2023-xue-use
findings extracted from this paper
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After blocking all *.google.com subdomains on September 22, 2022, China's censor lifted the block specifically for FCM endpoints on October 1 while leaving other Google services (Docs, Groups, Sites) blocked through at least February 2023. This selective whitelist exception — made after only days of blocking — indicates the censor judged the collateral damage to apps relying on FCM to be unacceptable.
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Over 7 months of Hyperquack measurements across 5,555,298 probes targeting 1,632 unique ASes, only a small number of ASes actively interfered with HTTPS connections to FCM endpoints. The majority of blocking incidents occurred in China during September 22–30, 2022, coinciding with the Party's National Congress, when nearly all measurements failed with TCP reset.
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PushProxy's high-frequency downstream channel generates over 100 push notifications to load a typical webpage, contrasting sharply with the daily average of 46 push notifications received by a smartphone. This statistical anomaly makes PushProxy flows identifiable by simple rule-based filters without requiring sophisticated traffic analysis.
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PushProxy with N=100 parallel push receivers achieves a median 10 MB download time of 16.46s (~4.86 Mbps) without exceeding FCM's 5,000 messages/hour per-deviceToken rate limit, compared to 2.70s for Shadowsocks and 9.68s for OpenVPN (UDP). This throughput significantly exceeds other service-tunneling systems: dnstt (1.5 Mbps) and CensorSpoofer (64 Kbps).
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PushProxy decouples upstream (XOR-obfuscated UDP) from downstream (FCM push notifications), implementing triangular routing that prevents per-flow traffic analysis: a network adversary with limited visibility cannot correlate upload and download flows since they use different transport protocols and paths. Median TTFB was 572ms versus 492ms (Shadowsocks) and 508ms (OpenVPN), while performance remained stable during Chinese peak hours (20:00–02:00 GMT+8) when Shadowsocks download times increased from 3s to over 100s.