Rust NYC: Reversing the Great Firewall and Geospatial Rust

Join us on Thursday, May 7th at Nominal for a Rust NYC meetup featuring two talks about engineering at Internet scale. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. so attendees have time to grab pizza and socialize, and talks begin at 7:15 p.m.

Our first talk, “Reverse Engineering China’s Great Firewall,” will be given by Jackson Sippe, a PhD candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder whose research focuses on privacy, network security, and censorship circumvention. Jackson is best known for his work on China’s Great Firewall, including the discovery of a memory disclosure vulnerability dubbed Wallbleed and the reverse engineering of several censorship techniques used by the firewall.

China’s Great Firewall is one of the largest and most sophisticated censorship systems ever deployed, but what does it actually do on the wire? Jackson will walk through several years of measurement and reverse engineering work on the GFW, including discoveries about how it blocks fully encrypted traffic, how it adapted to disrupt QUIC, and how vulnerabilities in its infrastructure exposed surprising weaknesses. More broadly, this is a talk about the engineering tradeoffs behind censorship at Internet scale: what it takes to inspect and interfere with live traffic, where those systems are effective, and where their complexity creates consequences for users far beyond China.

Our second talk, “Geospatial Rust: How to Go Places… and Get There Fast Without Crashing,” will be given by Yuri Astrakhan, Principal Engineer at Rivian. Yuri will give a practical introduction to mapping and explain how Rust and related technologies are changing the geospatial ecosystem.

The talk will cover open source tools and libraries related to mapping, where Rust is being adopted, how different projects compete and cooperate, and the story of MapLibre—including where Rust fits into its future. Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of the modern geospatial stack, why performance and reliability matter so much in mapping, and where Rust is starting to make a real impact.

Together, these talks explore two very different but deeply technical domains: censorship infrastructure and geospatial systems. Both involve complex networks, performance-sensitive software, open protocols, and hard reliability constraints. Whether you are interested in Rust, networking, security, mapping, reverse engineering, or large-scale systems design, this meetup should offer a rare and practical look at how real-world infrastructure behaves under pressure.

Speakers:

Jackson Sippe is a PhD candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he conducts empirical research on privacy, network security, and censorship circumvention. He is best known for his work on China’s Great Firewall, including the discovery of the Wallbleed memory disclosure vulnerability and the reverse engineering of several censorship techniques used by the firewall. More at sipperior.com.

Yuri Astrakhan is a Principal Engineer at Rivian and a long-time contributor to open source mapping technology. His work spans geospatial systems, open map infrastructure, and the evolution of MapLibre and related tools.

Lawrence Harvey is Rust NYC's official recruitment partner, with Ross providing support as a co-organizer and financial support.

The space is generously sponsored by Nominal.