FINDING · DEPLOYMENT
Brussee measures a systematic pattern of Chinese government websites actively blocking access from outside China (the "reverse Great Firewall"), publishing a CSV dataset of affected domains (available at zenodo.org/records/18172145). The paper frames this outbound geo-blocking as a cybersecurity-motivated practice — Chinese authorities classify foreign access to domestic government infrastructure as an attack surface — distinct from the inbound information control goal of the GFW.
From 2026-brussee-reverse-great-firewall — Conceptualizing the reverse great firewall: cybersecurity and the logics of government geo-blocking in China · §3, §5 · 2026 · Journal of Cybersecurity
Implications
- Circumvention infrastructure hosted on foreign ASNs may be blocked from accessing CN government endpoints (e.g., for connectivity testing or captive-portal detection); keep test endpoints out of CN-blocked foreign ASN ranges.
- The reverse GFW's IP/ASN-based approach differs from DPI-based inbound blocking — any circumvention proxy IP that appears in a foreign datacenter ASN may be treated as a hostile source by CN-side hosts, affecting probe and active-connectivity-test infrastructure.
Tags
Extracted by claude-sonnet-4-6 — review before relying.