A design document for "PDNS" specifies a recursive DNS resolver that dynamically monitors per-user behavior and applies differentiated blocking policy: NXDOMAIN or redirect-IP responses per target domain via BIND9 RPZ, a front-end "user reputation" score that adjusts per-user policy based on request history, and planned support for multiple ingress methods including encrypted DNS. The working prototype demonstrates source-IP-based user classification into block/passthru groups with policy synced via BIND9 zone transfer from a primary RPZ server.
用户控制功能,对不同的用户采取不同的请求控制策略,同时需要对用户信誉进行监控,根据用户请求情况调整请求控制策略...支持多种接入方式,包括各种加密DNS接入方式
Defense implications
- This design moves DNS-based blocking from a uniform network-wide blocklist toward per-user, reputation-adaptive policy keyed on source IP/identity -- adopting encrypted DNS (DoH/DoT) alone does not evade a censor moving to this model, since the blocking decision is increasingly about who is asking, not just what plaintext query was sent.
Related findings
A 2020 MESA Lab monthly report describes building an encrypted-DNS gateway device and a self-hosted DoH server that was wired directly into a live "TSG platform WAN net interface", alongside a passive DoH-service-discovery pipeline that found 39 new DoH-serving domains in a single day of backbone ("科技网") traffic; a related note documents actively probing known DoH-serving IPs' upstream resolvers via a proxy network across 196 countries to check which still function.
Geedge fingerprinted several V2Ray-based VPN apps by their fixed API/bootstrap domains rather than protocol characteristics — blocking "V2 Pro" via pro.mucacherry.org, "V2 VPN" via v2.mucacherry.org, and "V2Net VPN" via api.v2net.live plus 5 rotating free-node domains (free1-5.v2n3t2.online / v2n3t.online) the app uses to fetch node lists.
PanGu defines a configurable DNS response-spoofing subsystem (NTC_DNS_FAKE_IP_CB, NTC_DNS_RES_STRATEGY) supporting named 'answer groups' with a configurable number of fake answers returned per group (service ID 0x40 'dns欺骗'), i.e. DNS injection is a general, group-configurable policy primitive in TSG rather than a single hardcoded fake-IP response.
Raw structured DNS event logs (dated 2021-08-23) captured from what appears to be a GFW-adjacent DNS monitoring/injection pipeline use a schema purpose-built for DNS response forgery ('CHEAT_TYPE', 'CHEAT_RCODE', 'CHEAT_STRATEGY', 'CHEAT_RR', 'INJECTED_PKT_FILE' fields) alongside per-query geolocation; sampled records show lookups for facebook.com and tiktokv.com originating from residential China Telecom/Unicom/Mobile subscriber IPs in Guangdong, Zhejiang, Anhui and other provinces, resolving against both domestic and foreign (8.8.8.8, OpenDNS) resolvers.
A MESA Lab monthly report describes a 'web-proxy' engineering task that modified the open-source Ultraviolet web-proxy project to add keyword- and specific-URL-blocking, alongside deployment work (certificate issuance, redirect handling) and a document listing which sites the proxy is permitted to relay; the purpose (internal filtered access vs. a broader capability) is not stated in this excerpt.
A 2023 MESA Lab monthly report describes the 'TF' project's active-defense work: test cases for serial ('串联') HTTP hijack/tamper and parallel ('并联') DNS race-injection ('DNS抢答'), performance tuning that scaled active-defense capacity from 3 to 5 units, converting two existing TSG boxes to active-defense mode, and rewriting the active-defense flow-control logic to no longer depend on sapp.