geedge.lantern.io
evaluation confidence: medium public

An internal MESA Lab survey of VPN/circumvention tools explicitly names Lantern alongside Psiphon as tools whose domain-fronting "can effectively resist detection," and separately reports a measurement result of 39,284 distinct "concealment" (circumvention/proxy) IPs accessed a cumulative 140 million times in one week, spanning 78 identified hidden services/platforms, with the top 10 including Psiphon3 VPN, Xvpn, Thunder VPN, generic Residential Proxy, Secure Android VPN, Proxymaster VPN, Tomato VPN, Foxyproxy VPN, Torch VPN, and Bunny [VPN].

域前置的用途不限于HTTPS通信,也不限于仅访问特定web服务的域。它作为VPN网络(如Lantern和Psiphon)的域隐藏组件能够有效地抵抗检测。 ... 上述39284个IP在一周内被累计访问1.4亿次 ... 上述39284个IP共涉及78个隐匿软件或平台。Top10隐匿服务包括Psiphon3 VPN、Xvpn、Thunder VPN、Residential Proxy、Secure Android VPN、Proxymaster VPN、Tomato VPN、Foxyproxy VPN、Torch VPN、Bunny

Defense implications

censorscn
techniquesip-blocking
capabilitydpi-signature

extracted_by: claude-sonnet-5 · added 2026-08-26 · id: 2026-vpn-survey-lantern-scale-522561

Related findings

detection

A MESA Lab monthly report states that adjustments to a VPN-detection module accumulated over 10,000 Psiphon3 server IPs and delayed a Psiphon3 client's ability to get online by at least 3 minutes in the researchers' test environment, an earlier-stage data point consistent with the much larger-scale (~70-73K IP) 'vpn-thwarting'/CyberNarrator Psiphon-harvesting pipeline documented elsewhere in this corpus.

evaluation

MESA Lab group-meeting notes record parallel R&D on a whitelist-filtering module and a project to fingerprint cloud-hosted circumvention/proxy infrastructure at the IP-block (not single-IP) level, explicitly modeled on 2017/2019 academic 'Bulletproof-hosting IP block' research; the notes also mention local packet captures that found Psiphon IPs, the domain types/ratios Psiphon uses, and active-probing behavior with candidate detection countermeasures.

evaluation

An internal measurement-study report documents researchers live-testing the public DPYProxy TLS/SNI record-fragmentation tool against the GFW from inside China, against a control run from a German VPS. On a GFW IP-blocklisted Wikipedia IP, SNI fragmentation of any tested size (1/5/10/20 bytes) still ended in a server-side RST (though 1-5 byte fragments reached ServerHello before RST vs. 10-20 byte fragments RSTing right after ClientHello); on a non-blocklisted IP for the same domain, SNI fragmentation fully bypassed SNI-based blocking and returned a normal HTTP 200 response, matching the Germany baseline. The same report notes that testing Psiphon triggered roughly 5-10 minutes of residual censorship that also blocked other, unrelated circumvention tools from the same vantage point.

detection

A weekly 涉诈APP (fraud-suspected app) disposition report for Nov 5 covers 20 apps (12 with overseas servers); alongside genuine scam-lottery domain clusters (玖富彩票) it lists mainstream, non-fraud consumer apps -- Shopee (major Southeast Asian e-commerce platform) and Trust Wallet (widely-used cryptocurrency wallet) -- each with extracted domains/IPs/API paths and a disposition of 系统处置情况:新增拦截处置 (newly added to blocking), showing the anti-fraud program blocks broadly-used legitimate commercial/financial apps under the same infrastructure and process used against actual scam operations.

deployment

A weekly operational report documents newly-added blocking rules for 25 mobile apps (18 hosted overseas, mostly on Hong Kong-region Azure/Alibaba/Tencent cloud IPs), where analysts extract each app's domains, IPs, and distinctive URL paths (e.g. '/tigase/getLastChatList', '/user/getUserMoney') and log 'system disposition: newly added blocking action' for every one; matching raw keyword-object exports using the identical URL-path style confirm these hand-extracted paths are loaded directly as live filter-list entries in production.

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.