UMass Amherst Students Take First Place at Jump The Wall with Anti-Censorship Tool
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A team of University of Massachusetts Amherst students took first place for best anti-censorship tool at Jump The Wall (JTW), an invitation-only hackathon held Jan. 23–25, 2026, in Washington, DC
JTW brings together security professionals, hackers, and regional linguists to confront internet censorship and digital authoritarianism. Named after Chinese slang for circumventing the Great Firewall, the event challenges multidisciplinary teams to build tools that counter internet censorship in just 24 hours.
The winning team included PhD students Jade Sheffey and Ali Zohaib, and undergraduate computer science students Willow Taylor and Joyce Werhane. The group represented the Secure, Private Internet (SPIN) research group, led by Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences professor Amir Houmansadr.
Together, they developed DAWN, short for DNS Anti-censorship WebAssembly Nexus, a new framework designed to evade DNS-based internet censorship.
DAWN acts as a proxy that intercepts DNS queries and transforms them using portable, sandboxed WebAssembly plugins to bypass censorship infrastructure. Its design allows users to create and share new bypass techniques by implementing a single function that transforms a DNS packet. Plugins can be written in Rust, C, Go, and other languages that compile to WebAssembly.
In testing against China’s Great Firewall, a single 4 KB plugin reduced DNS censorship from 95.39% to 0.04% of tested domains, cutting the number of blocked domains from nearly 8,000 to just three.
The team’s long-term goal is to democratize censorship evasion by making it easier to develop, distribute, and deploy new bypass techniques. In doing so, DAWN could help researchers and activists around the world respond more quickly to evolving censorship systems.