DEFENSES
reality REALITY (TLS handshake forwarding)
5 papers on file
- 2026-amigocarra-bypassing-russian-federation-s Bypassing the Russian Federation's mobile internet whitelists—we're stuck, looking for real-world experience
- 2026-gohoski-russia-possible-tun [Russia] Possible TUN detection on DPI level?
- 2026-pooribitwise-iran-advanced-dpi [Iran] Advanced DPI is reassembling TCP fragments to extract SNI on VLESS/WS + CDN
- 2026-spiderxss-tlshello-fragmentation-not tlshello Fragmentation is not working in Iran anymore
- 2025-hyperion-cs-censor-has-new Censor has a new method of blocking
15 findings tagged here
-
Community-maintained public CIDR lists of Russian mobile whitelist ranges allow operators to identify specific whitelisted IP blocks within cloud providers: a /22 subnet inside Yandex Cloud's /16 pool appears on these lists, while the ephemeral addresses from a different /20 pool of the same provider do not. Reserving a static IP from the whitelisted /22 allows the Reality handshake to complete and traffic to proxy from external vantage points, though in-whitelist passage on a real mobile device remained unconfirmed at time of writing.
-
VLESS+Reality with uTLS and decoy SNI pointed at popular domains (vk.com, cloudflare.com) bypasses standard DPI blocking on MTS and has operated stably for one real user over several weeks with thousands of connections logged. However, an identical configuration failed to establish a single connection for a second user on the same carrier but in a different network segment (Moscow number vs. regional/southern number), including during periods confirmed to be outside whitelist activation.
-
Compared to peer protocols, AnyTLS rates 'medium' performance (vs. VLESS 'high', Hysteria2 'very high', TUIC 'high'), uses TCP/TLS transport (vs. UDP/QUIC for Hysteria2 and TUIC), and relies on padding-based obfuscation vs. REALITY/WebSocket (VLESS) or HTTP/3 framing (Hysteria2). Client ecosystem support is currently limited primarily to sing-box, vs. broad cross-client support for VLESS, Trojan, and Hysteria2.
-
AEGIS, a flow-physics-only ML classifier using a Hyperbolic Liquid State Space Model evaluated on a 400GB adversarial corpus including VLESS Reality, GhostBear, and AMOI-morphed traffic, achieves F1-score 0.9952, 99.50% TPR, and 0.2141% FPR at 262.27 µs inference latency on an RTX 4090. The system discards all payload bytes and classifies traffic exclusively on 6-dimensional flow physics: packet size, inter-arrival time, directionality, TCP window size, TCP flags, and payload ratio.
-
Automated proxy engines (e.g., Xray-core running VLESS Reality in automated mode) generate deterministically rigid inter-arrival time distributions because they cannot synthesize the stochastic variance of human-driven IAT, even when volumetrically anchored to benign distributions ('Fat Middle' anchoring via AMOI). The AEGIS Thermodynamic Variance Detector identifies this rigidity via Shannon Entropy of hidden states across 1,000-packet causal windows, rendering volumetric anchoring mathematically distinguishable from genuine human traffic.
-
Flow-physics classifiers face a fundamental 'Human Entropy Horizon': when VLESS Reality multiplexes true human entropy (a human actively browsing web applications), AEGIS achieves a detection rate of only 1.17%, because XTLS wrappers impart near-zero mechanical overhead and the temporal physics remain entirely stochastic. This implies adversaries operating at human interaction speeds can evade flow-based detection, but must abandon automated high-throughput C2 scripts.
-
On Beeline mobile internet (AS16345, Russia), enabling TUN mode with a VLESS+REALITY proxy consistently triggers ISP-level connection degradation after 5–15 minutes, while using the same proxy in HTTP/SOCKS5 proxy mode produces no such effect. The detection is reproducible across two independent GUI clients (v2rayN and Throne) with stock settings, suggesting the DPI trigger is the TUN traffic pattern rather than a client-specific artifact.
-
The TUN-mode detection occurs exclusively on Windows 10 and does not manifest on Android using the same VLESS+REALITY server and Beeline SIM, nor when running as a system proxy on Windows. The effect is also observed to impact all devices sharing the Windows hotspot simultaneously, ruling out endpoint-local causes and confirming the classification occurs upstream at the ISP/TSPU layer.
-
The Reality protocol triggers immediate RST flood responses from Iranian ISP infrastructure at the completion of the TLS handshake, suggesting Iranian DPI has developed a fingerprint or active-probe response specifically targeting Reality's TLS handshake forwarding mechanism as of June 2026.
-
Community members propose a two-hop architecture as a potential mitigation for Iran's current DPI upgrade: a first-hop server inside Iran's whitelisted datacenter ranges (where outbound traffic faces lighter inspection) proxying to a foreign exit node, with Reality masquerading as a legitimate Iranian organization's domain. The architecture's effectiveness under active TCP reassembly and handshake probing is explicitly unverified.
-
Community testing in Iran following the fragmentation bypass failure confirms that REALITY and Shadowsocks remain viable circumvention mechanisms as of late July 2026. Neither protocol relies on ClientHello fragmentation for evasion, which accounts for their continued functionality under the updated Iranian filtering regime.
-
The Russian DPI maintains two whitelists that exempt flows from the freeze: (1) a SNI-based whitelist covering select domains (visible in the TLS ClientHello), and (2) a CIDR-based whitelist of IP subnets for trusted destination servers. The SNI whitelist can be exploited by VLESS+Reality clients using an allowed SNI value as the apparent destination; the CIDR whitelist requires routing through an IP from a whitelisted prefix, making circumvention 'extremely difficult' without an intermediate node in a whitelisted subnet.
-
LZR, built on top of ZMap, can identify 99% of unexpected Internet services in five handshakes by acting as a shim between ZMap and ZGrab. This gives censors and researchers alike an efficient active-probing primitive to fingerprint proxy protocols at scale.
-
Obfuscated proxy traffic (including Shadowsocks, VMess, VLESS, Trojan, obfs4, and REALITY) can be reliably fingerprinted by detecting encapsulated TLS handshakes — the inner TLS ClientHello that appears inside an outer encrypted tunnel. This fingerprint is protocol-agnostic: any proxy that wraps TLS-bearing application traffic will produce it. The authors deployed a similarity-based classifier within a mid-size ISP serving over one million users and demonstrated detection with minimal collateral damage.
-
While stream multiplexing reduces the visibility of encapsulated TLS handshakes by merging inner connections, the paper cautions that multiplexing plus random padding alone is "inherently limited" as a long-term countermeasure. Censors can adapt by monitoring burst sizes and round-trip counts at the outer-connection level, which remain correlated with the number of inner TLS sessions regardless of padding.