Re: Would it be possible to effectively shutdown Freenet within the PRC?

Florent Daignière <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.network.freenet.technical
Message-ID <[email protected]>
* Peter Rosenmai <[email protected]> [2008-04-06 22:03:15]:

> 
> Hello all,
> I've looked around and have been unable to find an answer to the following questions. I hope I am posting these to the right group.
> 
> 1. Suppose Freenet were to prove such an irritant to the mainland Chinese government that they decided to shut it down altogether within China. How great a technical challenge would this present? I understand that the PRC farms out much of the responsibility for censoring internet traffic to ISPs: Chinese ISPs could simply look for and block the Freenet protocol, couldn't they?
> 

Blocking opennet is easy if not trivial, blocking darknet is way more
complicated.

How exactly would you fingerprint the Freenet protocol ? To block
something you've to discriminate it from the background "noise". No
doubt they are ways of doing that but it's a non-trivial problem... Only
one technique has been brought to our attention so far and we are going
to mitigate its effectiveness soon implementing something we call
transport-plugins (a steganographic layer on top of the protocol).

> 2. Would it be possible for the PRC to run Freenet nodes in order to determine the IP addresses of other nodes within China?  
> 

They could determine the IP addresses of opennet nodes, yes. That
wouldn't work for darknet nodes of course and it's why growing a real
darknet is so important.

> 3. Is it true that the PRC has previously blocked Freenet? If so, how was this achieved?
> 

Yes, using deep-packet-inspection on their firewalls : the old version of the protocol had some matchable session bytes. 

They have also been blocking the website since ages.

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