Defeating China's National Firewall

Bruce Schneier is reporting on his blog that a recent paper is discussing how to defeat China's national firewall. From the article: "However, because the original packets are passed through the firewall unscathed, if both of the endpoints were to completely ignore the firewall's reset packets, then the connection will proceed unhindered! We've done some real experiments on this -- and it works just fine!! Think of it as the Harry Potter approach to the Great Firewall -- just shut your eyes and walk onto Platform 9¾."

Comments

Publish and Perish

[Archangel Michael]

Okay, now that you let the cat out of the bag, how long before the Great Chinese Firewall gets this hole plugged?

On the otherhand, the more they try to squeeze star systems, the more they will slip out of thier han (or something like that).

Duh ... just use Gopherspace

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

No one is monitoring that protocol

Detectable and Illegal

[mrcaseyj]

Wouldn't this be easily detectable and probably illegal (for someone in china)? It sounds like a good way to get in trouble.

This should take a while to plug

[the_crowbar]

Because the filtering is not done on the routers, but rather on external machines this should take some time to plug. Off the top of my head I can't imagine how the Chinese government would change their filtering to defeat this trick. On a Linux box you could just set an iptables rule:

bash-3.0# iptables -s 0/0 -d 0/0 -p tcp --tcp-flags RST -j DROP

should take care of the reset packets at the local end. The remote end would need to drop them as well, but that would be easy to setup. Maybe we could setup some proxies for those in mainland China that would drop the resets so they could surf anywhere. Might be hard to restrict to those coming from mainland China.

Just a thought.

the_crowbar

Re:Irresponsible

[jandrese]

Back in the real world however, you can't overthrow the government whenever you don't agree with it, especially when they have lots of guns and tanks and all you have are disgruntled peasents. Sometimes civil disobediance is the best policy. Besides, you can't generate outrage against something like this until most of the people actually know about it, and even then many of them will believe the government line that they're only blocking "harmful materials" that you shouldn't be looking at anyway. Enough people start getting in trouble over bypassing the firewall and you might actually start educating the public about this.

Re:Drug Parallel

[Millenniumman]

Most libertarians believe that (currently) illegal drugs should only be legal for adults. Minors don't have the full responsibility of adults to take care of themselves. There are also a lot of more moderate ones who believe that taxing them is okay, especially if it can help lower other taxes. Their main reason for supporting legalization of drugs is that it would lower black market crime, and end up saving lives, although ideology is obviously an important reason.

Re:the chinese government is illegitimate

[808140]

Illegitimate? Whatever, dude. The Chinese are, with the exception of Americans, the most patriotic people I've ever come into contact with -- nationalist fervor is so ingrained here it's absolutely frightening. They're not interested in revolt and on the whole are happy with the status quo. They love their country and go on and on about it. Really. If there were a vote tomorrow there is no doubt in my mind that the CCP would win.

During the Chinese civil war, the Communist party was overwhelmingly supported by the people.

Your assertion that non-democratic societies are illegitimate suggests that most societies in history have been illegitimate. I'm not sure that's a particularly useful definition of legitimacy.