Over 11,700,000 DNS requests across 6 days at ICSI's border network and 15,200,000 DNS transactions in a 1.5-hour trace at UC Berkeley's border, secondary differing DNS replies were essentially absent in normal traffic, yielding effectively 0 false positives. Only two benign authority servers produced anomalous dual replies at Berkeley—one for the BBC returning two addresses within the same /24, one for businessinsider.com returning a SERVFAIL—neither of which would disrupt a Hold-On resolver.

Without DNSSEC, Hold-On can be defeated by a sophisticated censor that crafts injected packets with TTL and timing matching the expected legitimate reply, injecting just before its predicted arrival. When combined with DNSSEC, Hold-On is robust even against this attack because the censor cannot forge a valid DNSSEC signature; injection can still cause a denial-of-service by forcing a 'Bogus' result, but Hold-On prevents that by waiting for the legitimate validating reply.

§VI defense

A prototype Hold-On DNS proxy introduced no perceptible additional latency for either cached or uncached DNS queries in live testing; query-time measurements for both sets of names overlapped entirely with baseline (Hold-On disabled) measurements. The Hold-On timer (set to 5 seconds initial, 10s second try, 15s third try) is only reached under anomalous conditions; under normal operation the resolver returns as soon as the legitimate reply validates.

§V.B evaluation

On-path censors commonly operate on traffic mirrors rather than inline (in-path), making their systems failure-tolerant and easier to deploy. This architectural choice means on-path injectors cannot suppress the legitimate DNS reply—both the forged and authentic replies reach the resolver—creating a detectable anomaly. The same structural weakness applies to TCP RST injection and other on-path packet injection attacks.

§I, §II.A detection

In approximately 100,000 DNS queries over 9 days from within a censored network, injected packets were reliably distinguishable: legitimate IP TTLs were stable at either 44 or 42, while injected TTL values ranged across [0–255], and injected packets arrived well before legitimate replies because the injector co-resided within the same ISP while the recursive resolver was in another country. With a TTL threshold of ±1 and an RTT threshold of 0.5× expected RTT, the Hold-On prototype achieved 0% false positive rate and 0% false negative rate.

§IV.B, Table I evaluation

The June 2025 Iran shutdown—carried out during the Iran-Israel war beginning ~June 19—did not use BGP route withdrawals as in 2019. Instead, authorities applied service-level restrictions at the national border: DNS poisoning of foreign destinations, protocol whitelisting permitting only pre-approved domestic services, and DPI to block circumvention-tool traffic. Iran's international traffic fell roughly 90% while the country's BGP routes remained advertised, making the shutdown invisible to BGP-based monitoring systems. OONI measurement volume, which totalled 121,333 in June 2025, collapsed to under 200 submissions on June 19-20.

2025-iran-shutdown-measurement Executive Summary / §2 dpidns-poisoningport-blockingip-blocking

Article 19 documents that Iran's National Information Network (NIN / SHOMA) was designed with explicit reference to China's Great Firewall as a model, with institutional mirroring: Iran's Supreme Council of Cyberspace parallels China's Cyberspace Administration of China, and both governments share a "cyber sovereignty" doctrine used to justify domestic content controls and cross-border technology transfer. The report frames Iran's filtering infrastructure as deliberately architected to replicate GFW capabilities, not as an independently developed system.

2026-article19-tightening-the-net §2, §3 dpisni-blockingdns-poisoningip-blockingbgp-hijackthrottling

Article 19 documents that Iran combines technical filtering with formal coercion of major foreign platforms (including Telegram, Instagram, and WhatsApp) to comply with content removal orders under threat of full blocking. The report notes that Iran's 2022 Women Life Freedom protests accelerated platform blocking when foreign operators refused compliance, demonstrating that the censorship system operates in two modes: coerce-and-allow for compliant platforms, block for non-compliant ones. Domain fronting via these platforms is therefore subject to sudden revocation if political conditions change.

2026-article19-tightening-the-net §6 ip-blockingdns-poisoningthrottling

Both Firefox and Chromium leak cleartext DNS before establishing encrypted DNS connections: they first send an unencrypted UDP DNS query to resolve the DoH server's domain (e.g., doh.opendns.com). An in-path censor can intercept and poison this initial query, making encrypted DNS in browsers completely ineffective without additional circumvention of the resolver-lookup step. Additionally, Chromium always includes the SNI extension in the encrypted DNS TLS handshake (e.g., "doh.opendns.com"), leaking the resolver identity even after the initial lookup. No resolver requires SNI to be present for certificate validation when the resolver's IP certificate is configured.

2026-lange-towards §2.4, §7, §10 dns-poisoningsni-blocking

DNS censorship of encrypted protocols is inconsistent in both China and Iran. In China, Yandex resolvers are censored only when the SNI extension is present; omitting SNI bypasses censorship for these resolvers. In Iran, DoH requires SNI omission for Quad9, Google, Adguard, CleanBrowsing, and NextDNS resolvers, but works with SNI for Yandex and Cisco resolvers. These inconsistencies suggest resolvers have been accidentally missed by censors, highlighting the value of automated tools that trial all resolver-mode combinations rather than hard-coding a single strategy. The support evaluation found 47 resolvers supporting DoH, 16 supporting DoH3, and only 8 supporting DoQ out of ~65 tested.

2026-lange-towards §6.2, Table 2 dns-poisoningsni-blockingip-blocking

DPYProxy-DNS tested 8 circumvention modes against DNS censorship from vantage points in Iran (AS201295, Mashhad) and China (AS4837, China Unicom). In Iran, DoQ was entirely uncensored even with the SNI extension present; DoH3 worked for all Cloudflare and NextDNS resolvers. Iran's censor operates in-path (not on-path like the GFW), making the "Last Response" mode (wait 3s for the last UDP reply) ineffective in Iran but highly effective in China. Auto-mode averaged 12.32s (median 8.28s) in Iran and 13.78s (median 12.90s) in China to discover a working combination.

2026-lange-towards §6.2, §6.3 dns-poisoningsni-blockingip-blocking