* Peter Rosenmai <prosenmai at hotmail.com> [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. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/tech/attachments/20080406/8b3f4e94/attachment.pgp>
