Internet Censorship in China: Where Does the Filtering Occur?

China filters Internet traffic in and out of the country. In order to circumvent the firewall, it is helpful to know where the filtering occurs. In this work, we explore the AS-level topology of China’s network, and probe the firewall to find the locations of filtering devices. We find that even though most filtering occurs in border ASes, choke points also exist in many provincial networks. The result suggests that two major ISPs in China have different approaches placing filtering devices.