Browser Plug-in Punches an Unfixable Hole in China’s Great Firewall

DeathHamster · Dec 2, 2015

http://www.technologyreview.com/new...s-an-unfixable-hole-in-chinas-great-firewall/

Browser Plug-in Punches an Unfixable Hole in China’s Great Firewall

By exploiting the plumbing of the Web, researchers have created a new way around online censorship that governments could struggle to shut down.

By Tom Simonite on November 20, 2015

It could soon be a lot easier to access blocked news sites and even the social network Facebook from inside China thanks to a simple browser plug-in developed by researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The Chinese government’s “Great Firewall” blocks many foreign websites, such as news sources and social networks. The best-established tools to evade that kind of censorship, such as the anonymity network Tor or encrypted VPN connections, can make browsing slow and are actively targeted by the government.

Tests of the new browser plug-in, called CacheBrowser, from inside China show that it provides an effective solution that doesn’t slow browsing so much, says Amir Houmansadr, an assistant professor at UMass Amherst.

For sites that use encryption, censors in China or elsewhere can’t easily shut down the tool without also preventing access to thousands of popular websites that aren’t censored, he says. “They’ll have to block thousands or millions of other webpages,” says Houmansadr. “This advances the arms race in censorship resistance.”

Houmansadr built CacheBrowser with John Holowczak, until recently an undergraduate at Umass Amherst. Working versions of the plug-in for the Chrome and Firefox browsers are available but aren’t straightforward to install. Work is underway to change that and to provide better documentation. Available data suggests that CacheBrowser should work for over 80 percent of the sites that China blocks among the world’s 1,000 most popular, including Facebook and Bloomberg. Houmansadr expects that proportion to grow as the feature of the Web’s plumbing it relies on becomes more common.
[..]

It's not really unfixable, just harder. Also, it doesn't help with sites that don't use big league content delivery networks like Akamai.

Basically they have a way of asking the content delivery network for pages so that it doesn't look like you're reading Facebook.

China could probably reverse engineer that, know what you're really doing, and block that.

Other places, like Iran, will probably be slower to patch for that.

Disambiguation · Dec 2, 2015

https://www.cachebrowser.info/#/
CacheBrowser is a system designed to help Internet users bypass Internet censorship.

The core idea of CacheBrowser is to grab censored content cached by Content Delivery Networks such as Akamai and CloudFlaredirectly from their CDN edge servers, therefore, foiling censors' DNS interference.

DeathHamster · Dec 2, 2015

Disambiguation said: ↑

The core idea of CacheBrowser is to grab censored content cached by Content Delivery Networks such as Akamai and CloudFlaredirectly from their CDN edge servers, therefore, foiling censors' DNS interference.

Yeah, but how long would it take a government with a good team to duplicate the technique, and start blocking on what you're really reading?

This is a Short Duration Access Hack or ShorDurAccHack.

Log in or Sign up

Browser Plug-in Punches an Unfixable Hole in China’s Great Firewall

DeathHamster Member

Disambiguation Global Moderator

DeathHamster Member

Share This Page

Customize Theme Colors

Predefined Skins