Prior DNS-manipulation measurement systems suffered from high false-positive rates because DNS anomalies are also produced by benign infrastructure (CDNs, geo-DNS, captive portals). CERTainty's TLS certificate inspection step disambiguates these cases, establishing that certificate validation is a necessary complement to DNS-response comparison for reliable censor classification.

CERTainty identifies DNS manipulation by attempting a full TLS handshake with the IP returned by a remote resolver and inspecting whether the resulting certificate belongs to the legitimate origin or to an injected blockpage destination. This certificate-based ground truth substantially reduces false positives compared to prior DNS measurement systems that could not distinguish intentional manipulation from CDN geo-DNS or captive portals.

Abstract / §1 evaluation

CERTainty measured DNS manipulation across thousands of resolvers in 102 countries, identifying state-level censorship in China, Iran, and Russia, among others. The breadth of coverage — both resolver count and country count — demonstrates that TLS certificate validation scales to Internet-wide vantage-point studies.

Abstract / §5 evaluation

CERTainty demonstrates that state-level DNS censorship in China, Iran, and Russia operates through resolver-level injection: queries sent to in-country resolvers return IPs whose TLS certificates do not correspond to the queried domain, revealing blockpage or sinkhole destinations. This pattern is distinguishable from CDN or geographic DNS behavior precisely because blockpage servers cannot present a valid certificate for the censored hostname.

Abstract / §5–6 evaluation

A compiled blocklist dataset documents 43,083 apex domains blocked via DNS filtering across 6 Indian ISPs, representing one of the largest systematic inventories of Indian DNS censorship scope published to date.

2026-qurbat-list-domains-blocked compiled_blocklist.csv (main dataset) dns-poisoningmeasurement-platform

The dataset incorporates Tranco popularity rankings for blocked domains (derived from the 'Poisoned Wells' research), enabling measurement of how DNS blocking in India intersects with high-traffic websites rather than being confined to obscure domains.

2026-qurbat-list-domains-blocked Abstract (Tranco ranking annotation) dns-poisoningmeasurement-platform

The blocklist spans 6 distinct Indian ISPs, enabling cross-ISP consistency analysis; the multi-ISP scope reflects that DNS-based blocking in India is implemented heterogeneously at the ISP level rather than via a single national chokepoint.

2026-qurbat-list-domains-blocked Abstract / dataset metadata dns-poisoningmeasurement-platform

Of 6,915,266 domains extracted from the 572 GiB Geedge Networks Leak (GNL), 298,955 censored domains (93.7% of all GNL-censored domains) appear in neither Tranco top-1M nor CitizenLab test lists. Measurements across China (Guangzhou/Nanjing), Myanmar, Pakistan, and Algeria confirmed censorship via DNS injection and SNI-based TLS connection termination. The GNL covers 25–62% of Tranco-censored domains across countries, showing substantial but incomplete overlap. This vendor-side ground truth reveals a censorship surface roughly two orders of magnitude larger than curated academic test lists.

2026-sheffey-geedge §4.1, Table 2 dpisni-blockingdns-poisoningmeasurement-platform

Majority-vote ML inference (OCSVM + IF) over OONI data uncovered at least 5 previously undocumented DNS injection IPs active in Russia (e.g., 195.19.90.226, 95.167.13.51, 61.95.167.13.50, 188.19.132.154, 144.85.142.29.248) absent from OONI's existing blocking-fingerprints database, along with novel fingerprints in Italy, Czech Republic, and the UK. Records with fewer than 50 instances were excluded as a conservative false-positive filter.

2024-calle-toward §4.3, Table 5 dns-poisoningml-classifiermeasurement-platform

XGBoost trained on a single month of OONI data achieves near-optimal performance; expanding the training window to 24 months produces deviations of only 0–5 percentage points for FNR, 0.07 PP for FPR, and 0.10 PP for accuracy — suggesting that larger windows introduce noise and overfitting rather than improving detection. Isolation Forest performance degrades more sharply, with accuracy dropping ~5 PP as training data grows beyond 6 months.

2024-calle-toward §4.2, Figure 3 dns-poisoningml-classifiermeasurement-platform