In South Korea, adult websites (e.g., hardsextube.com) were censored exclusively via HTTP content substitution — a JavaScript redirect to the official blockpage http://warning.or.kr — with 98% of content-size-ratio samples falling below the 0.3 detection threshold, while no DNS tampering or TCP-level blocking was observed. All other tested countries had fewer than 16% of samples below the threshold.
From 2015-aceto-monitoring — Monitoring Internet Censorship with UBICA
· §3.2
· 2015
· Traffic Monitoring and Analysis
Implications
In environments where DNS and TCP-layer blocking are absent, enforcing HTTPS (TLS) provides complete protection against HTTP-layer content injection, since the censor's only lever is in-path HTTP substitution.
The sharp bimodal distribution of content-size ratios (mode near 0 for censored country, mode near 1 for uncensored) validates content-size ratio as a high-precision classifier — circumvention clients can use it as a lightweight runtime health-check to confirm tunnel effectiveness.