FINDING · EVALUATION
HTTP-based blocking is the dominant censorship technique across Indian ISPs, observed in 64 of 71 measured ASes. However, the authors note it is largely ineffective because over 90% of web connections now use HTTPS, meaning ISPs cannot inspect the HOST header for the vast majority of traffic — making HTTP blocking easily bypassed by any HTTPS client.
From 2023-katira-censorwatch — CensorWatch: On the Implementation of Online Censorship in India · §5.1 · 2023 · Free and Open Communications on the Internet
Implications
- Circumvention tools serving Indian users can rely on standard HTTPS transport as a baseline evasion layer; HTTP-only ISP filters are already bypassed by default browser behavior.
- Focus hardening effort on SNI and DNS layers — not HTTP — since those are the techniques used by the large ISPs that account for most of India's internet users.
Tags
Extracted by claude-sonnet-4-6 — review before relying.