http3-quic-block   QUIC / HTTP/3 blocking

After the shutdown lifted (Scan 3), DNS-over-UDP degraded severely — 89.18% of the 9,000 queried domains were affected — but the paper attributes this to general UDP transport instability rather than domain-specific censorship, corroborated by GitHub user reports of ongoing UDP issues. TCP-based protocols (HTTP, TLS) returned to pre-shutdown censorship levels (~15%) in Scan 3, confirming the post-shutdown persistence effect was UDP-specific and not a broadening of the blocklist.

2026-anon-insights-into-iranian §2.2.4, Table 1 evaluation

In the pre-shutdown scan (Scan 2), Iran's QUIC censorship jumped from 1 domain (0.01%) to 9,000 domains (100%) via complete UDP Initial-packet drops, while DNS-over-TCP censorship spiked from 15.12% to 96.68% of 9,000 queried domains. Both changes preceded the full blackout by roughly 5 days, indicating they were preparatory measures rather than incidental. After the shutdown lifted, QUIC remained 100% blocked while DNS-over-TCP returned to baseline (15.38%).

2026-anon-insights-into-iranian §2.2, Table 1 evaluation

Iran's June 2025 shutdown was enforced using fine-grained, service-level techniques rather than BGP withdrawals or a single 'big switch' event: individual protocols were selectively blocked before and after the 7-day full blackout (June 18–25), with the total preparation and recovery periods each lasting roughly 4–5 days. Cloudflare Radar showed HTTP traffic reaching near-zero by June 18 but partial recovery already on June 21, while the authors' vantage point (AS57497) remained unreachable until June 25, confirming heterogeneous recovery across Iranian networks.

2026-anon-insights-into-iranian §2, §3 deployment

The paper demonstrates that two protocol-specific censorship changes — QUIC blocking reaching 100% and DNS-over-TCP blocking reaching 96.68% — both occurred in the scan conducted immediately before Iran's June 18 full blackout, and that similar shutdown preparations were also documented before Iran's January 2026 shutdown. The authors hypothesize that continuous long-term measurement of protocol-specific censorship rates could provide advance warning of impending shutdowns before they come into full effect.

2026-anon-insights-into-iranian §3, §4 evaluation

Russia's TSPU devices began dropping all international QUIC traffic on approximately February 26, 2022, coinciding with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The filter identified QUIC flows by requiring the first UDP packet destined to port 443 to be at least 1001 bytes and contain the 4-byte QUIC version 1 header (0x00000001); QUIC traffic from Russia to Cloudflare dropped 46% within days. The TSPU maintained 420-second state on the 4-tuple and applied residual censorship to all subsequent packets.

2026-heitmann-russia-s-early-introduction §2.2 detection

Russia's TSPU devices switched from broad QUIC blocking to SNI-dependent QUIC censorship between May 2022 and July 2023—at least nine months before the GFW introduced SNI-based QUIC censorship, which was previously considered the first of its kind. This transition was discussed only on Russian-language forums (ntc.party) and went unnoticed by the international research community for approximately three years.

2026-heitmann-russia-s-early-introduction §2.3, §4 evaluation

Testing the Tranco Top 100k domain list from Russian vantage points shows that all 2,644 domains blocked over TLS SNI are also blocked over QUIC SNI, and domains accessible via TLS are accessible via QUIC—indicating the TSPU maintains a unified SNI blocklist across protocols. Additionally, 31 domain patterns including discord.com exhibit 'residual clearance': QUIC connections to those domains are not censored when immediately preceded by non-censored data on the same 4-tuple; 22 domains are only blocked on port 443.

2026-heitmann-russia-s-early-introduction §3, Table 3 evaluation

Reproducing Zohaib et al.'s 10-payload QUIC parser test suite against Russian TSPU devices reveals that the Russian QUIC parser differs meaningfully from the GFW: payload 8 (PING and PADDING frames inserted before the Crypto frame), which circumvents the GFW, does not bypass Russian censorship. Payload 10 (QUICv2) bypasses both censors. Payload 9 (ECH with outer SNI cloudflare-ech.com) is blocked by Russia; payload 3 (version bytes 0x00000002 with invalid MAC) is blocked by both.

