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Sharing a modified Shadowsocks as well as our thoughts on the cat-and-mouse game #136
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分享一个修改版的Shadowsocks,兼谈我们对猫鼠游戏的一点想法作者: Anonymous, Anonymous 我们在这篇文章中发布和开源一个修改版的Shadowsocks。这个版本的Shadowsocks可以绕过当前GFW的检测以及封锁。我们首先介绍这个修改后的Shadowsocks的原理,再分享一个如何部署服务器和客户端的简单教程。我们还会介绍其他两种当前能够帮助Shadowsocks和VMess绕过当前GFW封锁的办法。在文章的最后,我们分享我们对审查这个猫鼠游戏的一些看法。我们将从审查者每次开始大规模封锁的时间点选择出发,探讨审查者相比反审查社区缺乏灵活性这一根本性的弱点,并附上我们对如何利用审查者的弱点来达到四两拨千斤的效果的一些建议。 动机我们在此时发表这个版本有三个目的:
为什么这个修改后的Shadowsocks可以规避GFW当前的检测和封锁?我们与其他研究人员合作发现,当前的GFW会利用多种不同的规则来识别Shadowsocks,VMesss,以及Obfs4这类完全加密协议。其中一条规则就利用了这些加密流量的0比特与1比特的比例接近1:1的特性。因此,如果我们在加密流量中加入更多的0或1,再对比特序列进行重排,就可以达到改变原有比例特征,绕过检测和封锁的目的。 我怎么用这个修改版的Shadowsocks?这个修改版的Shadowsocks基于Shadowsocks-rust,我们还利用Shadowsocks-android编译了apk文件供安卓用户使用。所有的客户端和服务端软件都可以在这个branch和这个release找到。 安装服务端安装修改版的服务器的过程与安装任何其他
wget https://github.com/gfw-report/shadowsocks-rust/releases/download/v0.0.1-beta/shadowsocks-v1.15.0-alpha.9.x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz
tar xvf shadowsocks-v1.15.0-alpha.9.x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz
将下面的配置文件复制粘贴。注意,你需要把里面的 {
"server": "0.0.0.0",
"server_port": 8388,
"password": "ExamplePassword",
"method": "aes-256-gcm"
} 将上方替换过密码的配置信息复制粘贴到配置文件后, 按
tmux 然后再运行服务器:
最后,按 防火墙配置我们使用 在基于Debian的服务器上,可以通过如下命令安装 sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y ufw 然后开放有关 sudo ufw allow ssh
sudo ufw allow 8388 现在我们启动 sudo ufw enable 启动时如果弹出 最后,请用 Status: active
To Action From
-- ------ ----
22/tcp ALLOW Anywhere
8388 ALLOW Anywhere
22/tcp (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6)
8388 (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6) 客户端配置下面是桌面版客户端的配置文件,记得 {
"server": "ExampleServerIP",
"server_port": 8388,
"password": "ExamplePassword",
"method": "aes-256-gcm",
"local_address": "127.0.0.1",
"local_port": 1080
} 不足
你们还知道什么其他的可以规避当前封锁的方法吗?我们还知道两种目前可行的方案,他们都利用了另一种不同的GFW流量检测规则: 如果你是V2Ray用户,你可以开启 如果你是Shadowsocks用户,@database64128还实现了另外一种绕过审查的办法。因为对协议做了修改,所以需要同时更新客户端和服务端。 分享我们对猫鼠游戏的一点看法我们想借此机会分享一些我们对于审查与反审查这个猫鼠游戏的看法。这些看法既来自于我们对审查者和反审查社区两方的观察与思考,又同时受到klzgrad,David Fifield以及其他许多许多反审查者的深深影响。 审查时间点的选择长期关注互联网审查的朋友们一定已经发现,中国的审查者总是在政治敏感事件来临前的数天或数周开始大规模地使用他们的新审查武器。实际上,这样的时间点选择绝非偶然,那具体的原因是什么呢?我们猜想至少有三点,也欢迎大家继续讨论补充:
审查者有弱点审查者缺乏灵活性是由其自身和其所面对的问题的本质所决定的。具体而言,其自身是庞大官僚机构的一部分,这不可避免的导致其内部运行效率低下,行为僵化。而其所面临的问题却又是在全国范围内大规模地监控和审查复杂多变的网络流量。可以想象,一款新型审查武器总是要经历预先研究,经费申请,立项,科研,产品开发,调试,真实流量调研,实验性部署,才能到最后的全国范围内的大规模部署和使用。其过程的漫长程度可想而知。 空口无凭。我们不妨把这次发布当作又一场观察(反)审查者反应速度的实验:看一看审查者要花多久才能封锁我们这次发布的这个有着诸多弱点的版本。 如何利用审查者的弱点?针对审查者的弱点,我们想到了一些也许能让反审查工作在有限的资源下,事半功倍的原则:
感谢我们感谢David Fifield对文章初稿的反馈。 联系我们正如前文所说的,我们发帖的目的就是想引起用户,研究人员和开发者们的讨论。因此我们欢迎您或公开地或私下地与我们分享您的使用体验或想法。我们私下的联系方式可见GFW Report的页脚。 |
概括:以量取胜,使用大量不同的协议来遏制gfw的服务器资源 Overview: Quantity wins, using a large number of different protocols to contain gfw's server resources |
感谢!!不知对 TLS in TLS 的研究有任何结论或新的编译吗? Thanks!!! I wonder if there are any conclusions or new compilations of the TLS in TLS research? |
You may want to take a look at this post and this thread. |
是的,这样做本质还是捉迷藏,并不能长期逃避审查。毕竟 Shadowsocks 一直有 Yes, intrinsically this modification is a kind of hide-and-seek and it can't be used to gight against the censorship in long term. The Shadowsocks protocol has a feature known as |
