The first attack based on the Javascript wasn't actually using Chinese IPs to do the attack. As otherwise it'd indeed be very easy to block by just blackholing Chinese traffic.

What it was actually doing was a massive MITM attack against non-SSLd HTTP connections from inbound connections to China, from Chinese users abroad visiting Chinese websites. It's an extremely clever trick that is only possible if you have the ability to mount mass MITM attacks on an entire country, but what it gives you is a massive ever shifting botnet.

The lesson I draw from this is that we need more SSL, we need it everywhere and we need it yesterday. I hope this stuff puts to rest the idea that some websites aren't worth being encrypted.

I agree in general, but in this specific case, Beijing can just demand access to Baidu's private keys and MITM all traffic passing through the GFWoC.

Chinese government already has a root CA in all browsers.

> Chinese government* already has a root CA in all* * browsers.

* For definitions of "Chinese government" that includes the Beijing non-profit China Internet Network Information Center, which isn't technically part of the government, but presumably is easily pressured.

* * For definitions of "all browsers" that excludes some minority browsers and those browsers run by users who have disabled the CNNIC root cert.

I have no doubt that the Chinese government has access to the CCNIC root certificate private key if it so chooses, but demanding the private key for an existing domain certificate would provide slightly less traceability and slightly more deniability.

That would be the death of Baidu among the Chinese diaspora.

Buh? Encryption is de-facto illegal in China. To the extent SSL is used, you can be sure that the government already has a copy of the master key. I've worked on Chinese deployed train systems, and we were banned from encrypting train control signals (signing was allowed, though), just in case someone might try to sneak in a political message in an ATO control telegram...

Not breaking encryption itself. Breaking encryption to serve malicious scripts.

So breaking encryption is accepted; serving malicious scripts is accepted (it's what happened in this attack), but breaking encryption to serve malicious scripts would be out of limits? That doesn't make much sense.

Serving malicious scripts is very bad, and may not actually be accepted. I know I would hesitate to use baidu analytics after this. But people might come around if they say something about SSL and wont happen again.

If the encryption is then broken and it is done again, then a) it will prove that China did it. Because you can see who signed the certificate. b) it will prove that technical countermeasures are not enough, since the problem is deeper than that.

Why is encrypting train control signals a good idea? What reasons were given for the ban?

> Why is encrypting train control signals a good idea?

Because someone might like to mess with train signals, and in the off chance that some weakness is found in the MAC/signature scheme you're using, forcing an attacker to guess at which messages they're manipulating and how will make their attack more difficult.

If you're working with a networked application, even if it's on a non-public network, you should be asking yourself "why not encrypt?" instead of "why encrypt?". This is doubly true of critical infrastructure that's expensive and slow to replace.

If that was what the Chinese government wanted they could simply block all access from China to github. In fact they did that once but had to undo that because the damage to the IT sector would be too big. China doesn't want github inaccessible, they want github to take down repos which the Chinese censor doesn’t like.

Hmm, maybe Github could block all access from China except for these two projects, serve a special home page with install instructions, and make it so that with either of these installed you can access all of Github from China?

They can't selectively block parts of github when it's going over HTTPS. All they see is an encrypted connection from inside China to github.com.

Hopefully never. IMO access to the internet is a basic human right, like clean water and immunization. I wouldn't choose to deny these things to citizens of any country.

What happens when providing those things to another country means denying them to your own country?