2026-heitmann-russia-s-early-introduction Appendix B, Table 2 evaluation

As measured from three Russian vantage points in March–April 2026, TSPU devices decrypt QUIC Initial packets, locate the SNI extension in the embedded TLS handshake, and drop packets with forbidden domains plus all subsequent packets on the 4-tuple for 420 seconds (timer resets on each packet). Censorship is unidirectional (outgoing only), covers all destination ports up to 65535 at Saint Petersburg and Novosibirsk (Moscow exempts 22% of system ports 1–1023), and targets only QUICv1—QUICv2 passes uncensored at all vantage points.

2026-heitmann-russia-s-early-introduction §3 detection

As of October 2024, 22% (~220K) of Tranco top-1M domains support QUIC; of those, only 12.8% (~28K) are fully QUICstep-compatible (support IP-address migration). However, port-migration support grew 20% in 3 months (26,234 → 31,262 domains from August to late September 2024). Cloudflare hosts 74.6% of QUIC-supporting domains but only 0.2% support connection migration; if Cloudflare enabled it, 87.2% of QUIC-supporting domains would become compatible. Among QUIC-SNI-blocked domains in China (28,458 total), 2,404 (8.45%) support QUIC and 828 (34.4%) of those are QUICstep-compatible today.

2026-lee-quicstep §4.2, Table 1, Fig 3 deployment

QUICstep successfully circumvents the GFW's QUIC SNI censorship (active since April 2024) in live testing. Using an Alibaba VM in mainland China as client and an AWS instance in North Virginia as server, a native QUIC client was blocked after several fetches of youtube.com SNI, while QUICstep consistently succeeded across 50 consecutive fetches. 7 tiktokcdn.com subdomains that were QUIC-SNI blocked were also reliably accessible via QUICstep. The approach routes only QUIC long-header (handshake) packets through a WireGuard tunnel; all subsequent short-header (data) packets travel the native path.

2026-lee-quicstep §4.3.2, §3.2.3 evaluation

A censor attempting to block QUICstep by dropping all QUIC connections that arrive without a preceding Initial/Handshake packet would cause significant collateral damage. Analysis of 24-hour campus traces (3,786,050 unique QUIC connections) found 29.1% (1,100,439 connections) lacked QUIC Initial or Handshake packets—representing legitimate connection migration from mobile handoffs and similar events. This high baseline rate means blanket "no handshake" blocking would disrupt roughly 1-in-3 QUIC connections unrelated to circumvention.

2026-lee-quicstep §5 (Blocking all QUIC connection migrated traffic) detection

QUICstep reduces proxy (handshake channel) traffic by a median of 93% across 100 tested domains compared to full VPN tunneling. For www.youtube.com specifically, proxy traffic dropped from 3.634 MB (full VPN) to 96 KB (QUICstep), a 97.4% reduction. Page load time improved by up to 84% versus full VPN. Performance gain is greatest when the handshake channel is bandwidth-limited (1–5 Mbps): QUICstep/VPN ratios of 0.07–0.09 at 1 Mbps, 0.34–0.46 at 5 Mbps from London to nearby proxies. Psiphon's free tier (2 Mbps) and Tor (~10 Mbps median) are both well within the bandwidth regime where QUICstep provides substantial gains.

2026-lee-quicstep §4.4.3, Fig 7, Table 2 evaluation

When the domain burn rate β = λdisc/λintro exceeds 1, time-average availability is bounded by A ≤ 1/β regardless of rotation speed µ, endpoint count n, or domain buffer kmax (Theorem 2). Rotation speed µ appears only in the address factor, which redundancy already saturates, and is entirely absent from the binding domain layer — proving that 'rotate faster' is categorically the wrong design lever under a domain-filtering censor.

2026-maiti-block-a-mole-sustainability-frontier §6, Theorem 2 evaluation

In April 2024 the GFW began decrypting QUIC Initial packets at scale and blocking connections by domain rather than by IP address, targeting the exact transport layer that modern moving-target circumvention systems rely on for session continuity. Because blocking a registrable domain costs the censor essentially zero collateral (unlike blocking a hyperscaler IP range), the censor's optimal Stackelberg budget split allocates f* = 0.97 of its discovery budget to the domain channel once the defender runs n ≥ 2 endpoints (§8.10, Figure 7). GFWatch measurements show hundreds of thousands of domains persistently blocked.

2026-maiti-block-a-mole-sustainability-frontier §1, §3, §6, §8.10, Figure 7 detection

During full Iranian blackouts, WebRTC and all UDP/QUIC traffic were completely blocked. DNS-over-QUIC (DoQ) could complete a handshake but the censor severed the connection after a single post-handshake data packet, rendering it unusable for tunneling.

