Game-theoretic simulation shows that a QoS-cautious, wealthy Chinese censor (profile T1/T4) cannot reduce decoy-accessible routes below ~27% (censorship metric ≈ 0.277) via the RAD attack regardless of budget. An irrational censor can achieve a censorship metric of 1.000 but only by making 70.3% of all Internet routes unreachable to Chinese users—a collateral-damage threshold that constrains rational nation-state censors in practice.

Internet connectivity is the primary determinant of RAD attack strength across nation-state censors: China (573 ASes, 858 ring ASes) achieves a censorship metric of 0.277 under profile T1, while Syria (4 ASes, 5 ring ASes) achieves only 0.101 with the same decoy budget. Venezuela, despite fewer total ASes than Saudi Arabia (44 vs. 107), achieves a higher censorship metric (0.210 vs. 0.197) owing to its disproportionately large ring AS count (835 vs. 176), confirming that ring AS count predicts RAD capability better than raw AS count.

§6.4 / Table 6 evaluation

Optimal RAD by a QoS-cautious wealthy Chinese censor (profile T1, F/ρ₀ = 5×10^6) forces 10.8% of routes onto non-valley-free (NVF) paths and 1.2% onto less-preferred routes, while still leaving 16.3% of routes traversing decoy ASes—zero routes become unreachable at this budget. The NVF and less-preferred-route fractions rise and then fall as decoy budget increases, as further RAD routing gains diminish past a crossover point.

§6.4 / Figure 1 detection

The game-theoretic optimal decoy placement (ε-Nash equilibrium via best-response dynamics against an optimal RAD adversary) achieves a censorship metric of 0.2 at budget ratio F/ρ₀ = 10^8, versus 0.42 for the best prior heuristic ('sorted' placement from Houmansadr et al. [14]) under the same budget—a 2× improvement in censorship resistance per dollar. Prior comparisons used ad hoc RAD deployments rather than the optimal adversary, understating the benefit of principled placement.

§6.4 / Figure 3 evaluation

In the autonomous (non-centrally-funded) deployment model, the decoy service fee γ (ratio of decoy revenue to transit revenue per MB) is the primary lever for censorship resistance: for China with profile T1, γ = 5 leaves 9.6% of routes usable for circumvention after optimal RAD, compared to 16.3% under the centrally-funded model at budget ratio F/ρ₀ = 5×10^6. Higher fees compensate ASes for RAD-induced transit revenue loss and sustain participation, but the autonomous model delivers roughly half the censorship resistance of a centrally-funded deployment at comparable incentive levels.

§6.5 / Figure 5 defense

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

On March 28, 2022, Russian ISP RTComm (AS8342) hijacked Twitter's IPv4 prefix 104.244.42.0/24 for approximately 45 minutes (12:05–12:50 UTC) and announced it to the global Internet as a blocking measure. The hijack was blunted because Twitter had preemptively registered RPKI route origin authorizations (ROAs) for its prefixes, causing RPKI-validating ASes worldwide to reject the hijacked route.

2023-ramesh-network §4.3 bgp-hijackasn-blackholing

For China (a highly connected, routing-capable adversary), the gossip protocol combined with any symmetric decoy routing design requires only 5 heavyweight downstream stations plus 880 lightweight upstream gossip stations — versus 880 heavyweight stations for purely symmetric designs. Five downstream stations alone impact 78% of routes from Chinese users, while a single downstream station already covers nearly 25% of traffic.

2018-bocovich-secure Table 2 / §3.2 bgp-hijack

Any one of five Indian ASes — each needing control of only its BGP-speaking routers — can individually censor traffic for all ~896 Indian ASes via IP prefix hijacking. For example, AS4755 (Tata Comm.) fake advertisements can impact 955 ASes total (896 Indian + 41 foreign); AS9730 (Bharti Telesonic) requires as few as 7 edge routers to execute such an attack.

2017-gosain-mending §4.3, Table 4 bgp-hijack

If India deployed centralized filtering at its key ASes, approximately 121,931 foreign-origin paths (1.15% of all Internet paths to censored sites worldwide) that transit Indian ASes would experience collateral blocking, affecting non-Indian users in Finland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, the US, and elsewhere who have no connection to Indian censorship law.

2017-gosain-mending §4.1, §4.4 ip-blockingbgp-hijack

Through Internet-scale BGP simulation against China, downstream-only decoy routing (Waterfall) with a single decoy AS provides equivalent resistance to routing attacks as a traditional upstream decoy system (e.g., Telex) with 53 decoy ASes. This efficiency gain arises because censoring ISPs can selectively re-route upstream traffic per destination but must re-route all or none of downstream traffic through each provider AS, making downstream-only routing far more expensive to evade.

2017-nasr-waterfall §4.1.1 bgp-hijack