geedge.lantern.io
detection confidence: high public

Project "E21" tested SNI-FQDN-wildcard block policies against international news/media/academic domains -- opride.com (Oromo news), ethiotube.net, Reuters, NYT, Bloomberg, GitHub, ResearchGate, NIH.gov -- from an Ethio-Telecom-range office IP. Most blocks silently failed (shared root cause with OMPUB-466); britannica.com needed a separate deny-quic policy since QUIC bypassed SNI blocking.

client ip=196.188.136.150...sni-FQDN:*opride.com...*reuters.com 穿 *nytimes.com 穿 *bloomberg.com 穿...www.britannica.com有quic,需要deny-quic协议配合阻断

Defense implications

censorset
productstsg
capabilitydpi-signature

extracted_by: claude-sonnet-5 · added 2026-08-26 · id: 2026-ompub469-e21-ethiopia-media-blocking-quic-bypass

Related findings

detection

TSG automatically generates recurring weekly "SNI Report of Overseas APP" and companion "Server IP and Location of Overseas APP" reports at what is almost certainly a China-national (not export-customer) scale — single weekly runs process from ~5.7 trillion to over 135 billion rows and up to ~775TB/week — breaking down QUIC.SNI/SSL.SNI/HTTP.Host traffic per named blocked-in-China platform (YouTube, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, Telegram, WhatsApp, Netflix, BBC, Viber, Line, Snapchat, Gmail, HBO, and more), down to individual CDN edge hostnames (e.g. specific scontent-*.fbcdn.net and rr*---sn-*.googlevideo.com nodes ranked by bytes). The report series recurs weekly from at least Feb 2023 through Mar 2024.

detection

Recurring automated "Tiangou Secure Gateway — SNI Report of Overseas APP" documents (weekly, multiple recurrences across 2023-2024) enumerate every distinct QUIC.SNI/SSL.SNI/HTTP.Host value observed per major foreign platform (Netflix, WhatsApp, Telegram, Twitter, YouTube, Signal- adjacent services, etc.) with packet/byte counts, processing runs at up to ~6.3 trillion rows per report. QUIC SNI is tracked as a distinct column from TLS SNI, showing the pipeline separately fingerprints HTTP/3 traffic.

detection

MESA_Platform's "quic" module (built and packaged as stellar-on-sapp/sapp RPMs) implements SNI/User-Agent extraction from both cleartext GQUIC (versions 23-59) and encrypted IETF QUIC RFC9000 ClientHello payloads, and supports a QUIC SNI whitelist -- i.e. the DPI pipeline decrypts/parses encrypted QUIC handshakes to recover the destination domain rather than being blocked by QUIC's encryption.

detection

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.

defense

Multi-week TSG engineering investigation of iTOP VPN (requested by an Ethiopia deployment, cross-tested in a Myanmar environment) found blocking only takes effect for VPN sessions established AFTER a detection policy is pushed; a VPN already connected before the policy loads is never blocked or logged, regardless of signature type (SNI or server-IP).

deployment

A debugging ticket for sites "Old Airport-PE" and "Bole-IGW" (naming consistent with Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) confirms the customer verified Psiphon3, YouTube, Facebook, and Telegram blocking as working well during independent testing, and reveals the operational session-correlation method used when packet captures and system logs must be cross-referenced across NAT: JA3_HASH + server IP + client public IP + SSL SNI.