2026-tuleo1-internet-analysis-shutdown Issue body (WebRTC/UDP paragraph) detection

Small random per-session perturbations (±bytes per range) to Dodge-mimic extended manifests fully compensate for HPACK header compression in HTTP/2, yielding vRF accuracy of 10.5–14.2% for k=10 — indistinguishable from HTTP/1.1 results and near the theoretical bound. Because HTTP/3-QUIC uses analogous QPACK compression, the approach generalizes to the dominant future transport.

2026-witwer-dodge-client-side-framework §5.4, Table 3 defense

Neither China nor Iran directly block ECH ClientHello messages; instead both effectively prevent ECH by censoring encrypted DNS resolvers. China blocks Cloudflare's DoH/DoT resolver (mozilla.cloudflare-dns.com) via SNI-based blocking in TLS and QUIC, causing residual censorship of up to 360 and 180 seconds respectively. Iran blocks both Cloudflare and NextDNS DoH hostnames via DNS block-page injection, TLS TCP RST, and HTTP block pages. Iran cannot analyze QUIC, so DoQ is uncensored and enables ECH in Iran. China's NextDNS IP blackholing affected only one of two resolved IPs, leaving an uncensored path.

2025-niere-encrypted §5, Table 1, Figure 5 detection

During the June 2025 blackout, virtually all UDP-based protocols were blocked across major Iranian networks — WireGuard, AmneziaWG, QUIC, WebRTC, and OpenVPN — with the sole deliberate exception of UDP port 53 (DNS), preserved to avoid cascading failures in internal infrastructure.

2025-piotrowska-nym-iran-blackout Protocol-level blocking detection

Censorship enforcement varies dramatically across Iranian ASes. AS58224 (TCI, 3.6M IPs) blocks 89-98% of IPs across DNS injectors and 87.6% for UDP. AS197207 (MCCI, 2.3M IPs) and AS44244 (IranCell, 1.3M IPs) show near-zero censorship (0.15-0.76% across injectors). AS31549 (RASANA, 577k IPs) blocks 97-99% for DNS/HTTP but 64% for UDP. Some IPs— including those belonging to the Iranian President's website and Ministry of Foreign Affairs—are deliberately exempted from bidirectional censorship. Two exempted MFA IPs (109.201.19.184 and 109.201.27.67) appear linked to APT15 (Playful Taurus) C&C infrastructure.

2025-tai-irblock §5.1, §5.2, Table 1 evaluation

Over 2.5 months (Nov 2024–Jan 15, 2025), IRBlock scanned all 11M Iranian IPv4 addresses daily, finding 6.8M IPs subject to DNS poisoning and HTTP blockpage injection, and 5.4M IPs subject to UDP-based traffic disruption. Testing over 700M FQDNs (500M apex domains) revealed 6M banned FQDNs from 3.3M censored apex domains. Of 537 active ASes in Iran, 485 (90.3%) exhibited blocking for at least 25% of assigned IPs. DNS and HTTP censorship overlapped at >99% of censored IPs; UDP blocking was a strict subset of DNS-censored IPs, affecting ~5M addresses.

2025-tai-irblock §5.1, §1 evaluation

The computational cost of decrypting QUIC Initial packets limits the GFW's throughput: blocking effectiveness drops measurably as cross-border QUIC traffic increases and exhibits a diurnal pattern, falling during China's peak traffic hours. In a controlled experiment, sending QUIC Initial packets at 100–1500 kpps (TTL-limited so they reach the GFW but not end-hosts) caused GFW censorship effectiveness to decrease monotonically with sending rate, while equal-rate random-payload UDP traffic produced no such degradation—confirming the bottleneck is QUIC decryption, not raw bandwidth. A related availability attack using IP-spoofed QUIC Initials from one machine can cause the GFW to drop all UDP traffic between arbitrary Chinese hosts and any foreign endpoint for the 180-second residual window.

2025-zohaib-quic-sni §3.4 / §5 detection

Since April 7, 2024, the GFW decrypts every QUIC client Initial packet at China's national border and blocks connections whose TLS ClientHello SNI matches a QUIC-specific blocklist. Blocking takes the form of dropping all subsequent UDP packets sharing the same (src-IP, dst-IP, dst-port) 3-tuple for 180 seconds—with no RST injection. The GFW applies a source-port heuristic: packets with src-port ≤ dst-port are not inspected, capturing >92% of real QUIC client Initials while processing only ~30% of all UDP traffic. The QUIC blocklist contains 58,207 unique FQDNs (Tranco, Oct 2024– Jan 2025), approximately 60% of the DNS blocklist in size; 33% of blocked FQDNs do not actually support QUIC, suggesting the list was derived from an existing domain-name blocklist rather than live QUIC service discovery.

