Tools helping China’s netizens to bypass the Great Firewall appear to be facing a fresh round of crackdowns in the run-up to the country’s quinquennial party congress that will see a top leadership reshuffle. From a report: Greater censorship is not at all uncommon during countries’ politically sensitive periods, but the stress facing censorship circumvention tools in China appears to be on a whole new level. “Starting from October 3, 2022 (Beijing Time), more than 100 users reported that at least one of their TLS-based censorship circumvention servers had been blocked,” writes GFW Report, a censorship monitoring platform focused on China, in a GitHub post.

TLS, or transport layer security, is a ubiquitous internet security protocol used for encrypting data sent across the internet. Because data shared over a TLS connection is encrypted and cannot be easily read, many censorship circumvention apps and services use TLS to keep people’s conversations private. A TLS-based virtual private network, or VPN, directs internet traffic through a TLS connection instead of pushing that traffic to one’s internet provider. But Chinese censors seem to have found a way of compromising this strategy. “The blocking is done by blocking the specific port that the circumvention services listen on. When the user changes the blocked port to a non-blocked port and keeps using the circumvention tools, the entire IP address may get blocked,” GFW Report says in the post.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Popular Censorship Circumvention Tools Face Fresh Blockade By China