Subverting national internet censorship-an investigation into existing tools and techniques

The announcement of a trial of a National level internet filter in Australia has caused renewed interest in the arena of internet censorship. Whilst details on the schemes being tested have been fairly sparse the announcement of the trial itself, has drawn wide condemnation from privacy advocates throughout the world. Given this announcement it was decided to test and compare three of the most popular free tools available that allow for the bypassing of internet censorship devices such as those used within China. Tests were conducted using three software packages, Freegate, GPass and GTunnel which were analysed through packet capture to determine their likely effectiveness against the speculated methods to be employed by the Australian trials. The tests clearly showed that all three applications provide an easy means of subverting any likely filtering method with GPass and GTunnel the more suitable candidates as Freegate still allowed for plain-text DNS requests