Live TSG session logs from an internal test/QA gateway (device_id 9800165603191146 / 21426003, data_center label XXG-TSG-BJ) show real sessions from named commercial VPN apps — AlohaBrowserLite, BeePassVPN, BravePrivateVPN (WireGuard), Proton VPN, Turbo VPN, CyberGhost, BetternetVPN, SuperUnlimitedVPN, TrustzoneVPN and VPNHero — each matched to a dedicated per-app security rule (e.g. Deny_Brave, Deny_BeePassvpn, deny_Super Unlimited VPN) and given security_action=Deny. One row's app_transition field records a layered classification chain 'Psiphon Provider' -> ... -> 'BravePrivateVPN' for a single session, indicating the engine attempts nested/tunnel-in-tunnel protocol identification, not just single-label app ID.

TSG's app-traffic classification relies on an updatable "App Sketch DB" component (uploaded as a versioned file to each deployment). A version bump at the Xinjiang Unicom province-exit + IDC site increased identified application-traffic share from 23% to 68% of total traffic within days, with ByteDance-attributed traffic alone rising from ~100TB/day to ~500TB/day identified, illustrating both the scale of traffic under classification and that classification itself is a frequently-updated, centrally-distributed database rather than a static build-time artifact.

Side-by-side internal performance comparison across Xinjiang (China Mobile carrier deployment, hostname cmcc-xj-server1-sapp-244), Fujian (domestic), and Ethiopia (E21) explicitly references the same 'app_sketch_maat' diagnostic log format at all three sites, confirming the identical AppSketch app-fingerprinting stack is used for domestic Xinjiang surveillance and for the exported Ethiopia deployment.

TSG ships built-in BitTorrent detection apps in its "App Sketch DB" (v23.07). A 2023-08 field test found policies matched but did not block BT downloads; root cause was a UDP source/destination port ordering case (server port > client port) that let the real client IP land in the wrong field for the blocking policy to act on. Fixed via a second security policy rule.

TSG's app/protocol detection ("AppSketch" / context_based_detector plugin, part of the SAPP packet pipeline) is not purely static-signature: each detection rule can be an arbitrary Lua script (APP_SIG_LUA_SCRIPTS table) executed per-session in a per-worker-thread LuaJIT VM, with access to packet payload, session context counters, and helper functions (APP.data, APP.context.c2s_count, APP.log_debug, APP.append_extra_info). A validation CLI tool (luac-tool) checks script syntax, timeout, and return-value type before import.

Root-caused an Ethiopia SNI-block-failure incident to the detection mechanism itself: APP_SKETCH's FQDN-scanning module -- which exists specifically to identify Psiphon3 and Freegate via top-N SNI matching -- was CPU-expensive enough to saturate cores, triggering sapp's fail-open DDoS bypass and letting some target connections through uninspected. A signature-structure fix roughly doubled throughput (33K/s to 73K/s new connections) and disabling the fail-open bypass restored reliable blocking.

TSG's App Sketch DB includes a "TachyonVPN" signature. A 2023-06 report found ordinary browsing to microsoft.com misclassified as TachyonVPN in security event logs; closed Nov 2024 with no confirmed fix.