Jul 13, 2021 19:00:00

China's Great Firewall turns out to block more than 310,000 domains

A study conducted on the domestic Internet censorship system '

Great Firewall ' operated by the Chinese government revealed what kind of domain the Great Firewall is blocking.

[2106.02167] How Great is the Great Firewall? Measuring China's DNS Censorship
https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.02167

China's Great Firewall is blocking around 311k domains, 41k by accident --The Record by Recorded Future
https://therecord.media/chinas-great-firewall-is-blocking-around-311k-domains-41k-by-accident/

Nguyen von Juan and colleagues at the University of Toronto have developed a system called 'GFWatch' that measures how the Great Firewall blocks domestic and foreign domains. From April to December 2020, we tested 411 million domains per day to see which domains the Great Firewall is blocking and whether they are still blocking.

As a result of the investigation, it was found that the Great Firewall continuously blocks about 311,000 domains such as Facebook, Dropbox, Twitter and so on. The most blocked website genre is 'business', followed by 'porn' and 'IT technology', including sites that distribute tools to circumvent the Great Firewall, personal blogs, and gambling sites. It was included.

In addition, it was confirmed that the website related to COVID-19 was blocked in real time due to the intensified pandemic of the new coronavirus infection (COVID-19) during the research. Some of the blocked sites posted content that blamed the pandemic. 'About 40% of blocked sites are newly registered domains, and Chinese authorities seem to block new domains by default until they are whitelisted,' Nguyen and colleagues said.

A study by Nguyen et al. Also found that about 41,000 domains were accidentally blocked. According to Nguyen et al., When a domain with the Great Firewall is blocked, it is also blocking another domain that contains the strings contained in that domain. For example, the Great Firewall is blocking the Reddit domain 'reddit.com' on overseas bulletin boards, but along with this, it is accidentally blocking the domain 'geareddit.com' of the online store 'Geareddit' unrelated to Reddit. It is said that. 1088 other domains containing 'reddit.com' are blocked.

'We hope this result will be communicated to Great Firewall administrators and improved filtering policies,' Nguyen and colleagues said.