IPFS and Kubo have been blocked by China GFW

Help
1

Please investigate the GFW source code leak and improve IPFS/Kubo to circumvent the blockade.

Geedge & MESA Leak: Analyzing the Great Firewall’s Largest Document Leak

The Great Firewall of China (GFW) experienced the largest leak of internal documents in its history on Thursday September 11, 2025. Over 500 GB of source code, work logs, and internal communication

4

Thanks for bringing this up. Here’s what we understand about the current situation:

What is blocked:

  • The ipfs.io domain of the most popular public gateway
  • Default bootstrap node addresses (since at least 2019, see kubo#5993)
  • GFW can detect and block IPFS traffic patterns in some cases
  • Some regions (e.g. Shanghai) report wholesale P2P blocking except for enterprise-whitelisted traffic

What still works (?):

My understanding of GWF may be outdated, but last time I looked into it:

  • Some VPNs
  • P2P connectivity itself largely functions. Academic research from 2023 found that “the GFW has little measurable impact on P2P functionality” and that NAT is actually the main impediment.
  • QUIC transport has an advantage over TCP. GFW detection is primarily TCP-focused, and P2P QUIC connections use IP addresses directly (no SNI/hostname to censor).
  • Many public community-hosted HTTP gateways remain accessible, including Tor Onion Services (volunteer-run, useful as last resort when running your own node is not possible or not safe).
  • Kubo releases can be fetched from any working gateway (incl. Tor ones) via DNSLink (resolved by gateway, so not impacted by DNS censorship in China): https://<gateway>/ipns/dist.ipfs.tech/kubo/

Workarounds:

  • Make sure you have QUIC transport enabled
  • Bootstrap nodes are only needed for initial peer discovery. Once connected, Kubo remembers peers.
  • You can discover peer addresses by other means, for example by querying a delegated routing endpoint(s) for providers of popular content (example) (e.g. over Tor).

Regarding the Geedge/MESA leak:

The leak is real and significant, but published analyses focus on VPN blocking and application-layer censorship - no mentions of IPFS/libp2p so far. The technical details about how GFW detects encrypted traffic were already documented in academic research from 2023, so the leak doesn’t appear to reveal new information relevant to IPFS. If this is not true, and you find specific references in the leaked documents, please share.