2020-ramesh-decentralized
findings extracted from this paper
-
Of 44,797 CDN-served domains on the April 2019 Roskomnadzor blocklist, 99.6% (44,615) were hosted on Cloudflare—attributable to Cloudflare's free tier with minimal vetting enabling rapid mirror-domain creation by blocked operators; the blocklist also contained 1,769 responsive circumvention-related domains, confirming that circumvention infrastructure is an active and documented blocklist target.
-
Seven years of Roskomnadzor blocklist history (Nov 2012–April 2019) show the list grew to 132,798 unique domains and 324,695 unique IPs, with a dramatic spike in 2018 when Russia blocked Telegram by adding subnets covering approximately 16 million IP addresses—producing major collateral damage to co-hosted Google and Amazon services and illustrating that subnet-level blocking is the blunt instrument of last resort for CDN-hosted targets.
-
Data center VPSes predominantly experienced TCP connection timeouts and resets—with the highest-blocking VPS censoring 96.8% of tested domains—while residential ISPs were substantially more likely to inject explicit blockpages citing Roskomnadzor's registry, confirming that blocking mechanism varies significantly by network tier even when blocking rates are similar.
-
Despite Russia's decentralized ISP ecosystem, 9 of 14 residential probes observed more than 90% of 98,098 tested blocklist domains blocked, and all 14 probes observed at least 49% blocked—demonstrating that coordinated nationwide censorship without centralized choke-points is achievable through legal mandates and commodity equipment alone.
-
Quack (which probes censorship on port 7/echo servers) detected substantially less blocking than Satellite (DNS-based): approximately 50% of Quack vantage points observed no blocking and ~90% observed only minor blocking, whereas Satellite observed major interference at most vantage points; the authors attribute this gap to Russian ISPs applying filtering predominantly on ports 80 and 443, leaving non-standard ports largely unfiltered.