Researchers have confirmed what many people suspected: the Internet filtering system which the Chinese government has ordered installed on all new computers is censoring political material as well as pornography.

Three members of the University of Michigan’s computer science and engineering department have discovered the system blocks sites containing references to Falun Gong, a spiritual group banned by the Chinese government over fears it could increase political opposition.

Meanwhile a Chinese blogger reports that the word list which triggers such blocks includes “6-4 massacre” (the date of the 1989 Tiananmen Square killings) and “the celebration of Tibetan people.” He also notes that the list contains far more politically-related phrases than terms related to adult content.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, the head of the firm which created the software maintained it was solely for dealing with pornography but refused to share details of the separate blacklist of banned Web sites used by the system. He argued that doing so would act as promotion for the sites.

The Michigan researchers also confirmed reports that the system has major security flaws. Both the filtering itself and the process of updating the list of banned Web sites use a fixed length buffer (the section of memory allocated to the particular task).

That’s considered a basic security error as, to simplify the process for the sake of explanation, hackers may be create a chunk of data which exceeds the buffer space, thus gaining access to other parts of the memory and potentially taking control of the operating system itself.

Of course, it may not simply be hackers who take advantage of this. The researchers noted,“This could allow Green Dam’s makers to take control of any computer where the software is installed and automatic filter updates are enabled.”

The researchers also found that even after uninstalling the software, some logfiles remain on the computer, leaving some record of the user’s activity.

Related:

Entry was posted on Friday, June 12th, 2009 at 4:24 pm under Politics, Security.

Read more entries by John Lister.
Stumble It!