Investigating the Ecosystem of Private Circuit for Censorship Circumvention

Private Circuit has been a traditional telecommunication service that can be legally purchased and used by multinational enterprises to enable private and guaranteed connections across dispersed locations. IPLC (International Private Lease Circuit) and IEPL (International Ethernet Private Line) are two common types of Private Circuit services. IPLC and IEPL are functionally similar, providing multinational enterprise customers with private, point-to-point/point-to-multipoint data lines that can offer bandwidth guarantee and Ethernet-like access capabilities.

As the traffic of Private Circuit services intrinsically bypasses censorship systems such as the Great Firewall of China (GFW), it has been increasingly used by individuals who would like to access the content prohibited by censorship policies. Unlike other popular relay-based solutions that primarily achieve traffic obfuscation to deceive censors (e.g., through Shadowsocks or Trojan), Private Circuit leverages dedicated transmission networks where no censor devices are deployed to examine traffic. In this project, we conduct a systematic study to understand the ecosystem of IPLC/IEPL-based censorship circumvention.

Detailed study will be released later ...