China
On June 9, join the Citizen Lab’s Emile Dirks to discuss China’s influence, interference, and repression in Canada.
Our investigation of a spearphishing campaign that targeted senior members of the World Uyghur Congress in March 2025 reveals a highly-customized attack delivery method. The ruse used by attackers replicates a pattern in which threat actors weaponize software and websites aimed at preserving and supporting marginalized and repressed cultures to target those same communities.
China’s DeepSeek AI chatbot has raised serious privacy concerns. Speaking with Kevin Collier at NBC News, The Citizen Lab’s director, Ron Deibert, remarks that the privacy problems regarding DeepSeek are not limited to Chinese platforms, and that personal information is also used by U.S. artificial intelligence platforms. Read the article here.
Our network security analysis of the popular social media app, RedNote, revealed a number of issues with both the Android and iOS versions of the app.
In March 2024, Emile Dirks, research associate at The Citizen Lab, along with Ausma Bernot (Griffith University), and Yves Moreau (University of Leuven) prepared a written submission in response to the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights call for input on the application of digital technologies in the administration of justice.
Meryem and her family left the Xinjiang region in China for Turkey in the early 1990s, before settling in North America. As a human rights defender, Meryem has experienced various digital threats in response to her activism. She is frequently attacked by what she believes to be Chinese state-backed trolls on X, Facebook, and in the comment section on public Zoom meetings.
Since 2014, the Chinese government has escalated its repression against Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region in northwestern China. The entire region has been subjected to a comprehensive system of mass surveillance, mobility controls, arbitrary detention, forced labor, and forced sterilizations. China’s efforts extend also across borders as its authorities engage in a widespread campaign of transnational repression that targets individuals both on the basis of their ethnic identity and their activities.
Drawing on the lived experiences of 85 women human rights defenders originating from 24 countries of origin and residing in 23 host countries, we examine how gender and sexuality play a central role in digital transnational repression.
This report performs the first public analysis of MMTLS, the main network protocol used by WeChat, an app with over one billion users. The report finds that MMTLS is a modified version of TLS, however some of the modifications have introduced cryptographic weaknesses.
Research FAQ for the full report “Should We Chat, Too? Security Analysis of WeChat’s MMTLS Encryption Protocol”