非常感谢,我使用这个方式在ipv6服务器上搭建完成,并可以使用。 Thank you very much, I used this to build it on an ipv6 server and it works. |
不懂就问,基于游戏流量(https://github.com/MCModuleStudio/Minecraft-tunnel-server )再加上加速器能否规避封杀 Ask if you don't understand, based on the game traffic (https://github.com/MCModuleStudio/Minecraft-tunnel-server ) plus accelerator can circumvent the blocking |
I'd say it has been more efficient than before. It was a bureaucracy, but market forces have been introduced into the problem domain. Independent vendors compete to solve engineering challenges and optimize performance.
Not always, probably not even close. The issue with the scientific workflow of censorship research was that the academic project lifecycle is very long and the deliverables are papers, not actual censorship systems and large scale results, and if there are any practical results, their ROIs are very unpredictable in both expenses and project schedule. That paradigm of censorship R&D being unsustainable doesn't mean there isn't another business mode that can make this work. This is where I argue this area is now much more streamlined and efficient, because much of the censorship problems are no longer academic problems but industry engineering problems. The new variants of v2ray are not an interesting and novel academic research topic (blockchains, other new types of anonymous distributed networks may qualify for academic novelty). The variants are by nature not suited for the academic research workflow. It's entirely logical for these to be solved at the engineering level where a plethora of companies can compete to deal with the large diversity. To compare the characteristics of the academic and industrial censorship R&D workflows:
Why is machine learning very popular in this area of problem. It is because machine learning is actually more efficient than human learning at dealing with diverse protocols. With human learning it requires a large number of experts with deep understanding in networks and protocols but the time and budget to deal with a particular circumvention tool is unpredictable. With machine learning there is no requirement for deep domain expertise, and the cost for good performance is linearly or sublinearly correlated to the amount of raw compute power and ML system tuning manpower invested. This makes a very good deal for decisionmakers because ROIs are quite measurable and predictable in this case compared to the academic workflow. |
Some relatively easy ideas I gathered to improve TLS in TLS tunnel survivability:
|
Wrong strategy. Then GFW enough to detect "valid" protocols and block all the others. |
https://hostloc.com/thread-1082330-1-1.html |
After 3 hours of re-completing the manual,it still does not work,which is quite identical as before. |
I wouldn't call it a protocol change, since anyone can easily implement the idea as an SIP003 plugin. This feature was added for convenience. It is not and probably will never be a part of the protocol.
I have recently made the change in database64128/shadowsocks-go@d98e94d to pad initial payload by default.
