Chinese Green Dam Porn Blocker May Be Security Risk
by Alan Harten
New parental software called the Green Dam Youth Escort is raising concern from net privacy activists and security watchers, as they believe the remote code access can be used to create a botnet that can use the PCs to target government computers.
According to the Chinese authorities, the chip, which will be installed on all PCs that are shipped to China, starting 1 July 2009, is bundled as an application that will block ‘harmful content’, such as political content deemed harmful, porn, and other materials that are sorted aside by ISP level filters.
The main concern is that the application may have a software vulnerability that can be harmfully used.
Research fellow, Isaac Mao, from Harvard University’s Berman Center for Internet and Society, has found that there is no encryption between the developing company behind the system, Jinhui Computer System Engineering, and the client PC which leaves the system open for attacks.
He pointed out that this could also be considered a form of spyware from the Government after a study of the coding.
Chinese blogger, Shi Zhao, has also stated that the program works by blocking certain keywords from being displayed.
Among the banned keywords are many related to political content, such as references to the Tiananmen Square massacre.
According to Zhao, political content is blocked at a much higher level then porn, but the founder of the program, Bryan Zhang, a developer from Jinui, denies the suspicion, claiming that he knows what was blocked out and that the statement is not true.
Other problems that the Green Dam Youth Escort bring along with the implementation is that it may require high maintenance, may require a large degree of internet resources, and can accidentally block school course material.
Costs are estimated to range up to 41m in just the first year, but it may not be around for a year, as test versions showed that the program is only compatible on the IE and Google Chrome browsers.
It will not work with Mac, Linux, or Firefox according to a report summary by Global Voices.
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Alan, your story is way off base. There’s no chip. Not even the filtering software in question is required.
How can there be censorship when end users aren’t even required to install or run this software?
“preinstall” in Chinese means “bundle”. The PC makers were asked to bundle the software with new computers, while end users were never reuqired to install or run Green Dam.
Take this 6/12 ZDNet article citing WSJ:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=19688
As to what Green Dam will filter, it is configuable by the user. And it’s only a content filter, not a replacement for conventional safeguards (AV, firewall). How can this be twisted into censorship or cyber terrorism is beyond me – perhaps anti-sinoism?