Inside the Great Firewall of China's Tor Blocking 160
Trailrunner7 writes with an article at Threat Post about China's ability to block Tor. From the article: "The much-discussed Great Firewall of China is meant to prevent Chinese citizens from getting to Web sites and content that the country's government doesn't approve of, and it's been endowed with some near-mythical powers by observers over the years. But it's somewhat rare to get a look at the way that the system actually works in practice. Researchers at Team Cymru got just that recently when they were asked by the folks at the Tor Project to help investigate why a user in China was having his connections to a bridge relay outside of China terminated so quickly. Not only is China able to identify Tor sessions, it can do so in near real-time and then probe the Tor bridge relay and terminate the session within a couple of minutes."
And you say Chinese can't innovate (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that much new here... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not that much new here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Tor exit node based blocking has been used on various IRC servers to combat abuse for years and years now, The chinese might be doing something more fancy, but that only shows that they didn't go for the fairly easy and quick solution.
The Torproject responded with bridges when countries started to block entire countries like those IRC servers do. The entire list of Bridges is not public. What GFW now does to detect and block those bridges is something new and it is something entirely different. The "download the entire list of Tor servers and block them" method was used and stopped being efficient thanks to Tor bridges.
Re:Not that much new here... (Score:2, Insightful)
They're not blocking exit nodes -- they're blocking your first hop(s) into the tor network
Re:My college did it easier (Score:5, Insightful)
It was NOT designed as a means of bypassing firewalls that are actively try to block Tor. That was never its purpose.
Totally agree that it was not the original purpose, but I would add to your comment and congratulate the folks behind Tor for taking a stand and trying to allow their software to get past the GFW. Sometimes when you realize that your software is being used for something more important (possibly something much more important than not letting your ISP know what you are doing) then it is a great opportunity to change your purpose somewhat. If the purpose itself isn't being changed, then it is still heart warming to see the effort being made anyhow.
Re:Tor, China and the USA (Score:1, Insightful)
you're a fucking moron. the united states of america is nothing close to communist. did you just type a bunch of shit and hope you look brilliant by chance? ...further evidence that most americans dont realize how good they have it, and that most stupid americans continue to misuse labeled like "communist" and "fascist"
these words have meaning beyond shock value when tossed around carelessly in conversation. words MEAN something. use the right words, or keep your stupid fucking ideas confined to your fat little american head.
Re:Tor, China and the USA (Score:4, Insightful)
You're right--the US is nothing close to communist. The US is however VERY close to or has already acheived fascism, which is properly defined by the inventor of the word as the merger of corporate and state interestes. We absolutely have that. Right now the only thing we're missing is the traditional single dictator, but I'm not all that certain that it's required in version 2.0.
It is kind of amusing to see people equate "socialism" with "communism" or use either of those terms in conjunction with fascism though--and it's even more amusing to watch people blame government for "stealing" things when, at best, it's been the enabler of the theft by large multinational bankers and corporations. It's everyone's vaunted "private industry" and "free enterprise" that are the thieves. They rig the game, or they outright steal, and they use part of their takings to enable a media campaign to get everyone to hate the one force that could possibly stop all that--proper (in the interests of the people) government regulation.
Were it not so tragic, it would be even more amusing to watch people complain about "big government" willingly step into the TSA's porno scanners, support indefinite detention of whoever doesn't look like them, and generally engage in their fawning behavior over the ever-militarized police forces who truly occupy our cities and our streets. It is "law enforcement", which is almost never used against the rich and corporate, that is the greatest threat to freedom, liberty, and especially life these days, and yet that's the one part of government these morons never seem to question. "Law enforcement" has tried and will continue to try to bring this and many other evils to the US, and that sort of thing must be stopped at all costs.
Re:obfuscation? (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I think this is something of a myth.
"normal traffic" these days is mostly compressed.
Since the goal of both encryption and compression is to achieve a byte stream that is otherwise indistinguishable from random noise, I don't think one set of random noise stands out much more than another set of random noise.
Only thing that really separates traffic these days is imperfections in these algs and the negotiation protocols.
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My suggestion for their problems would be to negotiate an otherwise compressed stream that is widely used (e.g. gzip) then tunnel the encrypted data through this stream, ideally encrypting post compression.
Re:And you say Chinese can't innovate (Score:4, Insightful)
Reality is by far the majority of Chinese in China work as near slave labour in factories or as peasants on farms working for a pittance. Don't get confused by numbers and percentages, plus independent thinking, striving for their voice, Chinese tend to be the ones who have already left and live elsewhere in the world. That is aproximately 40 million people http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Chinese [wikipedia.org] which you blithely reduce nothing.
The numbers of Chinese who have a voice in China and are in a position to control anything only number in the tens of thousands, it is an corporo-Fascist Autocracy after all.
Internet censorship in China is made significantly easier because by far the majority can not afford and must gain access through a limited number of internet cafe's. As time progresses and the majority of people living in China release how backward they are in their rights and how cowardly they have been in failing to fight for them, will of course start to baulk at passing that future on to their children and grandchildren and strive to break the autocracy that controls them.
So in a future China where 1.3 billion want internet access, we will see how effective the government is at censoring them and keeping them cowed.