How do governments censor only parts of Wikipedia when the site is encrypted? How do they know which pages you are browsing if they can't see the URL?
Since the rest of the request, including the URL is hidden, governments and other malicious agents between you and the server cannot actually see what pages you're requesting directly. They can only see that you are accessing wikipedia.org and transmitting some data. You may still be somewhat vulnerable to timing attacks to try to identify what pages you're viewing, but censorship can't happen at the page level over HTTPS; you have to block the whole thing in one go.
Although countries like China, Thailand and Uzbekistan were still censoring part or all of Wikipedia by the time the researchers wrapped up their study
The top comment might be asking about the "were still censoring part" of the article.
I know that certain companies (like Google and Microsoft) will actively censor themselves to continue to operate within China, but I figured Wikipedia would be against that practice on principal. Now I'm curious as to how it's done.
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-chin...
If your internet traffic is going to flow through infrastructure that a curious government owns, then you'll know that they're monitoring the traffic but there is no way to keep them from seeing what you're doing.
That is, assuming you don't click away your browser's security warning.
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/8145/does-https...
Or in other words it is vulnerable.
China can (and probably does) issue a certificate that all Chinese browsers must install, they can then do MITM https using their certificate to sign the new versions.
Companies do this routinely BTW. Since it's their equipment, it's considered just fine. (But be aware of it if you are using a company computer.)
I've never seen or heard of this (at least across all browsers), so I find this unlikely.
"On Friday, March 20th, we became aware of unauthorized digital certificates for several Google domains. The certificates were issued by an intermediate certificate authority apparently held by a company called MCS Holdings. This intermediate certificate was issued by CNNIC."
Although there have been lots of concerns about CNNIC, I don't believe that the Chinese government currently either (1) routinely uses CNNIC to perform MITMs for censorship or mass surveillance purposes, or (2) purports to require UAs to trust CNNIC or another Chinese root in order to be used by Chinese users. I'm happy to be corrected if someone knows otherwise.
What's more dangerous, and much more likely, is that they might use forged certificates against specific individuals for a short period of time, for example, to intercept login credentials. The attack will go unnoticed as long as they also block the corresponding HPKP reporting URL (if the targeted site uses HPKP at all).
Hopefully the risk for the attacker from the two kinds of attack are gradually converging, due to pinning and especially Certificate Transparency.
Lots of people travel in and out of China with all sorts of computing devices. China does care about the reputation of their root and of their highly profitable electronic exports.
https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2014/oct/china-collecting-appl...
Given the recent Shadow Brokers release of the NSA tools, it seems to me that this was not only possible, but probable (not necessarily with Wikipedia, but any website).
Cert Pinning or HPKP is one type of solution, but it's tricky to get right especially for a large site like wikipedia.
"In Turkey, Wikipedia articles about female genitals have been banned; Russia has censored articles about weed; in the UK, articles about German metal bands have been blocked..."