DNSSEC's hierarchical delegation structure provides no protection against state-level censors: governments can legally compel top-level domain operators to alter records, and coerced results still validate because they are signed by the coerced-but-technically-legitimate authority — making end-to-end DNSSEC security insufficient to detect such attacks.

A browser-history survey found that approximately 8% of domain name resolutions involved typing in a genuinely new domain not reachable via an existing link, meaning a SDSI/petname delegation-based name system could serve roughly 92% of real-world Web navigation without requiring any out-of-band key exchange.

§4.5 evaluation

In a DHT-based censorship-resistant name system, poisoning attacks (injecting invalid mappings) are neutralized by requiring signature verification on stored values; eclipse attacks (isolating specific mappings from the network) require replication across multiple DHT nodes. Critically, decentralizing lookups from a single ISP resolver to a DHT shifts query visibility from ISPs to arbitrary peers, requiring per-query encryption keyed to secrets known only to the querying client to limit adversaries to confirmation attacks.

§4.4 defense

Pseudo-TLDs (e.g., '.key' for cryptographic-identifier namespaces, '.pet' for petname systems) allow multiple censorship-resistant name systems with distinct security trade-offs to coexist transparently alongside DNS via Name Service Switch configuration, with system-specific resolution logic applied per TLD and no application reconfiguration required by users.

§4.1 defense

In an adversary model where the censor may hold more computational power than all honest nodes combined, a squatting attack lets the adversary enumerate and pre-register every memorable name, formally proving it is impossible to simultaneously achieve memorable, secure, and global names in a single name system (Zooko's triangle).

§3 policy

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