Attempts to censor QUIC traffic create chance to block access to offshore DNS resolvers

China’s attempts to censor traffic carried using Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) are imperfect and have left the country at risk of attacks that degrade its censorship apparatus, or even cut access to offshore DNS resolvers.

Those findings emerged last week in a paper written by researchers from University of Massachusetts Amherst, Stanford University, University of Colorado Boulder, and activist group Great Firewall Report. The paper, titled "Exposing and Circumventing SNI-based QUIC Censorship of the Great Firewall of China," is the subject of a presentation at next week’s USENIX Security Symposium.

QUIC is a transport layer network protocol that uses User Datagram Protocol (UDP) instead of Transport Control (TCP). Network boffins at Google invented the protocol and it later became a standard because it allows a client and server to exchange data with fewer round trips than are needed to establish a TCP link. Internet measurement wonks think ...