Security vulnerabilities found in China's nationwide installed filter software | Hacker News Reader

Security vulnerabilities found in China's nationwide installed filter software

cse.umich.edu

17 pointsliuliu11 comments

James Fallows argued pretty persuasively that these sorts of things aren't actually relevant to the Chinese government's ability to accomplish effective censorship in his article about the Great Firewall: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/chinese-firewall

What the government cares about is making the quest for information just enough of a nuisance that people generally won’t bother. Most Chinese people, like most Americans, are interested mainly in their own country. All around them is more information about China and things Chinese than they could possibly take in. The newsstands are bulging with papers and countless glossy magazines. The bookstores are big, well stocked, and full of patrons, and so are the public libraries. Video stores, with pirated versions of anything. Lots of TV channels. And of course the Internet, where sites in Chinese and about China constantly proliferate. When this much is available inside the Great Firewall, why go to the expense and bother, or incur the possible risk, of trying to look outside?

The same points arguably hold for the Green Dam.

Edit: I guess I missed the point of the advisory (see comment below). I assumed they were discussing methods of circumventing the system, but after a second (more careful) reading, that's obviously not the biggest concern.

It's really a crappy situation: mandated software that's this broken. Either join a botnet or potentially raise the government's suspicions by uninstalling the software.

The point is that the censorship software is mandated in every sold PC in China. If it is so vulnerable and user's machine so eaisly to be taken control of, considering China's population, thounds and thounds PCs may be turned into hacking proxies.

The legal consequences of this (in China) are frightening. Imagine a malicious site that uses this vulnerability to download child porn onto the target computer, and then reports the user to The Authorities. Many lives could easily be ruined, as I imagine China does not provide many rights for the accused. (This will probably get you into trouble in the US, too, which is why I make sure all my filesystems are encrypted.)

China has a court system and there are rights for the accused. Now, if your up against someone that has lots of power, its well understood the legal process can be bought to a certain extent. That said, there are quite a few cases in China where the "little guy" prevails in the courts.

The real issue is simply that this new system is not safe for many reasons, without regard to the situation suggested by the parent post.

This will probably get you into trouble in the US, too, which is why I make sure all my filesystems are encrypted.

That's exactly what happened to this guy and he got off: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9970660-7.html

I don't doubt that there's a sizable chance of getting convicted anyway, but I really hope it's not "probable".

The encryption ensures that you avoid charges in the first place.

My imagined dialogue: "We're here to seize your hard drive to see if you are doing anything illegal." "OK." "Damn, it's encrypted, tell us your password." "I refuse to testify against myself." "Uh, you have to." "I forgot the password." "Fuck."

The fishing expedition then ends fairly quickly. (If you really are distributing child porn, though, they will probably get you some other way. This is exactly how the system should work.)

(You might want to have a "honeypot" that can be activated with a certain password so that you don't even have to claim you forgot the password. This could be helpful for avoiding "contempt of court". IMHO, this should not be necessary, but I Am Not The Supreme Court.)

Or you could create a hidden volume inside of a hidden volume. Supposedly Truecrypt's data looks random, so if you are forced to decrypt one volume, they wouldn't be able to prove there was another volume. http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=plausible-deniability

Slightly off topic, but I'm curious: what sort of encryption set-up/software do you use? Does it affect access times in any noticeable way?

I use LUKS, and it doesn't appear to affect performance much. During heavy disk activity, the crypto threads do use some CPU, but it is not noticeably slow, even on my eeepc.

This poses some pretty interesting questions.

1. Is it mandatory to install such filter software on Linux boxes also? 2. How do they handle the case where the filter software is chroot'ed in a jail, so that the individual is complying with the letter of the law by installing and running the software, but managing to avoid the ill-effects?

I'm not speaking about censorship etc., just plain curious.

Will be fascinating on how China's government responds to this. With any luck these findings will postpone this terrible idea... Or at least get some competent(security focused) people writing this application.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com