Ethiopia's TSG deployment was explicitly configured to block TikTok, Telegram, Facebook, YouTube, and Psiphon3 network-wide at the customer's request — Psiphon3 (a censorship-circumvention tool) is named alongside mainstream platforms as a direct blocking target, not merely an incidental side effect.
此次E现场业主要求配置全网Tik Tok、telegram、Facebook、YouTube、psiphon3的封堵 [this E-site customer requested network-wide blocking configuration of TikTok, Telegram, Facebook, YouTube, psiphon3]
Defense implications
- Circumvention tools should assume they are explicit, named blocking targets in TSG deployments, not just collateral coverage under a generic VPN category.
Related findings
TSG supports customer-directed HTTP response-body content replacement (not just blocking) on named URLs, verified working on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. In Ethiopia (E21), the customer directed replacement of a specific Amharic-language keyword on a named independent media outlet's Facebook page (facebook.com/mereja.media) with an innocuous substitute; engineers had to additionally target Facebook's GraphQL API endpoint (facebook.com/api/graphql) once static-URL matching failed, because dynamic content was no longer served from the page URL.
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.
The internal 'MAAT网络流处理配置统一描述框架' engineering manual (v3.1.20, author name redacted, 2021) documents MAAT's Redis-synced rule-compilation framework and its RuleScan/Hyperscan-based pattern-matching engine (libmaatframe.so / librulescan), and records that RuleScan's fast-scan feature caused a production outage on 2019-03-19 and has been disabled ever since.
A MESA Lab monthly report describes a 'web-proxy' engineering task that modified the open-source Ultraviolet web-proxy project to add keyword- and specific-URL-blocking, alongside deployment work (certificate issuance, redirect handling) and a document listing which sites the proxy is permitted to relay; the purpose (internal filtered access vs. a broader capability) is not stated in this excerpt.
An internal MESA Lab research note directly measures and compares China's ('CN') HTTP censorship middlebox against Russia, India and an unlabeled 'HZ' system, plus open-source Snort2/Snort3/Suricata: China is characterized as inspecting Host- and keyword-based triggers (example trigger given: a request containing the parameter 'q=ultrasurf') across ALL ports rather than just 80/443, responding with a triple RST or an extra RST+ACK; an 8-technique HTTP-request-mangling evasion comparison table credits China's middlebox as vulnerable only to request-line whitespace insertion and HTTP-version tampering, fewer categories than the other three systems tested.
pg_valve_deal.cpp / pg_valve_main.cpp source shows the 'valve' (pangu_valve) component implements a MAAT-fed, hierarchical (region/group -> dataset -> domain-ID) rule-dispatch engine: each incoming rule line carries a keyword field plus expr_type/match_method/is_hexbin matching flags, an ADD/DEL action, and a percentage-based 'Droprate' throttle parsed out of a semicolon-delimited region string (DOMAIN_ID=...;config_id=...;Droprate=...) — i.e. a keyword/domain-based engine that can partially throttle traffic, not just binary-block it.