WATER (WebAssembly Transport Executables at Runtime) defines a pluggable-transport architecture in which the transport logic is compiled to a WASM module that is loaded and executed at runtime by a thin Go host process. This separates the stable host ABI (dial, accept, read, write) from the rapidly-evolving transport logic, allowing new or updated transports to be delivered as small WASM binaries without recompiling or redeploying the host application.

Because WATER uses a sing-box-compatible interface, a single WASM transport module written once is immediately usable by any application that embeds the WATER host runtime — including lantern-box (Lantern's proxy SDK), any other sing-box-derived client (33k+ GitHub stars as of 2024), and standalone WATER host binaries. This gives each new transport a substantially larger deployment surface than a single-app pluggable transport achieves.

§4 deployment

Internal Geedge documents confirm active contracts to deploy GFW-derived censorship and surveillance infrastructure in Myanmar, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, and at least one additional unidentified country under the Belt and Road framework, in addition to domestic deployments in Xinjiang, Jiangsu, and Fujian. The exported product (the Tiangou Secure Gateway / TSG line) is not a stripped-down export variant — leaked TSG documentation shows DPI, active-probing, ML classifiers, and granular per-region traffic control rules that mirror the domestic GFW capability set.

2025-geedge-mesa-leak §5, §6 dpiactive-probingml-classifiersni-blockingdns-poisoningfully-encrypted-detecttraffic-shape

InterSecLab's 76-page analysis of the Geedge/MESA leak (based on nine months of indexing and translating >100,000 documents) characterizes the Tiangou Secure Gateway (TSG) product line as a commercially deployable detection stack that combines deep packet inspection, real-time mobile subscriber monitoring, active probing, ML-based traffic classifiers, and granular per-region rule sets. TSG is not a research prototype — leaked documentation includes deployment timelines and client government interactions for Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Myanmar, and one unnamed country, with censorship rules explicitly tailored to each region.

2025-interseclab-internet-coup §3–§5 (InterSecLab report) dpiactive-probingml-classifiersni-blockingip-blockingtraffic-shapefully-encrypted-detect

Censorship classifiers and traffic analysis attacks consistently exploit the initial seconds of a proxy connection, where packet-size, inter-arrival-time, and burst features are maximally discriminative. Cited work demonstrates that website fingerprinting classifiers trained solely on the first few seconds of Tor traffic achieve high accuracy, and real-world GFW detection of fully-encrypted protocols also targets early-connection bytes.

2025-pereira-extended §1 traffic-shapewebsite-fingerprintml-classifierdpifully-encrypted-detect

The GFW detects fully encrypted protocols using ad-hoc rules including the percentage of printable ASCII characters per packet (threshold: over 50%) and the observation that FEP entropy is considerably higher than normal encrypted TLS traffic. These rules are subject to frequent changes, making rigid FEP designs unable to adapt.

2025-wilson-extended §1 fully-encrypted-detectdpitraffic-shape

WATER (WebAssembly Transport Executables Runtime) separates transport logic from the host application by compiling it to a WASM module (WATM) that is distributed and loaded independently at runtime. Deploying a new or updated circumvention technique requires only distributing the new WATM binary and optional configuration — no change to the host application and no app-store update cycle is required.

2024-chi-just §1, §3 dpifully-encrypted-detecttraffic-shape

Against censors that detect blacklisted application protocols by examining only the first 30 packets of a flow (e.g., the technique in Wang et al. 2015), a single IP migration after 30 packets have been exchanged is sufficient to defeat detection while incurring minimal performance overhead—the client continues the connection normally on the new address.

2020-govil-mimiq §5 dpitraffic-shapefully-encrypted-detect