Internal engineering docs detail MAAT's config/policy hierarchy (region/policy-unit -> group/policy-object -> compile/policy, a conjunctive-normal-form structure capped at 8 top-level groups), its Redis-backed one-master-many-replica config push ("MAAT Redis") with a rulescan fallback, and confirm MAAT runs non-distributed -- one instance per front-end traffic-scanning box -- invoked by sapp per-packet or per-stream (Maat_stream_scan_string_detail) with match-all-then-return semantics; recommended hardware is CentOS 7, 256GB RAM, 2TB disk, 48-core Xeon E5.
Maat不是分布式部署，而是单机部署，会每个前端机（相当于客户端，流式处理扫描业务流量）上都有一个maat，用于接收用户从界面下发的配置然后去调用流量扫描接口封装返回的命中结果。
Defense implications
- MAAT's config-effective interval defaults to 60,000ms and full incremental reload reportedly takes about 10 minutes per this doc's own noted issue -- freshly-added blocking rules are not instantly live across every front-end box; this is an operational propagation window on the censor's side, not an evasion technique for rules already loaded.
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 internal 'MAAT网络流处理配置统一描述框架' engineering manual (v3.1.20, author 郑超, 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.
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.
Real TSG session logs from device "XXG-TSG-BJ" (Beijing) show live production blocking of named commercial VPN apps by app-signature: 206 of 213 sampled sessions carry security_action "deny_quarkVPN01" against app field "quarkVPN0622.quarkVPN0619" (destination IPs in Germany, Russia, US, Australia, Bangladesh); a second log from the same device shows security_action "Deny_BeePassvpn" against app-identified BeePass VPN traffic.
An internal "DPI Benchmark" methodology document names the three production components underlying TSG's DPI stack and proposes benchmarking each against open-source equivalents: Marsio (DPDK-based packet I/O) for receive/transmit, Sapp ("网络安全开发平台", a high-speed traffic-processing platform) for protocol parsing and flow-table management, and Maat (Hyperscan-class signature engine with Redis-based multi-machine config sync) for pattern scanning.
Internal MAAT engineering specification (v3.1.20, MESA Lab, revision history spanning 2014-2021) documents the config schema underlying sapp's rule-matching engine: per-rule action types (0=block/阻断, 1=monitor/监测, 2=whitelist/白名单), string/regex/IP/numeric/digest match types, and a geographic+ISP "tag" targeting system that lets the identical rule set be selectively activated per city district and carrier (e.g. Beijing/Chaoyang + China Telecom vs. Shanghai/Pudong), enabling narrowly-scoped rule rollout/testing before wider deployment.