Understanding the "Airport" Censorship Circumvention Ecosystem in China

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 16 Jun 2026] Understanding the "Airport" Censorship Circumvention Ecosystem in China Rumaisa Habib, Mingshi Wu, Shiva Shahandeh, Min Ni, Eric Wustrow, Zakir Durumeric In China, a burgeoning underground market sells citizens subscription-based censorship circumvention proxies known as ''airports''. We present the first systematic study of this ecosystem, combining user surveys, social media analysis, and active network measurements. We find that airports are by far the most popular off-the-shelf censorship circumvention tool in China, used by over half of our 1,667~survey respondents, who cite their ease of use, performance, and access to geo-restricted services like ChatGPT and Netflix. By scanning the Internet and scraping Telegram announcement channels, we identify 3,431 active airports built on a handful of open-source toolkits. We subscribe to 35 airports and characterize their performance, which often surpasses direct connections through the Great Firewall due to a distinctive multi-hop architecture. However, airports also pose new challenges and security risks: they accept payment through commercial services like Alipay, suffer frequent government takedowns, and are difficult for clients to configure optimally. Many airports also deploy their own distinct censorship policies. Airports are far more widely used than other circumvention tools from the academic literature, but introduce new forms of fragility and control, offering both lessons and opportunities for future circumvention research. Comments: The first two authors contributed equally Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) ACM classes: K.5.2 Cite as: arXiv:2606.18427 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.18427v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.18427 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Rumaisa Habib [view email] [v1] Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:22:14 UTC (1,251 KB) Access Paper: view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.CY cs.NI References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)