geedge.lantern.io
detection confidence: high public

Documents Geedge's standard operating procedure for building a new app-detection signature: collect a target's server IPs and FQDNs, create IP-match and SNI-match (ssl.handshake.extensions_server_name) feature objects, combine them via OR logic into a named custom "application", then validate via session-log reports filtered on that application label.

创建自定义特征1:ip.dst引用步骤1中IP对象...创建自定义特征2: ssl.handshark.extensions_server_name引用步骤2中FQDN对象...创建自定义应用icq:引用两个或关系的特征

Defense implications

productstsg
capabilitydpi-signature

extracted_by: claude-sonnet-5 · added 2026-08-26 · id: 2026-ompub977-icq-fingerprint-workflow

Related findings

detection

TSG maintains a traffic-volume-ranked "Top SNI" / "Top Server IP" allowlist (Galaxy component, learned from live traffic, capped at top ~2000 SNIs / ~40000 server IPs per Nacos config) that is checked before a VPN/circumvention-tool deny policy (including a Psiphon3-specific policy) is enforced. Confirmed empirically: Psiphon3 client traffic whose destination SNI was in the Top SNI list passed through undenied, while traffic to the same client IPs with an SNI not yet in the list was blocked. A 2022-06 incident over-blocked TikTok/BBC/CNN/NYTimes because their SNIs were not yet in the learned allowlist at the time.

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).

detection

For a domestic Fujian deployment, Geedge validated SNI-wildcard blocking (*.sohucs.com, *.sns.sohu.com) as technically effective against a specific Chinese social app ('Huyou'), but rejected it for production because the domain is shared with a third-party SDK platform and would cause false-positive blocking of unrelated services -- falling back to destination server-IP blocking, deployed inline via TCP RST injection.

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.

deployment

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.).

detection

TSG/CM ships with pre-built, first-class 'Learning Object' entries specifically for Freegate (Object ID 18) and Psiphon3 (Object ID 19), plus a generic 'Top Server IP' object (ID 20) -- default product features, not customer-commissioned custom signatures. The Psiphon3 object auto-learns and dynamically updates a live blocklist that reached roughly 70,000 IPs at one deployment before a database issue temporarily dropped it to ~50,000.