To make these possible, payload chunks in Shadowsocks TCP need to support padding. I've made plans to add it for Shadowsocks 2023:
|
My apologies as I may have missed some discussion about this earlier, but I was under the impression that the recent blocking targets only TLS-based circumvention tools. Is shadowsocks also affected? |
It is more likely based on luck.
We all survive during the time.
תודה לאל.
Oct 16, 2022 09:24:14 diwenx ***@***.***>:
… My apologies as I may have missed some discussion about this earlier, but I was under the impression that the recent blocking targets only TLS-based circumvention tools. Is shadowsocks also affected?
I've two Outline servers that my friends in mainland have been using over 6 months and both of them survived the recent blocking. Is this patch preemptive?
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昨天晚上11:20按群友建议购买了2台lightsail, 客户端是Windows虚拟机新安装的系统, Last night at 11:20 as suggested by the group purchased 2 lightsail. The client is a new installation of the Windows virtual machine. |
我昨天中午部署的,使用流量1g左右,暂时没有被墙,但是感觉不怎么好用啊 I deployed it yesterday at noon, using about 1g of traffic, and it's not walled for now, but it doesn't feel like it's working very well |
That's whitelisting, not in the scope of discussion |
I'll take these as bug reports. |
HezeCaoxian:
非常感谢您的报告。这样的用户报告及时、准确、详实,帮我们排除了很多其他可能性。我们现在立刻开始调查。 Thank you very much for your report. User reports like this are timely, accurate, and detailed, and help us rule out many other possibilities. We are now starting our investigation immediately. |
Good question! The GFW has been able to accurately detect and block Shadowsocks, VMess, and Obfs4, and many other fully-encrypted protocols since November, 2022. There are at least two ways the GFW blocks these protocols: immediate dynamic blocking of ports and relatively long term static IP or port blocking. We know dynamic blocking has only been applied to connections from China to the IP subsets of many popular data centers like Amazon Lightsail, Digital Ocean and Alibaba cloud. They selectively deployed this technique for probably two reasons:
How do you know if a certain IP address is under dynamic blocking? Try sending some random payload from China to an open port of that IP address: head -c 100 /dev/urandom | nc -vn $ip $port If after executing the command several times, your connections got timeout for 120 or 180 seconds, then you can confirm that the IP you tested is within the GFW's dynamic blocking IP subnets.
Thanks for your report. Are your servers located within one of those big name VPS providers? Or are you hosting them at some residential or institutional IP addresses that often do not have circumvention servers hosted? |
@database64128 maybe you know already, but it is possible to implement padding in Shadowsocks AEAD with no protocol changes.
Let's say you want to add
|
Thank you for the information. In fact, right after I posted yesterday they got IP blocked. I guess I run out of luck eventually. They were rented from profitserver.net and located in Netherlands and Russia, respectively. I'll set up new servers following the instructions provided here. Is there any additional steps I should consider (e.g., collecting pcaps for suspicious probes) to help investigate how they do blocking? |
@gfw-report Could you clarify what the change you made to shadowsocks is? |
@wkrp Thank you for letting me know. This workaround doesn't sound very flexible. The padding length is limited to multiples of 34. And it takes 2 I've seen more than a few developers in the Shadowsocks community with the sentiment that we must avoid protocol changes at all costs, that protocol changes won't be accepted by downstream developers or users. If anything, my experience with Shadowsocks 2022 has taught me otherwise. People want new protocols to experiment with. People are concerned about the fact that we keep introducing hacks and workarounds to "improve" Shadowsocks AEAD. The end result is a fragmented, divided community, where new developers start their own small circles, instead of joining existing ones, even though we all share the same goal of circumventing censorship. Sometimes protocol changes are necessary. At this point, I consider recommending Shadowsocks AEAD to users to be irresponsible, because of the known vulnerabilities. Like @gfw-report said, it's a cat-and-mouse game. The protocol needs to rapidly iterate when faced with new challenges. |
@gfw-report In case you didn't already know and it might be helpful to your investigation, shadowsocks-rust by default only enables Shadowsocks 2022's replay protection. The bloom filter for older AEAD and stream ciphers is disabled by default. |
diwenx:
Yes, that would be very helpful because the more eyes we have, the more likely and quickly we spot any new censorship actions. |
database64128:
Thanks for the heads up. As soon as we support this encoding scheme on Shadowsocks 2022, we can start recommending users to use Shadowsocks-2022. Any help to implement it is more than welcome! BTW, in case you are concerned about the active probing vulnerability, this modified Shadowsocks has been proved to be able to evade the current active probings because the GFW doesn't suspect its traffic in the first place. |
