geedge.lantern.io
evaluation confidence: medium public

An August 2024 internal MESA Lab survey evaluates nDPI, Suricata, and Tranalyzer2 as candidate open-source DPI engines, scoring each explicitly on DPDK integration support ("dpdk集成") alongside protocol-detection and custom-protocol-extension capability — corroborating that DPDK compatibility is a hard selection criterion when picking/extending third-party DPI code, consistent with sapp's DPDK-based Marsio packet-I/O layer.

dpdk集成 | 官方支持至19.11 需要源码联合编译 | 有第三方支持 需要源码联合编译 | 暂未发现支持 ... 自定义协议检测扩展:可添加允许应用层检测协议,与使用的端口无关。
censorscn
techniquesdpi
capabilitydpi-signature

extracted_by: claude-sonnet-5 · added 2026-08-26 · id: 2026-opensource-dpi-tool-survey-ac

Related findings

deployment

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.

detection

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.

detection

An internal design note for a 'Shadowsocks traffic parsing/restoration module' describes decrypting captured Shadowsocks payloads back to the original HTTP request/response, given a known pre-shared key (AES-256-CFB, MD5-derived key, IV embedded in the stream).

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

A 2018 MESA Lab monthly report describes work on the "GPS"/"先导" (Pioneer) active-probing projects: adding IPv6 scanning support and simultaneous 3-domain scanning to MAAT, alongside active-probing experiments (nslookup/dig/nmap) and root-DNS-server BGP-anycast measurement -- indicating MAAT's rule engine is paired with an active network-scanning subsystem, not purely passive/inline matching.

detection

An internal 'MAAT Configuration Description Manual (String)' fully documents MAAT's rule-compilation model: per-field string matches (substring/prefix/suffix/exact/regex/AND-of-substrings/offset-anchored substrings) grouped into up to 8 AND/NOT clauses per compiled rule (conjunctive normal form), each carrying an action code (0=block, 1=monitor-only, 2=whitelist), blacklist and logging flags, and a floating-point execution-order field for safe rule reordering, plus the C scanning API (Maat_full_scan_string) and the file/JSON formats used to push rule updates to production.