geedge.lantern.io
evaluation confidence: high public

TSG engineers explicitly acknowledged to an Ethiopia customer that the system's application-identification statistics over-count Psiphon3 and Freegate due to misidentification, inflating their apparent traffic share (e.g. Psiphon3 appearing in the application Top-2 despite the customer reporting no active blocking of it), and that Netflix's ranking also varies drastically by sort metric (bytes vs. sessions vs. unique client IP).

我们系统对于这两个应用有误识别,所以识别的结果偏高... 埃塞没有任何block,psiphon3占比没有那么高,至少不会在top2 不会有那么大的数据量

Defense implications

censorset
techniquesml-classifier
capabilitydpi-signature

extracted_by: claude-sonnet-5 · added 2026-08-26 · id: 2026-ompub586-psiphon-freegate-overcounting

Related findings

detection

TSG's Psiphon3 blocking (Ethiopia/E21 site) uses a dynamically-learned "Top SNI" / "Top Server IP" allowlist meant to avoid collaterally blocking shared infrastructure Psiphon3 also rides on (e.g. Google); a bug in the learning pipeline (SNI values under 3 bytes rolled back the whole DB write transaction) let the allowlist silently go stale, causing Google traffic to be misidentified and blocked as Psiphon3.

detection

The same internal research note's second research point develops an ML-based detector for Geneva-style automated censorship-evasion traffic; simple flow-level features (flow size, max packet size, RST/SYN/FIN flag counts, forward init-window bytes, inter-arrival timing) achieve near-perfect (ROC-AUC ~1.00) classification of Geneva-generated evasion traffic against CICIDS2017 and MAWI backbone background traffic using decision trees, LightGBM, XGBoost and random forest, with abnormal flow size (~150 bytes vs. 1000-30000 bytes typical) identified as the single most discriminative feature.

detection

A 2020 MESA Lab monthly report describes building a sapp plugin that extracts packet-sequence features specifically "for DoH (DNS-over-HTTPS) service discovery," alongside a broader CSTNET DoH measurement-report effort and configuring a DNS-to-DoH gateway -- confirming sapp is used to fingerprint DoH traffic via statistical sequence features rather than plaintext DNS content.

detection

MESA Lab researcher notes on an encrypted-video-identification project describe adding SSL-layer information output to more precisely trace a flow's true source/identity, and considering reinforcement learning so the identification model adapts as network conditions change, working within/around sapp's plugin limitations.

detection

An internal schema doc describes an 'Unknown Protocol Identification Database': an Elasticsearch port-asset table tracking active/passive/fused protocol-type guesses and banner text per IP:port, feeding a MySQL clustering pipeline (cluster_info/cluster_task) that groups unclassified traffic by a 'fingerprint' field into named-protocol clusters -- an unsupervised discovery pipeline for identifying and naming new/unknown protocols at scale, distinct from MAAT/AppSketch's signature-matching against already-known protocols.

export/sales

A thesis-project assignment for hidden-service (VPN/Proxy/Tor) identification via heterogeneous graph neural networks on flow logs sources its one day of training data from a database explicitly named 'tsg_galaxy_p19' — tying the internal TSG naming convention to the taxonomy's P19/WMS-UTR Pakistan site codename — accessed over an internal 'Information Harbor' (信息港) VPN, with ground-truth hidden-service IP labels supplied by the commercial IP-intelligence service spur.us.