A June 2021 internal report measures a live in-network TLS-interception pilot: one sapp instance ingests raw ciphertext via mrzcpd while a second ingests plaintext from a "third-party decryption platform" over a Unix domain socket, and one hour of production traffic on a live front-end (10.187.0.2) shows the decryption platform successfully produced plaintext for 4.85% of raw traffic bytes and 7.4% of all port-443 TCP connections, with an average end-to-end decrypt latency of 1741ms (median 460ms, up to 6000ms) between first ciphertext byte and the resulting plaintext HTTP GET.
希望解密方能够提供可解密连接识别特征。当前解密后流量(明文)占同时段原始流量的4.85%。443端口的TCP链接数占同时段原始流量中443端口链接数的7% 平均延迟时间为1741 ms。最大延时约6000ms,最小延时158ms,延时中位数为:460ms。
Defense implications
- As of this 2021 pilot, only a minority of live HTTPS connections (~7.4% of port-443 flows) were successfully MITM'd, implying selective/partial targeting rather than blanket interception at that site and time.
- The multi-hundred-millisecond-to-several-second decrypt latency (median 460ms) is a potential timing side channel: unusually high latency-to-first-byte on a fresh HTTPS connection from a given vantage point may indicate active interception on that path, worth building into active-MITM detection tooling.
Related findings
sapp's internal architecture guide documents three deployment topologies (mirror/passive-tap, inline, dual-arm transparent) and four distinct methods for injecting blocking packets back onto the wire, including a MAC-in-MAC scheme that extracts device/link IDs from mirrored traffic's source MAC field to route an injected packet to the correct physically separate inline device over VXLAN when multiple injection points exist.
An official "Geedge Networks Confidential And Proprietary" sapp/mrzcpd operations manual documents the packet-injection API (MESA_kill_tcp / MESA_inject_pkt) used for both out-of-band mirror-tap RST injection (relies on the local box's own IP routing table to send) and inline in-path injection (requires mrtunnat.conf tunnel-tracking state -- use_recent_tunnel, use_link_info_table -- keyed on outer/inner MAC and link_id/link_dir), plus the Marsio DPDK-based driver's I/O sub-modes (marsio4, marsio_vxlan, pag_marsio, agent_smith) and its role extracting VXLAN/GTP encapsulation metadata and stamping link/circuit identifiers into mirrored packets' MAC field for session-log correlation.
A June 2021 MESA Lab test report ("精管流量初步分析报告") measured a live TLS-decryption pipeline feeding two sapp instances -- sapp A ingesting raw encrypted traffic via mrzcpd, sapp B ingesting plaintext from a third-party decryption platform over a Unix domain socket -- and found decrypted plaintext covered only 4.85% of raw traffic bytes and 7.4% of port-443 connections, with average MITM decryption latency of 1741ms (range 158-6000ms) across 2957 matched connections.
An internal TSG operations/troubleshooting manual lays out TSG's full traffic pipeline (NIC -> mrzcpd/marsio capture driver -> sapp DPI engine -> firewall/proxy(KNI->TFE)/active-defense/WAN-NAT policy branches) and shows engineers using maat_redis_tool to pull the live Redis-synced blocking policy tables (TSG_SECURITY_COMPILE, TSG_OBJ_IP_ADDR, TSG_OBJ_APP_ID) and filter them by numeric policy/object ID to debug why a block rule isn't firing.
The same SAPP manual documents mrzcpd's inline (串联) packet-re-injection subcomponent mrtunnat, configured at /opt/mrzcpd/etc/mrtunnat.conf: use_recent_tunnel=1 allows it to inject a packet with no prior session record, and use_link_info_table=1 makes it validate outer MAC, link_id, link_dir, and inner MAC against a live link-state table at /run/mrzcpd/mrmonit.tunnat before re-injecting a censor-forged packet onto the correct physical link.
An internal SAPP platform training/reference manual (marked "Geedge Networks Confidential And Proprietary") gives SAPP's full name as "Stream Analyse Process Platform" and documents its three-tier plugin architecture (platform / protocol-parsing / business layers, each loaded via dlopen), inline and mirror deployment modes at a stated 10-40 Gbps per box, tunnel-protocol support (GRE/MPLS/IPIP/IPv6-over-IPv4/Teredo), and the MESA_kill_tcp() plugin API that forges and sends RST packets to sever a monitored TCP connection, with the manual noting it was "originally used in mirror mode to send RST packets to block a TCP connection" and auto-retries until the connection is confirmed dead.