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I am currently moving a website to HTTPS. That website is used from all over the world, including China.

Tools like observatory.mozilla.org only give a site a good rating, if it enforces HTTPS usage.

Mainly I would like to know if this can be a problem in China. Someone even told me, you cannot use HTTPS in China. Is that true?

Marcus
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1 Answers1

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As you know China's notorious firewall has blocked thousands of websites in the mainland of China which include the likes of Yahoo, YouTube and even Google but generally the likes of the blocks are because these sites fail to comply with their internet censorship program.

Understanding China's Censorship Policies

To understand what sites China blocks, or may block in the future I recommend that you read how China allows government criticism but silences collective expression. China doesn't block encryption it blocks:

SOURCE

  1. IP Blocking
  2. DNS hijacking
  3. Keyword content inspection/filtering

China's firewall is far from perfect and they will only be able fully understand packets of data that are not encrypted, they do not currently blocked HTTPS SSL encrypted connections unless they have blocked the website by IP, or by DNS hijacking.

Online China Website Firewall Checkers

There are many online checkers that will physically test a website as a real visitor from someone behind the Great Firewall of China.

Using my own SSL enabled website you can see I get status 200 OK:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 06 Nov 2016 17:52:36 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.18 (Ubuntu)
X-Pingback: https://www.bybe.net/xmlrpc.php
Link: <https://www.bybe.net/wp-json/>
Link: <https://www.bybe.net/>
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html
Simon Hayter
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