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The Secure, Private Internet (SPIN) Research Group, part of the UMass Amherst Cybersecurity Institute and led by Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences Professor Amir Houmansadr, has recently earned widespread recognition for work on censorship resistance and internet freedom.

SPIN researchers received the 2025 Best Practical Paper Award from the Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI) Community for their paper “Wallbleed: A Memory Disclosure Vulnerability in the Great Firewall of China.” The award recognizes a single paper each year on internet censorship, across all cybersecurity conferences, that demonstrates the most significant real-world impact in advancing internet freedom.

“Wallbleed” reveals a previously unknown weakness in the Great Firewall of China, the massive nationwide system used to monitor and block online communications. The researchers discovered that the firewall inadvertently leaks small fragments of its internal memory when processing certain types of internet traffic.

“Exposing and Circumventing SNI-based QUIC Censorship of the Great Firewall of China,” a paper from the SPIN research group led by CICS graduate student Ali Zohaib, received an honorable mention for Best Paper at the 2025 USENIX Security Symposium. The paper examines how censors exploit Server Name Indication (SNI) data within the QUIC protocol to block encrypted traffic. Although QUIC is a modern internet protocol designed to make connections faster and more secure, it still reveals small pieces of metadata, such as the domain name a user is visiting, making it a target for censorship systems like the Great Firewall of China.

Finally, work led by a pseudonymous SPIN graduate student was recognized as a runner-up for the 2025 Caspar Bowden Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET) Award, one of the most prestigious honors in the privacy research community.

The 2023 paper, titled “How the Great Firewall of China Detects and Blocks Fully Encrypted Traffic,” has earned multiple accolades to date, including the 2024 Applied Networking Research Prize, first place at CSAW 2023’s Applied Research Competition, and the FOCI 2023 Best Practical Paper Award. By uncovering how the Great Firewall identifies and obstructs fully encrypted communications, the study has helped shape ongoing technical and policy discussions surrounding online privacy and digital freedom.

“I’m proud of our SPIN graduate students whose leadership and dedication are shaping the future of internet freedom,” Houmansadr says.

More information about this research and these papers – as well as the awards they have garnered – can be found on the CICS website.