Inbound access to Iran remains heavily restricted even after the May 26 restoration: only ~2.8% of tested global /24 blocks (~400,000 of 14,461,944 representative IPs) could reach the Iran vantage point, compared to over 70% for comparable hosts outside Iran — more than 25× lower reachability — demonstrating that Iran enforces allowlist-based destination-IP filtering on inbound traffic as well as outbound.

Iran's source-IP allowlist severely restricted outbound access before the May 26, 2026 partial restoration: only ~0.017% (~2,000 of 11,766,454 spoofed Iranian IPs) could reach destinations outside Iran. After restoration, reachable IPs increased nearly fourfold to ~0.07% (~8,000), with most newly reachable addresses originating from Noyan Abr Arvan Co. (ASN 202468), indicating expansion rather than removal of the allowlist.

§4.1.1 evaluation

Before the May 26 restoration, Iran's inbound allowlist granted near-full access (100%) to university ASes (e.g., Shahid Beheshti University AS56765, Iran University of Medical Sciences AS47981) while major residential ISPs had <2% pass rates, demonstrating that the Iranian allowlist enforces differentiated access by institution type rather than a uniform policy. Additionally, roughly half of allowlisted IPs experienced no SNI filtering at all, while the other half faced domain-specific RSTs, suggesting non-uniform application-layer policies even among privileged addresses.

§4.1.2 and §4.2 deployment

Unlike the Great Firewall of China, Iran's SNI-triggered blocking produces no residual interference: after a TCP RST caused by a sensitive SNI, subsequent connections from the same source IP using benign or randomly generated SNIs proceed normally without additional disruption. This behavior was observed consistently before and after the May 26, 2026 partial restoration.

§4.2 detection

Iran layers SNI-based domain blocking on top of its IP allowlist: even source IPs permitted by the allowlist trigger TCP RSTs when a TLS ClientHello contains a sensitive SNI value. Randomly generated, non-existent domain names pass through without triggering resets, confirming the blocking operates as a domain-name blocklist rather than a generic TLS fingerprinting rule. Blocking behavior was highly consistent, with 97.4% of (source IP, SNI) pairs producing identical outcomes across three test repetitions.

§4.2 detection

Iran's SNI filtering is applied inconsistently across allowlisted users: among 737 tested allowlisted IP addresses, approximately half experienced no SNI filtering at all and could reach destinations even using previously-reported blocked domains. For IPs subject to filtering, 49.9% of requests containing hrw.org and 50.2% containing tiktok.com triggered RSTs, while only 0.5% of requests with youtube.com were blocked — suggesting differential access policies tied to specific domains and user classes even within the allowlisted population.

§4.2 detection

'Resource Inaccessible' was the most frequently reported issue (61% of 119 submitted reports) during a month of naturalistic Tor Browser browsing, followed by CAPTCHAs (18%), Broken Content (17%), Other Issues (13%), and Timeouts (5%). These categories document the operational failure modes that degrade everyday Tor Browser usability beyond protocol-level censorship.

2026-micallef-reportor-facilitating-user §6.1, Figure 3 ip-blockingmeasurement-platform

IODA Active Probing shows Iran's global Internet connectivity dropped to approximately 3% on February 28, 2026, and had not recovered as of the report date (59+ days). This matches the near-3% floor seen during the January 2026 protests shutdown, establishing a repeatable operational baseline for the regime's tiered blocking posture.

2026-wkrp-internet-pro-tiered IODA Data: The Discrepancy in the Signals measurement-platformip-blocking

IODA telescope and Google Product signals, corroborated by Cloudflare Radar and Kentik traffic data, show selective whitelist restoration: Google Search and Images are accessible via the NIN while Google Maps is not, and IranCell (AS44244) shows a slight diurnal Telescope traffic increase consistent with 'Internet Pro' access—demonstrating that selective per-service and per-ASN whitelisting is operationally active.

2026-wkrp-internet-pro-tiered IODA Data: The Discrepancy in the Signals ip-blockingmeasurement-platform

During the June 2025 Israel-Iran war, IODA observed that BGP routing announcements remained largely intact while Active Probing and Telescope signals showed a near-total Internet blackout—a 'stealth blackout' technique that hides shutdown actions behind maintained routing infrastructure. This pattern was replicated in the February 28, 2026 shutdown, where Active Probing dropped to ~3% while BGP remained stable.

2026-wkrp-internet-pro-tiered The New Normal in Comparative Perspective ip-blockingmeasurement-platform

Cloud-hosted services represent an open measurement problem for ZMap because IPs are shared, ephemeral, and behind CDN layers, making traditional IP-to-service attribution unreliable. The paper identifies reconciling scan-based observation with cloud infrastructure as a key challenge for the next decade.

2024-durumeric-ten-years-zmap Abstract — open problems measurement-platformip-blocking

IPv6 measurement remains an open problem for ZMap because the address space is too large for exhaustive single-packet enumeration, unlike IPv4. This asymmetry means IPv6-addressed infrastructure is structurally harder to enumerate via blocklisting.

2024-durumeric-ten-years-zmap Abstract — open problems measurement-platformip-blocking