2025-zohaib-quic-sni §3 / §3.1 / §3.3 / §4 detection

The GFW's QUIC censor does not reassemble QUIC client Initial packets that are split across multiple UDP datagrams, nor does it reassemble QUIC CRYPTO frames split within a single datagram. Three practical bypasses follow: (1) send any UDP datagram with a random payload before the QUIC Initial—the GFW uses 60-second UDP flow state and won't inspect a mid-flow packet; (2) fragment the TLS ClientHello SNI across multiple QUIC CRYPTO frames; (3) use an unknown QUIC version number in the first packet (Version Negotiation bypass, payload undecryptable). Chrome independently exploits (2) through its Chaos Protection feature (since 2021) and post-quantum Kyber key-agreement (since v124, Sep 2024), whose larger key sizes force fragmentation across UDP datagrams. As of January 2025, the GFW also does not block ECH-containing QUIC payloads unless the outer (cleartext) SNI is on the blocklist.

2025-zohaib-quic-sni §3.2 / §7 defense

The TLS-Attacker suite is being extended to cover QUIC and DTLS 1.3 under a universal analysis framework that reuses existing Workflow Trace and Modifiable Variable machinery with only protocol-specific components added. As of 2024 the QUIC dialect is functional, making TLS-Attacker the only open-source tool that can fuzz TLS, DTLS, and QUIC handshakes under a single scriptable API.

2024-niere-tls-attacker §2 Development / §3 Outlook evaluation

Russia's TSPU ("Средства противодействия угрозам") system is deployed inline at individual ISP edges rather than at centralized internet exchange points, producing substantial per-ISP heterogeneity: some providers apply layer-7 SNI/Host filtering while others rely primarily on IP-prefix blocklists, and QUIC/HTTP3 is blocked at several major providers. Rollout timing and enforcement depth vary measurably across autonomous systems, meaning a single "Russia passes/fails" test fixture systematically underestimates blocking coverage.

2024-xue-tspu-russia §4–§5 deployment

In China (AS45090), HTTP/3 over QUIC has a lower overall failure rate (27.1%) than HTTPS over TCP (37.3%), but hosts that time out during the TCP handshake (TCP-hs-to, indicating IP blocking) always also fail over QUIC — while hosts blocked via TLS-hs-to or conn-reset (SNI-based methods) nearly always succeed over QUIC.

2021-elmenhorst-web §5.1, Table 1, Figure 3a evaluation

In India (AS55836), TCP and QUIC failure rates closely track each other (15.0% vs 12.0%), with every TCP-hs-to and route-err failure matched by a corresponding QUIC failure, confirming IP-based blocking affects both protocols equally. In contrast, India AS14061 (VPS) shows 16.3% TCP failure entirely from route-err but only 0.1% QUIC failure, suggesting the VPS vantage point sits outside the censored path.

2021-elmenhorst-web §5.1, Table 1, Figure 3b detection

In Iran (AS62442), HTTPS connections fail at 34.4% (mostly TLS-hs-to, consistent with SNI filtering), while HTTP/3 over QUIC fails at only 16.2%. SNI spoofing reduces TCP failure from 60.1% to 10.2% but has zero effect on QUIC (20.1% both with real and spoofed SNI), indicating Iranian censors apply separate UDP endpoint blocking to QUIC rather than SNI-based identification.

2021-elmenhorst-web §5.2, Table 3 detection

Only approximately 5% of domains from the combined Citizen Lab and Tranco Top-4000 test lists supported QUIC in early 2021, heavily skewing the measurable set toward large global .com domains (e.g., Google properties). This bias means the study predominantly captures censorship of internationally targeted sites rather than country-specific domains.

2021-elmenhorst-web §4.3 evaluation

Across all four studied countries (China, Iran, India, Kazakhstan), HTTP/3 over QUIC had consistently lower failure rates than HTTPS over TCP: 27.1% vs 37.3% in China, 16.2% vs 34.4% in Iran, and 12.0% vs 15.0% in India (AS55836). The only QUIC-specific interference method observed was black-holing during the QUIC handshake (QUIC-hs-to); no RST injection or SNI-based QUIC filtering was detected.

2021-elmenhorst-web §5, Table 1 evaluation