MESA Lab group-meeting notes record parallel R&D on a whitelist-filtering module and a project to fingerprint cloud-hosted circumvention/proxy infrastructure at the IP-block (not single-IP) level, explicitly modeled on 2017/2019 academic 'Bulletproof-hosting IP block' research; the notes also mention local packet captures that found Psiphon IPs, the domain types/ratios Psiphon uses, and active-probing behavior with candidate detection countermeasures.
小组组会，汇报白名单过滤代码进展，汇报在本机抓包发现的一些 psiphon 的 IP，所使用域名的类型及比例，主动探测的现象，以及相对应的可以采取的检测方法...讨论结合白名单项目，做云上伪装 IP 识别
Defense implications
- GFW-adjacent R&D explicitly targets cloud-hosted circumvention infrastructure by CIDR block rather than single IP, using bulletproof-hosting classification methodology; distributing bridges/proxies across many unrelated small cloud accounts/ASNs (vs. concentrating in a few ranges at one provider) raises the cost of this block-level classification.
Related findings
A MESA Lab monthly report states that adjustments to a VPN-detection module accumulated over 10,000 Psiphon3 server IPs and delayed a Psiphon3 client's ability to get online by at least 3 minutes in the researchers' test environment, an earlier-stage data point consistent with the much larger-scale (~70-73K IP) 'vpn-thwarting'/CyberNarrator Psiphon-harvesting pipeline documented elsewhere in this corpus.
Three harvested datasets catalog full server-fleet inventories for multiple commercial VPN/proxy brands -- WaselPro/BVPN/SmokeTunnel/iWasel/BackboneVPN (with per-node CA certificate, IPsec PSK, and SSH private key captured), VyprVPN/GoldenFrog (per-location hostname/IP/coordinates), and tap2free (per-node IP with PRO/FREE tier flags) -- i.e. Geedge enumerates and archives entire commercial VPN provider bootstrap/config responses, not just individually observed connections.
Session-log exports from a Beijing test/demo TSG device ("XXG-TSG-BJ") show live "Deny" enforcement actions (security_rule_list "Deny_VPNHero", "deny_TowerVPN") against traffic the app-ID engine classified with nested app chains "VPNHero" and "OPENVPN.TowerVPN.Psiphon Provider.Psiphon-Server" -- i.e. TowerVPN is specifically tagged internally as riding on Psiphon infrastructure, and both it and VPNHero are actively blocked, not just logged, on this device.
A MAAT/AppSketch signature literally named "Psiphon-Server-IP" blocks by destination IP against a list of 1,300+ IPs (the extracted text is truncated at ~200KB so the true list is likely larger, consistent with the taxonomy's cybernarrator/vpn-thwarting note of ~70-73K harvested Psiphon IPs), directly corroborating that the CyberNarrator/vpn-thwarting Psiphon3 IP-harvesting pipeline feeds its output straight into a production MAAT/AppSketch blocking signature.
The cyber-narrator/cn-ui repo (the CyberNarrator/网络叙事者 frontend, 3123 commits across 21.08-24.11 tags) maintains dedicated deployment branches "dev-24.01-m22" (M22 = Myanmar per taxonomy) and "dev-xj-0111" (Xinjiang), confirming CyberNarrator is actively built and shipped per-deployment for both an export customer (Myanmar) and a domestic site (Xinjiang) as of 2024, and ships EN/RU/ZH localization plus per-country geojson map data (including kazakhstanLow.json, ethiopiaLow.json, myanmarLow.json) consistent with a multi-country tracking dashboard.
An internal UI-revision memo instructs changing the product's displayed name from 'NPM' to 'Cyber Narrator' and specifies an 'Entity explorer' with per-FQDN and per-IP detail pages (e.g. 'Entities/Entity explorer/Fqdn-qq.com', '.../IP-8.8.8.8'), split into 'server-side' and 'client-side' IP detail tabs, plus a planned DNS Dashboard -- confirming CyberNarrator's UI was originally built and marketed as a generic Network & Application Performance Monitoring (NPM) console before being rebranded, and detailing its entity-drilldown structure.