China's Great Firewall, or GFW, is often spoken about, but is rarely understood.

It is one of the most sophisticated and opaque censorship systems on the planet, and it shapes

how over a billion people interact with the global internet, influences the design of privacy

and proxy tools worldwide, and continues to evolve in ways that challenge researchers, developers,

and policymakers alike. Jackson SIP is a PhD researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder,

whose work focuses on uncovering how national scale censorship systems operate.

Jackson recently helped lead a groundbreaking study analyzing a previously undocumented

GFW technique that quietly broke fully encrypted proxy protocols across China for more than a year.

In this episode, Jackson joins Gregor Van to discuss how the Great Firewall works at a technical level.

The 2021-2013 blocking event, the pop-count-based

detection algorithm his team reverse engineered, the cat and mouse ecosystem of censorship

circumvention, and what these findings mean for the future of the open internet.

Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity,

cyber insurance, and general software engineering companies.

He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at van.hk or on LinkedIn.

Music or on LinkedIn.HK or on LinkedIn.

Hello and welcome to Software Engineering Daily.

My guest today is Jackson Sip.

Hey, happy to be here. Yeah, so we're going to be getting into a pretty

interesting topic with Jackson today around what is called the GFW, so the great firewall.

We'll get into what even that is, but also Jackson's done a lot of research into how it operates

and actually sort of how it operates through the years because it's

...