A "精管流量初步分析报告" (2021-07-26) documents a live paired-sapp TLS-interception testbed: sapp instance A captures raw ciphertext via mrzcpd/PAG while sapp instance B ingests plaintext from a third-party decryption platform over a Unix domain socket. The report measures decryption latency (mean 1.82ms), completeness (only 44% of connections flagged decryptable via an SSL/TLS ClientHello-based "user legitimacy" check were actually decrypted, and 88% of eligible users), and confirms RST-based blocking triggered from the decrypted side reaches the client in a median ~0.5ms and successfully blocked live access to Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, the New York Times, and Google (BBC was the one tested site that evaded blocking). The decrypted side also resolves each session to a persistent per-user ID via the ciphertext side's four-tuple lookup.
封堵延时测试结果：测试访问不同的页面十次，除去其中一次最大访问延时为6s，其余访问延时平均约为0.47ms。 表6 部分网站封堵效果统计：facebook 是；维基百科 是；twitter 是；纽约时报 是；谷歌 是；bbc 否（没在客户端收到rst包）
Defense implications
- Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and NYT were all successfully RST-blocked within ~0.5ms of decryption in this internal test — assume the censor can already decrypt-and-block that fast for any traffic where a trusted MITM cert or an identifiable SNI/cert makes the destination clear, so protocol-level TLS use alone is not sufficient defense against a censor that has already achieved interception.
- The pipeline explicitly ties decrypted sessions to a persistent per-user ID rather than just domain/IP — treat per-user targeted disruption/follow-up (not only domain-level blocking) as a credible threat model for any Lantern user whose traffic transits an interception point.
- BBC was the one platform that evaded blocking in this specific test run; worth investigating what differed about its certificate/CDN setup as a possible (if fragile) defensive pattern.
Related findings
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.
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.
The same operations manual's troubleshooting section confirms the blocking system operationally injects forged RST and "spoofed" (欺骗) packets onto mirrored/passive-tap links via network devices — validated by test-injecting a packet via tcpreplay to an external VPS and confirming arrival with tcpdump — runs the sapp process under supervisor scripts with live status/config-version files (TF_maat.status, RESTART.log), and distinguishes a national "GF" system from separate provincial-gateway ("省口") deployments when localizing which egress point a given block should have taken effect at.
TSG ships a built-in offensive "active defense" (主动防御) module named houyi (后羿), built on the sapp/marsio/mrzcpd stack, that performs spoofed-source-IP network-layer flood attacks, DNS/NTP/Memcached reflection-amplification attacks, and application-layer (HTTP/HTTPS) CC floods against a configured target. Spoofed source IPs are drawn from named CIDR-range "profiles" (e.g. 10.1.1.0/24), and policy is distributed via Redis and issued either through an interface called "安天" (Antiy) or by directly calling a "毕方" (Bifang) API. Deployment is via Ansible from git.mesalab.cn/tsg/houyi-deploy, packaged as RPMs installed under /opt/houyi and as sapp plugins under /home/mesasoft/sapp_run/plug.