FINDING · DETECTION
Libya's 2011 Internet shutdown combined two distinct censor techniques across separate episodes: BGP-level route withdrawal and later packet filtering. During the packet-filtering episode, γC remained near its pre-censorship baseline (~2.0 packets/flow) even as the number of reachable Conficker sources dropped, confirming that the mechanism was per-subnet allowlisting rather than link saturation.
From 2013-benson-gaining — Gaining Insight into AS-level Outages through Analysis of Internet Background Radiation · §IV-C · 2013 · Traffic Monitoring and Analysis
Implications
- When facing packet-filtering censorship, circumvention clients should not interpret reduced throughput as network failure; per-flow retransmit behavior remaining normal indicates targeted filtering that may be bypassable via different source subnets or IP ranges.
- Monitoring γ alongside source-count metrics allows accurate classification of censorship modality, informing whether to switch protocols (filtering) or wait for restoration (transient congestion).
Tags
Extracted by claude-sonnet-4-6 — review before relying.