Anti-censorship technology uses online video games to bypass Chinese internet restrictions

New technology developed by US researchers can transmit messages through popular multiplayer online games, making it very difficult for censors to detect and block.

"People who were using [anonymising tools] were fairly easily detected by censors and blocked," said Rishab Nithyanand, a researcher at Stony Brook University and one of the developers of The Castle.

The Castle uses video games as a "benign transport", transmitting and receiving data through the game itself in a manner that will just look like normal gameplay from the outside.

"You will construct a request for the webpage you want to get, encode it as a series of game moves and put it through the game," said Rob Johnson, another researcher.

A client outside of the firewalled region can then decode the request and transmit the desired information back via the same method.

"We can basically transmit any kind of information through the video game," said Nithyanad.