I can respect your development decisions, but I believe you are mistaken on this point. There is no requirement that TCP segment boundaries be aligned with AEAD ciphertext boundaries. For example, if you need 75 bytes of padding for the current segment, you can generate 102 bytes and only use the first 75 bytes of it for the current segment. The remaining 27 bytes become the beginning of the next segment. (In general, you keep a buffer of available data. If you want to send a segment that's smaller than the amount of data in the buffer, you break off the head of the buffer and only send that. If you want to send a segment that's larger than the buffer, you increase the size of the buffer with padding ciphertexts until it is sufficiently large.) You are correct, however, that the receiver can only consume the padding 34 bytes at a time, which for large amounts of padding means many |
Unless the proxy program runs its own TCP stack (which could create its own problems (e.g. fingerprinting of the TCP stack)), I don't think it's realistic to control TCP segment boundaries during mass payload transfers.
I think you misunderstood what I meant. My understanding is that the proxy program might want to add padding between individual payload chunks to change the characteristics of outgoing TCP segment sizes. And that works best when you can add as many bytes of padding as you want. Your proposed method of doing smaller writes cannot guarantee smaller TCP segments, even if you enable |
Can you add support for udp, including uot |
Thank you guys for your help When using proxies such as shadowsocks or v2ray, my upload speed is very very bad. example my download speed is at 1 mb/s, my upload speed goes down to 30 kb/s |
There's nothing in the protocol itself that would make it that slow. You would have to do A/B testing to narrow down the cause of the problem, e.g. overloaded server, congested route, deliberate throttling by ISP, or whatever. |
Is there a specific reason that you use "pure" ShadowSocks (without plugins such as V2Ray, Xray, etc)? @gfw-report |
Hello there, currently I am using wss (vmess + tls + nginx), I use LEMP, then I use certbot to issue ssl, finally I add wordpress. for clients I use, what I learnt and found out mostly close tothe description are located here in v2fly.org (https://www.v2fly.org/config/protocols/vmess.html#userobject), then search "experiments: string". So I took clash for windows as an example, and I add this in clash for windows yaml file:
and then at the server side I add this in ClientObject (https://www.v2fly.org/config/protocols/vmess.html#clientobject) under InboundConfigurationObject:
Finally I also add maxEarlyData (https://www.v2fly.org/config/transport/websocket.html#websocketobject) in WebSocketObject.
I know these are probably wrong but all these echos back to the question, how to add 'ExperimentReducedIvHeadEntropy'. Although my servers get blocked daily but I think wss is still a very good method. Thank you in advance. |
The Outline Client now supports a prefix parameter that gets used as the first bytes of the connection salt to disguise it as an allowed protocol. The prefix is specified on the Access Key. Usage details and examples can be found at https://www.reddit.com/r/outlinevpn/wiki/index/prefixing/ Combined with Dynamic Access Keys, you can use different prefixes for different sessions. One advantage of our approach is that downloading the client or inspecting its code doesn't give the censor knowledge to know what to block. Furthermore, it enables service providers to change prefixes easily and move faster than the censor. |
FYI: Tests have been done, users report that it does not working in Iran even with these modifications. However, it might be used in China. |
@gfw-report unfortunately doesn't work for Iran. |
I just read the paper How the Great Firewall of China Detects and Blocks Fully Encrypted Traffic, which seems to be the research related to this modification. However, I also noticed that this research in 2021 has a contradictory conclusion regarding entropy. Did the blocking strategy change during the 1 year period? |
Sorry for necro but I did the test yesterday on a proxy server that I set up for my friend (only one user) and there was no timeout after reruning the command 200 time while the proxy server was blocked last year and unblocked few months later. It's an AWS Tokyo EC2 instance so I assume both the IP and ASN are red flags according to the latest research. On the server end, I ran Does it mean the block last year was just a false positive ? or did the GFW upgrade the algorithm? BTW, do you have any insight of IPv6 traffic? According to some, IPv6 traffic is affected by neither active probing and passive analysis. |
Hi @KaraRyougi,
Thank you very much for your interest in the paper. And yes, you are right that this is the "modified Shadowsocks" we mentioned in the paper: https://gfw.report/publications/usenixsecurity23/en/#sec:responsible-disclosure
Great question! Thank you for giving us the opportunity to clarify on that. We did not observe any changes of the blocking strategy from November 2021 to the ceased blocking in March 2023. The contradicting statement was simply due to our lack of understanding of the system in 2021. In particular, at that time in 2021, we did not fully understand the GFW's new censorship system and thus made the false/inaccurate statement in the preliminary report that "[b]locking is not based on entropy.... we find that entropy does not tell the whole story. Some payloads with very high entropy never trigger blocking, whereas other payloads with very low entropy can trigger blocking immediately". We confirm that the GFW was indeed using the monobit testing as a measurement of randomness/entropy. |
Hi @yoshyv, We really appreciate your spirit of measuring the censorship system yourselves.
