Countries" in I2P according to lack of press freedom and that for being started in hidden mode by default in I2P. Kovri, however could handle an own list of countries, where crypto currencies (or Monero in special) would be banned and let you connect by default with even more security features like hidden mode and disabled inbound.

So in general, it's a cat-and-mouse-game to obfuscate traffic so it can't be filtered. But I am quite sure, that there always will be ways to hide (especially if you are not transferring TeraBytes of data) since the effort to inspect every bit of data in real time is simply too high. Especially Kovri project's focus is security first, even more than I2P.