https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/chinas-great-firewall-springs-huge-leak
Chinese censorship sprang a major leak on September 11, when researchers confirmed that more than 500GB of internal documents, source code, work logs, and internal communications from the so-called Great Firewall were dumped online, including packaging repos and operational runbooks used to build and maintain China’s national traffic filtering system.
The files appear to originate from Geedge Networks, a company that has long been linked to Fang Binxing — widely described as the “father” of the Great Firewall — and from the MESA lab at the Institute of Information Engineering, a research arm of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Contained in the leak are what appear to be full build systems for deep packet inspection platforms, as well as code modules that reference the identification and throttling of specific circumvention tools. Much of the stack is geared toward DPI-based VPN detection, SSL fingerprinting, and full-session logging.
Researchers at the Great Firewall Report, who first verified and indexed the material, say the documents outline the internal architecture of a commercial platform called ‘Tiangou’, which is designed for use by ISPs and border gateways. They describe it as a turnkey “Great Firewall in a box,” with initial deployments reportedly built on HP and Dell servers before shifting to Chinese-sourced hardware in response to sanctions.