The reason why you couldn't observe the blocking anymore is likely because the GFW has stopped dynamically blocking fully encrypted traffic since sometime between Tuesday March 7, 2023 and Wednesday March 15, 2023. It may be because the politically sensitive time has passed and the censor is thus less willing to tolerate the collateral damage. Specifically, there were two politically sensitive conferences in China ended on Monday March 13, 2023:
We documented this observation in this directory and README in the repo: https://github.com/gfw-report/usenixsecurity23-artifact/tree/master/artifacts/ceased-dynamic-blocking
Great question. We do not have an answer to this question because we haven't done any testing over IPv6 yet. |
So from my understanding, the current investigation is only focusing on "real-time TCP block", which seems to be only part of how GFW works now. I suspect there are also offline detections. Evidence includes the reports of blocking in this thread, and other reports of UDP-based protocols such as Hysteria being blocked. |
Thanks again for the heads up. Are the affected AS and IP prefix the same for static blocking and dynamic blocking? Have you collected the data in this regard? Is the original shadowsocks (2017) still considered a viable protocol to bypass GFW now? How to take proactive approach to prevent proxy server being IP address blocked? In fear of IP blocking, I haven't used my residential network to set up shadowsocks proxy as my IP address is not dynamic and doesn't change over years. |
每年花50-200美元租【亚马逊/微软/Oracle/阿里/百度/腾讯】在【新加坡/北美】的VPS作为代理,随便用个什么加密协议只要数据不被破解,即可堂堂正正访问外网资源,速度极好,还不会被封。实在太担心,再加点洋葱佐料。简单、安全。 Spend $50-200 per year to rent [Amazon / Microsoft / Oracle / Ali / Baidu / Tencent] in [Singapore / North America] VPS as a proxy, casually use what encryption protocols as long as the data is not cracked, you can squarely access to the outside resources, the speed is excellent, but also will not be blocked. If you're too worried, add some onion spices. Simple and safe. |
Authors: Anonymous, Anonymous
Date: Saturday, October 15, 2022
中文版:分享一个修改版的Shadowsocks,兼谈我们对猫鼠游戏的一点想法
In this post, we release and open source a modified version of Shadowsocks that can bypass the current GFW's detection and blocking. We first introduce the reason why this modified Shadowsocks can bypass the detection and blocking. We then share a simple tutorial on how to setup the client and server. We will also cover two other ways that help Shadowsocks and VMess bypass the current GFW's blocking. At the end of the article, we share some of our thoughts on the cat-and-mouse game of censorship. In particular, we start with answering why censor always starts the massive blocking a few days or weeks before politically sensitive period of time in China; we then argue that, comparing to the anti-censorship community, a fundamental weakness of censor is its inflexibility. We further discuss how to exploit censor's weaknesses to achieve better anti-censorship effect with limited resources.
Motivations
We release this modified Shadowsocks tool today for three reasons:
First, we want to provide Chinese netizens with a (temporarily) viable solution to bypass censorship, mitigating the GFW's massive blocking of multiple censorship circumvention tools since October 3rd, 2022.
