Analysis of 5.1 billion Wallbleed responses revealed that the leaked memory
contains fragments of live network traffic processed by the injection device:
IP/TCP/UDP/HTTP headers and payloads (including plaintext traffic not related to
DNS), x86_64 Linux stack frames with ASLR-consistent pointer patterns, and what
appear to be glibc stack canaries. The 166 million UPnP/SSDP snippets in leaked
memory suggest the GFW device shares a memory pool with traffic from private
RFC 1918 addresses, hinting at internal management-plane traffic co-located with
the censorship infrastructure. A side channel — the fixed cyclic ordering of false
IP addresses across injection processes — distinguishes individual GFW injector
processes from each other.
From 2025-fan-wallbleed — Wallbleed: A Memory Disclosure Vulnerability in the Great Firewall of China
· §4–§5
· 2025
· NDSS
Implications
GFW DNS injectors process both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic in the same address space; IPv6-only transports do not escape the DNS injection subsystem.
The side channel (fixed IP rotation order per process) enables external measurement of injector fleet size and load balancing — useful for longitudinal censorship monitoring even after Wallbleed itself is patched.