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Computer experts from the University of Cambridge say they've figured out a way around the so-called Great Firewall of China.
Zdnet reports that as well as breaching the firewall, a research group from the University has managed to use the firewall to launch DOS (denial of service) attacks against IP addresses in China.
China's firewall, which uses keywords to block content, is considered an extremely heavy-handed form of censorship by the country's 162 million internet users. It has the world's second largest online population.
The Cambridge experts, told a Privacy Enhancing Technologies (pet.org) conference that it fired data packets containing the text 'falun' to Chinese addresses.
It is a reference to the banned Falun Gong religious group.
They found it was possible to circumvent the Chinese intrusion detection systems by ignoring the forced transmission control protocol resets injected by its Cisco routers, said the website article.
This would normally force both endpoints to kill the connection.
Ignoring the resets was reasonably simple to do, the researchers told Zdnet, and opened up possible ways of conducting DOS attacks.
- NZ HERALD STAFF
