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 detection event on Beeline (AS16345) exhibits a 5–15 minute delay between TUN activation and connection degradation onset, followed by a further delay before full blocking, consistent with a behavioral or statistical classifier rather than a signature-based real-time inspector. The graduated timeline (partial degradation → near-total block) suggests a threshold-based scoring system rather than an immediate signature match.

Issue body detection

After the detection event triggers on Beeline (AS16345), the connection is restricted to exactly one destination: the government-approved MAX messenger (max.ru), while all other Russian domestic whitelist domains (ok.ru, vk.ru, ya.ru, mail.ru) are also blocked. This response is enforced at the ISP/TSPU level and persists until the LTE router is restarted, indicating a stateful per-subscriber penalty state rather than simple packet-level blocking.

Issue body deployment

The reporter notes the phenomenon began several months prior to the September 2026 report and has only one corroborating data point (a Telegram message describing similar Beeline behavior), suggesting the TSPU capability is narrowly deployed — possibly in a single region or in a trial phase — rather than nationally rolled out. The reporter explicitly flags uncertainty about whether this is a TSPU experiment or a misconfiguration in their VPN client.

Issue body evaluation

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.

Issue body detection

TSG's Context-Based Detector (CBD) evaluates circumvention tool signatures across JA3/JA4 TLS fingerprints, SSL certificate issuer fields, UDP payload length, first-packet byte patterns, server IP ranges, and FQDN matches, often combining multiple conditions with logical AND. Of 29 VPN and circumvention tool signatures logged in the VPN Signature File Update Log (March–November 2024), 21 carry risk level 5 (the maximum), indicating aggressive prioritization of blocking major tools including ExpressVPN, NordVPN, Tor Browser, and Psiphon.

2026-ablove-technical-analysis-geedge §4.1, §4.1.2, Table 3, Table 4 dpitls-fingerprinttraffic-shapeip-blockingsni-blocking

A three-stage detection pipeline exploiting the "dual-role" behavioral fingerprint of single-IP circumvention relays achieved 23.2% recall (96/414 ground-truth relays) with a 0.18% false-positive rate against 97,651 benign TLS servers, for an overall accuracy of 99.5%. The ground-truth set covered OpenVPN, WireGuard, and SOCKS relays identified in a 17 TB single-day backbone trace (WIDE Project, April 9, 2025).

2026-almutairi-server §3.4, Table 1 traffic-shapedpiflow-correlation

The paper identifies a fundamental architectural vulnerability in single-IP circumvention designs: a relay must generate new observable flows (via DNS or TLS SNI) to reach end services after receiving client connections, creating a detectable server-and-client behavioral contrast. A relay accessing user-facing domains (news, social media) scores high on a Relay Suspicion Score (w=0.9) versus infrastructure domains (w=0.1). The paper argues this host-level signal is censorship-invariant and cannot be concealed by link obfuscation.

2026-almutairi-server §2.4, §4 traffic-shapedpisni-blocking

Based on analysis of over 100,000 leaked Geedge Networks documents, InterSecLab (2025) found that Geedge supplied China-GFW-equivalent censorship and surveillance systems to Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Myanmar. The systems include deep packet inspection, real-time mobile user monitoring, fine-grained traffic control, regionally customizable censorship rules, and — per WIRED's reporting — ML-based extraction of metadata from encrypted traffic to determine whether a flow is likely from a VPN or circumvention tool.

2026-anon-2026-27-vpn §8 (InterSecLab / WIRED section) dpiml-classifierfully-encrypted-detecttraffic-shape

AnyTLS's default padding scheme operates across 8 levels (stop=8), with initial padding fixed at 30 bytes, small-data padding 100–400 bytes, and medium-to-large data padding chains of 400–500 bytes continuing through multiple 500–1000 byte segments. The 'c' (continue) marker allows multi-stage padding sequences within a single connection burst.

2026-anon-anytls-anytls-sing-box-2026 §2.3 traffic-shapedpi

AnyTLS is a TLS-based proxy protocol maintained by the sing-box team, designed in 2024 and first released in the sing-box dev-next branch. Its core mechanism wraps arbitrary proxy traffic in standard TLS and applies a configurable padding scheme (Padding Scheme) to enhance traffic concealment while maintaining compatibility with standard TLS infrastructure.

2026-anon-anytls-anytls-sing-box-2026 §1.1–1.3 tls-fingerprinttraffic-shapedpi