Beginner's guide to overcoming Internet censorship
If your government has suddenly started censoring your Internet access, here are some methods you can try. The method you use to overcome Internet censorship depends on the method your government is using to block you. This page starts with the most primitive blocking methods and moves on to the most sophisticated.
1. First, the oldest and simplest methods censors use to prevent access to certain web sites. These simple methods would only be used by a government new to censorship or not possessing a sophisticated firewall. They are quite easy to overcome.
Table 1
Blocking method |
Solution |
|---|---|
DNS poisoning |
Use an international DNS service, e.g. |
Blocking pages containing certain keywords | Use the HTTPS version of web sites, so that the contents of the pages you view are not visible to censors |
2. The next level up is still quite easy to overcome.
Table 2
Blocking method |
Solution |
|---|---|
Blocking particular domains, pages within domains, or IP addresses of particular domains' servers |
Use a VPN such as OpenVPN or WireGuard, or a commercial service that offers these protocols. Watch out for "free" VPNs. You have to ask yourself how they can afford to make the service free. Are they selling your browsing habits to data brokers? Are they a covert intelligence-gathering operation of the CCP? Is there malware included in their client app? A couple of respectable VPNs do have very limited free tiers. These are:
If the consumer VPN protocols of OpenVPN or WireGuard are blocked, you may have success with enterprise VPN protocols such as IPsec, OpenConnect (equivalent to Cisco AnyConnect), or Microsoft SSTP. |
3. At the next level of censorship sophistication, you also need to become more sophisticated.
Table 3
Blocking method | Solution |
|---|---|
The government has become aware that people are using VPNs, and starts to block VPNs by protocol and/or domain name and/or IP address |
You need to use a method explicitly designed to overcome censorship. There are some respectable free methods. In some cases the overseas servers are provided by volunteers. In other cases the service receives funding from pro-democracy individuals or bodies such as the U.S. State Department.
There are also some paid VPN services that have in the past worked well to overcome censorship in certain countries. You will need to do your own due diligence as to whether these still work today in the country in which you intend to use them.
There are also smaller, local services specializing in overcoming a particular country's Internet censorship. In Chinese Internet slang these are called "airports." |
4. Now for the most sophisticated level of deep packet inspection (DPI). All the obvious services are throttled or blocked. Therefore you determine that you will have to go with a self-hosted solution.
Table 4
Blocking method | Solution |
|---|---|
Sophisticated and rapidly evolving blocking of all the easy-to-use options |
You need to use a complex, self-hosted solution that may require technical expertise to set up and operate. Here are some examples:
There is a longer list of anti-censorship software at https://github.com/danoctavian/awesome-anti-censorship. |