Your State is Not Mine: A Closer Look at Evading Stateful Internet Censorship

Tested across 11 vantage points in 9 Chinese cities against 77 Alexa-ranked websites (50 trials each, April–May 2017), most prior TCB evasion strategies are largely broken: TCB creation with SYN achieves only 6.9% success (88.9% Failure 2), TCB teardown with FIN achieves only 11.1% success (87.9% Failure 2), while in-order data overlapping with TTL-based insertion still achieves 90.6% success and only 3.7% Failure 2. Without any evasion strategy the baseline success rate is 2.8%.

§3, Table 1 evaluation dpirst-injection cn

The GFW evolved to create a TCB not only on SYN packets but also on SYN/ACK packets, and enters a 're-synchronization state' upon seeing multiple SYN packets, multiple SYN/ACK packets, or a SYN/ACK with an incorrect acknowledgment number. Once in this state, it re-synchronizes its TCB using the next client-to-server data packet or server SYN/ACK, invalidating prior TCB-creation evasion strategies that assumed the GFW used only the first SYN sequence number.

§4 detection dpirst-injectionmiddlebox-interference cn

INTANG, a measurement-driven tool that caches the best-performing TCP evasion strategy per server IP, achieves an average success rate of 98.3% (range 93.7%–100%) from vantage points inside China. Four combined new strategies — Improved TCB Teardown, Improved In-order Data Overlapping, TCB Creation + Resync/Desync, and TCB Teardown + TCB Reversal — each independently achieve average success rates of 94.5%–96.2% inside China and 84.6%–92.7% outside China, with Failure 2 rates below 1.1%.

§7, Table 4 defense dpirst-injection cn

Packets carrying an unsolicited TCP MD5 option header (RFC 2385) are silently ignored by modern Linux servers (kernel ≥ 2.6) that have not negotiated MD5 authentication, yet are accepted and processed by the GFW as normal packets that update its TCB. Crucially, none of the observed middleboxes dropped packets with MD5 options, making the MD5 header the most universally applicable insertion packet type — usable with any TCP flag (SYN, RST, or data) and immune to middlebox filtering.

§5.3, Table 3 defense dpimiddlebox-interference cn

Client-side middleboxes at every tested vantage point interfere with IP-layer evasion tactics: Aliyun (6/11 nodes) discards all IP fragments, while the Tianjin China Unicom node drops packets with wrong TCP checksums or no TCP flag. IP-layer discrepancies that survive routers (e.g., IP total-length > actual length) are still dropped by some middleboxes, making IP-layer manipulations unreliable across Chinese ISPs. TCP-layer manipulations are significantly more consistent across paths.

§3, Table 2 evaluation middlebox-interferencedpi cn