China has long orchestrated its Internet censorship through relatively centralized policies and a unified imple-mentation, known as the Great Firewall of China (GFW). However, since August 2023, anecdotes suggest that the Henan Province has deployed its own regional censorship. In this work, we characterize provincial-level censorship in Henan, and compare it with the national-level GFW. We find that Henan has established TLS SNI-based and HTTP Host-based censorship that inspects and blocks traffic leaving the province. While the Henan Firewall is less sophisticated and less robust against typical network variability, its volatile and aggressive blocking of second-level domains made it block ten times more web sites than the GFW at some points in time. Based on the observed parsing flaws and injection behaviors, we introduce simple client-side methods to bypass censorship in the Henan province. Our work documents an alarming sign of regional censorship emerging in China.

The iCloud Private Relay (PR) is a new feature introduced by Apple in June 2021 that aims to enhance online privacy by protecting a subset of web traffic from both local eavesdroppers and websites that use IP-based tracking. The service is integrated into Apple’s latest operating systems and uses a two-hop architecture where a user’s web traffic is relayed through two proxies run by disjoint entities.