FINDING · EVALUATION
Across all four studied countries (China, Iran, India, Kazakhstan), HTTP/3 over QUIC had consistently lower failure rates than HTTPS over TCP: 27.1% vs 37.3% in China, 16.2% vs 34.4% in Iran, and 12.0% vs 15.0% in India (AS55836). The only QUIC-specific interference method observed was black-holing during the QUIC handshake (QUIC-hs-to); no RST injection or SNI-based QUIC filtering was detected.
From 2021-elmenhorst-web — Web censorship measurements of HTTP/3 over QUIC · §5, Table 1 · 2021 · Internet Measurement Conference
Implications
- As of early 2021, QUIC's primary advantage over TCP for circumvention is bypassing SNI-based blocking; designers should treat this as a temporary window before censors deploy SNI inspection for QUIC.
- Black-holing (handshake timeout) is the censor's only deployed QUIC interference method, meaning active-probing–resistant designs that complete handshakes quickly are the key robustness target.
Tags
Extracted by claude-sonnet-4-6 — review before relying.