The tsg-scripts Ansible deployment repo (git.mesalab.cn:tsg/tsg-scripts) contains dedicated per-city deploy configs for well over a dozen Kazakhstan locations (Astana/Nur-Sultan, Almaty, Karaganda, Zhezkazgan, Aktau, Shymkent, Petropavl, Pavlodar, Semey, Taraz, Kostanay, Taldykorgan, Uralsk, Kokshetau, Ust-Kamenogorsk, Aktobe/Aktubinsk, Kyzylorda), consistent with and substantially extending the K18 Kazakhstan site codename. A single 2020-10-24 commit was authored directly from a '[email protected]' account 'at K18-2 Control Center', concretely tying CEIEC (China National Electronics Import & Export Corp) to on-site K18/Kazakhstan deployment access.
dc9336ae2690ca00230073331e8524f68a168509|k18ceiec|[email protected]|2020-10-24|First commit, at K18-2 Control Center.
Defense implications
- Confirms TSG (not a bespoke local system) is the platform deployed for K18 — Lantern testing against Kazakhstan censorship should assume the full TSG/sapp/maat/certstore/mrzcpd capability set documented elsewhere in this corpus is present, not a cut-down variant.
Related findings
The T1/NTC (text-content DPI) node's wired-config manifest (main.conf, dated 2019-01-30) sets REMOTE_DIR=ASTANA/KAZAKHTELECOM/, directly naming Kazakhtelecom — Kazakhstan's dominant state-linked telecom operator — as the carrier context for this K18 deployment. The NTC_MAAT module's EFFECTIVE_FLAG further scopes rules to {location: Astana, isp: Tanstelecom}, naming a second Kazakhstani ISP (Transtelecom) tied to the same deployment.
A recurring weekly 'Tiangou Secure Gateway — Server IP and Location of Overview' report, spanning Jan 2023 through Jan 2024 in this batch alone, tracks per-app top server IPs/geolocations/bytes for named foreign platforms (Instagram, Netflix, Reddit, Skype, Pinterest, Quora, Line, Likee, Medium, Pandora). Top consumer-side IP rows consistently resolve to Kazakhstan cities (Almaty, Pavlodar, Nur-Sultan/Astana), matching the K18 site codename. Processed-row counts grow roughly 10x over the year (889B rows/week in Jan 2023 to 9.4T rows/week in Jan 2024), and one instance reports Total Bytes Transferred of 14.66 PB and an average of 218.34 Gbps for a single week.
A custom Prometheus-backed infrastructure-monitoring platform (MySQL schema dumped from source "nz-prometheus", schema "nz-temp", dated 2020-10-16) has its sys_area reference table seeded with exactly the five Kazakhstan cities named in the K18 site-codename entry — Aktau, Almaty, Nur-Sultan (the pre-2022 name for Astana), Karaganda, and Zhezkazgan — and a companion live alert-message dump (dated Nov 2020) shows real "endpoint down" P2 alerts tagged Data center: Nur-Sultan / Aktau, Project: ADC, across modules named MXN-NODE and MCN0-3-NODE/SRV, pushing the earliest confirmed evidence of the K18 Kazakhstan deployment back to at least October-November 2020.
tsg/cli-deploy is an Ansible deployment repo for "tsg-cli" host monitoring (tsg-monitor service, rsyslog forwarding) targeting named production hosts, including hosts.astana and astana_ADC_IPlist_V1.xlsx, with a commit explicitly adding "astana部署环境IP" (Astana deployment-environment IPs) and a later branch for reading ADC hardware chassis IDs into the device serial-number scheme — concrete deployment evidence for the K18 (Kazakhstan, Astana) site.
Production network-topology docs for the Astana and Almaty (Kazakhstan / K18) sites show a live decrypted-traffic forwarding pipeline between an ADC front-end and an ASEM front-end over a direct fiber link, plus a distinct 'IP Spoofing' business function and dedicated static/dynamic proxy interception business lines, and a certificate-management endpoint (port 9991) — confirming operational TLS interception (MITM) infrastructure in production, not just lab capability, at both K18 sites.
A Kazakhstan-specific push service (galaxy/K18/galaxy-push-service) tracks per-geographic-area protocol blocking (AreaBlockProtocol, BlockingArea, EventsBlock domain classes) and pushes Top-N blocking analytics on a schedule, indicating K18's blocking is administered and reported at sub-national (area) granularity rather than applied uniformly nationwide.