VMess (V2Ray)

Internal MESA Lab reading notes dissect the USENIX 2024 paper on fingerprinting obfuscated proxies via encapsulated TLS handshakes, highlighting its protocol-agnostic packet-size-3-gram-plus-Mahalanobis-distance-over-bursts classifier, which the paper's own mid-size-ISP deployment reliably fingerprinted across shadowsocks, vmess, trojan, and vless-family configurations at false-positive rates the notes explicitly say the annotator estimates the GFW would find operationally acceptable (<0.6%). The notes flag the technique's main gaps as: no public source code, sharply reduced true-positive rate under connection multiplexing (10-30% vs. 60-80% unmultiplexed), and no evaluation against UDP/QUIC.

A June 2024 MESA Lab internal survey ("针对审查系统的科学研究及探测技术调研报告") explicitly states its purpose is to catalog academic/public censorship-measurement and circumvention research (OONI, Augur, Satellite, GFWatch, Citizen Lab, CensorBib, FOCI/IMC/NDSS/CCS/USENIX Security papers) in order to find and patch GFW/censorship-system vulnerabilities before outside researchers exploit them. It systematically covers circumvention protocols/tools (Shadowsocks, VMess, Trojan, decoy routing, Parrot-style mimicry, CovertCast, Slitheen++, ESNI/ECH, uTLS) and notes GFW blocked ESNI (not ECH) since July 2020, plus historical TLS-fingerprint blocking of meek by a Cyberoam firewall (2016).

Geedge fingerprinted several V2Ray-based VPN apps by their fixed API/bootstrap domains rather than protocol characteristics — blocking "V2 Pro" via pro.mucacherry.org, "V2 VPN" via v2.mucacherry.org, and "V2Net VPN" via api.v2net.live plus 5 rotating free-node domains (free1-5.v2n3t2.online / v2n3t.online) the app uses to fetch node lists.