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.
psiphon3目前测试FD效果一直很好目前，youtube、Facebook、telegram封堵正常...只能通过JA3_HASH+服务端IP+客户端公网IP+SSL SNI查询后比对数量
Defense implications
- Psiphon3 is a specifically named, actively monitored target with customer-verified blocking effectiveness at a live Ethiopian deployment — treat Psiphon-style obfuscation as a known-detected baseline in this context.
- Session identity is reconstructed via JA3+SNI+IP tuples even across NAT — fingerprint randomization alone, without also varying SNI presentation, may be insufficient.
Related findings
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.
TSG's QUIC-parsing layer decrypts QUIC ClientHello payloads and parses a user-agent-like parameter from the decrypted content, deployed at the Ethiopia (E21) DIR-IGW site. A missing bounds check on this field caused a watchdog-timeout crash, confirmed via a MESA_Platform/quic GitLab commit (git.mesalab.cn/MESA_Platform/quic).
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.
An internal methodology memo for the '新疆省口项目' (Xinjiang provincial-gateway project) and '联通IDC项目' (Unicom IDC project) states both rely on 现有的系统（TSG与CN） (the existing TSG and CN [CyberNarrator] systems) to Block/Monitor/identify mainstream apps, and describes a largely manual signature-engineering workflow -- download the target app, capture traffic with 科莱(Colasoft Capsa)/Wireshark, extract fingerprint fields (http.host, http.user_agent, quic.sni, ssl.handshake.extensions_server_name) by hand, and register a per-app signature -- extending CyberNarrator's documented role beyond Psiphon-IP-harvesting/Pakistan subscriber correlation into general domestic app-blocking alongside TSG.
A dedicated internal "运营商前端分析团队" (Carrier Front-end Analysis Team) produces weekly, carrier-specific traffic-analysis reports explicitly titled "新疆移动流量分析报告" (Xinjiang Mobile Traffic Analysis Report) and "新疆联通流量分析报告" (Xinjiang Unicom Traffic Analysis Report), with instances dated from at least July 2022 through March 2024. One instance (Xinjiang Mobile, 2023-05-15) reports total carrier bandwidth of 4.4Tbps (1Tbps access bandwidth), 27.34PB of weekly throughput, 123 distinct identified application-layer protocols, and a section (4.1, pages 17+) explicitly tracking server IP/location for 28 named overseas apps (BBC, Discord, ESPN, Facebook, Gmail, Google, Hulu, Instagram, Netflix, Reddit, Skype, Telegram, Twitter, Uber, WhatsApp, Wikipedia, YouTube, Zoom, etc.).
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.