Second, we would like to take this opportunity to start a discussion among anti-censorship researchers and developers. Our empirical research shows that the current GFW can already accurately identify Shadowsocks, VMess, and Obfs4 and many other full-encrypted protocols. We estimate that the GFW's current traffic detection algorithm has
0.6%
false positives, while the false negatives are almost negligible. This finding urgently requires us to brainstorm and discuss how to improve the current protocols collectively.Finally, we would like to use this release as an experiment to observe both the censor and the anti-censorship community on how fast each side can react to a new (anti-)censorship event.
Why can this modified Shadowsocks circumvent the GFW's current detection and blocking?
We worked with other researchers to discover that the current GFW utilizes a number of different rules to identify fully encrypted protocols like Shadowsocks, VMesss, and Obfs4. One of these rules takes advantage of the fact that the ratio of 0 bit to 1 bit in these encrypted flows is close to 1:1. Therefore, if we add more 0s or 1s to the encrypted traffic and then rearrange the bit sequence, we can achieve the goal of changing the original ratio feature to bypass detection and blocking.
How do I use this modified Shadowsocks?
This modified version of Shadowsocks is based on Shadowsocks-rust, and we also make use of Shadowsocks-android to compile the apk files for Android users. All client and server side software can be found at this branch and this release.
Installing the server
The installation process is the same as installing any other
Shadowsocks-rust
server.sudo nano server_config.json
Copy and past the following settings to the file. Note that you need to replace the password
ExamplePassword
with a much stronger one. A handy way to do this from your terminal is:openssl rand -base64 16
. You may also want to change theserver_port
.After finishing editing, you type
Ctrl + x
to exit. The text editor will ask"Save modified buffer?"
, and you can typey
and then hitEnter
.tmux
session by:You then do:
Finally, type
Ctrl + b
and then typed
to detach from the tmux session.Firewall configuration
We use
ufw
to open ports for the Shadowsocks server.To install
ufw
on a Debian-based server:sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y ufw
Then open ports for
ssh
andShadowsocks-rust
. Note that if you set theserver_port
to a value different than8388
inserver_config.json
, you need to change the value8388
below accordingly:Now enable
ufw
:sudo ufw enable
If it prompts
Command may disrupt existing ssh connections. Proceed with operation (y|n)?
, typey
and hitEnter
.Finally, run
sudo ufw status
, and the output should look like this:Client side configuration
Below is a configuration file for Client. Remember to change the
server
value fromExampleServerIP
to your remote server's public IP address. If you used andorid and installed from the apk file we provided, the usage should be the same as usual.Limitation of the current implementation
chacha20-ietf-poly1305
oraes-256-gcm
.Are you aware of any other ways to circumvent the current blocking?
We know of two other currently viable options, all of which utilize a different traffic detection rule by the GFW.
If you are a V2Ray user, you can turn on the
ExperimentReducedIvHeadEntropy
option to avoid the GFW's detection and blocking. The advantage of this option is that you do not need to make any changes to your servers.@database64128 also implemented another way to bypass the censorship. Because the protocol is changed, it requires updating both client and server to use it.
Our thoughts on this cat-and-mouse game
We'd like to take this opportunity to share some of our thoughts on the cat-and-mouse game of censorship. Our views are based on our observations and reflections on both the censor and the anti-censorship community; we have also been deeply influenced by klzgrad, David Fifield, and many other anti-censorship developers and researchers.
Censor's timing choice of new blocking techniques
As many long-time Internet censorship observers have noticed, Chinese censors always start using their new censorship weapons on a large scale a few days or weeks before a politically sensitive event. In fact, such timing choices are no coincident. So what are the specific reasons? We suspect there are at least three reasons, and we encourage everyone to share their thoughts on them.
First, it is an important political task for censors to ensure that they have sufficient control over public opinion and information flow, at least during politically sensitive time periods. This task is often described in official parlance as "protecting the cybersecurity during such-and-such event".
