TFE includes a dedicated DoH (DNS-over-HTTPS) business plugin that parses and reconstructs DoH POST/response traffic, applies MAAT policy scanning to it, and supports a "Redirect-DoH" policy action tracked by a distinct "DoH_hijack" counter -- meaning encrypted DoH queries are actively parsed and redirected/hijacked by policy, not simply blocked outright.
62dde9ea6e638900e7616dd90e688dd270df7416|luwenpeng|[email protected]|2021-02-23|TSG-4427: folded DoH redirects into the Proxy Redirect counter, kept the DoH_hijack counter separate
Defense implications
- DoH alone is not a safe DNS-resolution channel against this pipeline -- TFE actively parses and redirects DoH queries rather than only blocking the transport; circumvention tooling should treat DoH as observable/manipulable and pair it with additional obfuscation of the DoH request itself.
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.
The T1/NTC (text-content DPI) node's wired-config manifest (main.conf, dated 2019-01-30) sets REMOTE_DIR=ASTANA/KAZAKHTELECOM/, directly naming Kazakhtelecom — Kazakhstan's dominant state-linked telecom operator — as the carrier context for this K18 deployment. The NTC_MAAT module's EFFECTIVE_FLAG further scopes rules to {location: Astana, isp: Tanstelecom}, naming a second Kazakhstani ISP (Transtelecom) tied to the same deployment.
An internal TSG troubleshooting runbook ("HTTPS证书替换策略无效果") documents the certstore MITM-certificate service actively serving/validating forged certificates keyed by SNI, walking an operator through checking certstore logs for specific real-world domains including Google's update service (update.googleapis.com) and Nvidia's GFE service (services.gfe.nvidia.com), and cross-checking keyring config live via maat_redis_tool.
certstore's own commit history documents its transparent-TLS-MITM mechanics directly: it writes the client's observed SNI into the SAN field of the leaf certificate it mints on the fly, supports ECC issuance (secp192r1/secp256r1) for those forged certs, and reads its Trusted/Untrusted decryption-keyring configuration from MAAT's DECRYPTION_KEYRING table -- confirming the interception pipeline end-to-end: client SNI in, matching forged certificate out, gated by MAAT-synced keyring policy.
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.