Second, censors are willing to tolerate more collateral damage caused by false positives in detection during sensitive times. This nature provides new censorship weapons a more permissive trial-and-error environment when they are first put into use. Tschantz et al. analyze and summarize a large number of censorship incidents and find that "real censors tend to use vulnerabilities that produce underblocking but not overblocking" (see recommendation 5). And this tendency shifts slightly during politically sensitive times: censors become more tolerant of the collateral damage caused by false positives in detection in trade of a tighter social control. By deploying a new censorship weapon during such period of time, the censor's mistake will be more tolerated even if the tool caused any overblocking accident due to bugs that were not tested out in the prior phases. klzgrad shares a similar view in this comment.
Finally, and most importantly, a often overlooked reason is the fact that the GFW is actually trying to compensate for and cover up its fundamental weakness of inflexibility. In this cat-and-mouse game, the censors know that they are simply no match for the anti-censorship community in terms of responsiveness and flexibility. If they started deploying their new secret weapon long before the sensitive period begins, the anti-censorship community will have more time to study it and find new ways to bypass censorship. At that point, if they can't be flexible and fast enough to improve their censorship weapons, then their attempts to tighten their controls over the Internet during politically sensitive times will fall flat. David Fifield shared a similar point of view in this comment.
Censors have weaknesses
The censor's lack of flexibility is dictated by the nature of itself and the problems it faces. Specifically, it is itself part of a large bureaucracy, which inevitably leads to inefficient internal operations and rigid behaviors. And yet the problem it faces is as complex as monitoring and censoring network traffic on a national scale. It is not hard to imagine that a new censorship weapon always has to go through the procedures of early-phase research, grants application, more formal scientific research, product development, debugging, surveying on real-world traffic, experimental deployment, and then the final nationwide large-scale deployment and use. The length of the process can take quite a long time.
One may be wondering if it indeed takes such a long time for the censor to deploy a censorship weapon. Let's take this release as another experiment to observe how fast the censor and anti-censorship community can react. In particular, let's see how long it takes the censors to block our released tool that has many weaknesses.
How to exploit censor weaknesses?
Exploiting the censor's weakness, we came up with a few principles in hope they can make the anti-censorship efforts more effective.
Be more tolerant of imperfect circumvention solutions and do not give up on an imperfect circumvention solution too soon. As mentioned in the previous section, the fact that the GFW is less flexible than the anti-censorship community is often overlooked. And because of that, many circumvention solutions have been dismissed and killed prematurely simply because they "have weaknesses". This is often because when anti-censorship developers and researchers envisioning themselves as censors, they tend to focus on the first step for censor -- "pre-research" -- and thinking that a circumvention solution would be easily blocked; however, they actually underestimated the long process of funding applications, formal scientific research, product development, debugging, surveying real-world traffic, experimental deployments, and finally, nationwide deployment, that the real censors have to face. In fact, if an anti-censorship developer spends an afternoon rolling out a new anti-censorship tool, but it takes the censor a large amount of time, energy, human, material and financial resources to block it in six months, we have to say this "imperfect" tool served as a great leverage.
Increase the diversity of censorship circumvention solutions by letting a thousand flowers bloom. In many people's imagination, the GFW is a perfect censor because of its national-level resources; however, in reality, there are limited number of teams with the skills, ability, and resources to walk through all the procedures to make a censorship weapon from an idea to a real weapon deployed national-wide. Therefore, the more anti-censorship solutions the community can create, the less likely these limited resource censor teams will be able to block all tools in one go. And as long as there is one working circumvention solution left in one of these massive blocking event, the information is not disrupted completely.
Actively report new censorship events, promptly measure and understand new censorship techniques, and share the viable circumvention strategies with the community. Achieving this will require communication, effort, and cooperation between Chinese netizens, researchers, and developers. Encouragingly, we are now seeing more and more people joining this collaboration and working together as a collective.
Develop backup circumvention tools in advance. We have seen that the GFW makes up for its lack of flexibility by starting using its new secret weapons in large scale a few days before politically sensitive events. So can we use a similar strategy where we develop more backup plans in normal times, and then send them out just before sensitive times, like this release? This way, even if the technical staffs working for the GFW immediately spot any flaws in the new tool, and knew how to block the tool, it would still take them a long research and development cycle before actually being able to block it in real world.
Acknowledgment
We thank David Fifield for commenting on an earlier draft of this article.
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