Residual censorship—where a censor continues blocking all traffic on a 3- or 4-tuple after an initial censorship event—is active in China (HTTP: 90s 3-tuple RST injection; ESNI: 120–180s 3+4-tuple null routing), Iran (HTTP+SNI: 180s 4-tuple null routing, occasionally up to 5 minutes; protocol filter: 60s), and Kazakhstan (HTTP+SNI: 120s 4-tuple null routing). A December 2020 Quack scan found 3-tuple stateful disruption in 33 countries and null-routing censorship in 18, suggesting much broader applicability.

A low-bandwidth attacker can sustain indefinite availability attacks by periodically re-triggering residual censorship: China's 3-tuple HTTP system requires only 4 spoofed packets every 3 minutes. For 4-tuple systems requiring full source-port coverage (65,535 ports), Kazakhstan needs 1,093 packets/sec (~634 kbps HTTP) and Iran needs 729 packets/sec (~422 kbps HTTP)—achievable with commodity hardware. Iran achieved 100% attack success against all 17 geographically disparate victim vantage points tested.

§V.B, §VI evaluation

Switching source IP via VPN, Tor, or HTTP proxy is the primary victim-side mitigation because residual censorship is tuple-keyed; however, if the proxy entry node's path also crosses the censor, the attacker can redirect the attack at the proxy itself. On the censor side, null-routing middleboxes could eliminate the vulnerability by validating TCP sequence/acknowledgment numbers before dropping traffic, or by replacing null routing with an explicit block-page response.

§VII defense

All tested censors (China, Iran, Kazakhstan) can be triggered statelessly—without completing a TCP 3-way handshake—using a SYN with decremented sequence number followed by a PSH+ACK containing the forbidden payload. This stateless triggering enables fully off-path, source-spoofed attacks: an adversary with packet-spoofing capability can residually censor a victim pair they have no on-path access to.

§IV, §V.A detection

Iran and Kazakhstan reset the residual censorship timer whenever the censor observes any matching packet from the victim, so TCP retransmissions from the victim's own stack inadvertently extend the blocking window far beyond the nominal 120–180s. China's HTTP residual censorship has only ~50% per-request reliability from some vantage points due to heterogeneous GFW middlebox load-balancing, but reliability plateaus near 100% after 7 repeated censorship triggers sent ahead of time.

§IV (timer reset), §IV (reliability), Fig. 2 evaluation

The server-side variant of the blind VPN inference attack—where an in/on-path adversary exploits predictable NAT assignment and tunnel routing semantics to inject spoofed packets indistinguishable from legitimate encrypted traffic—has remained unacknowledged and unmitigated across all tested platforms since its concurrent disclosure in 2019. Unlike the client-side variant, which received partial fixes from Google (CVE-2019-9461, CVE-2024-49734) and Apple (iOS 17.2.1), no vendor has proposed a viable remediation or claimed ownership of the server-side attack surface.

2026-tolley-architectural §2.1, §3.1, §3.4 traffic-shaperst-injectionmiddlebox-interference

An internet-wide scan of 500k IP addresses from an in-country VPS vantage point found TCP establishment-interception injections on 43,479 addresses (8.7% of scanned), with over 70% concentrated in two Akamai ASes (AS16625 and AS20940). The injection pattern — triggered by the first packet sent to these addresses — is consistent with targeted blocking of domain-fronting proxies hosted on Akamai CDN.

2025-alaraj-iran-refraction §4.1.2 packet-injectionrst-injectionip-blocking

Iran's censorship of refraction-networking proxies (Conjure via Psiphon) is not monolithic: different ISPs independently deploy different techniques and timelines. Over 800 million logged Conjure connections from July 2023–February 2025 across 10+ Iranian ASes show TCI (AS58224, ~33% of traffic) uses packet injection, while MCCI/Hamrah-e Avval (AS197207, ~22%) applies IP-based blocking, and some ASes (Parsonline AS16322, Shatel AS31549) show no proxy blocking at all.

2025-alaraj-iran-refraction §4 rst-injectionip-blockingpacket-injectiondpi

Russian TSPU devices directly block ECH by dropping ClientHello messages that contain both an ECH extension and the outer SNI hostname "cloudflare-ech.com" — the static outer SNI Cloudflare advertises in all its ECH configurations. Blocking affects both TLS and QUIC. ECH connections to servers with Cloudflare ECH support but outside Cloudflare's official IP ranges are NOT blocked. TCP segmentation alone or TLS record fragmentation alone did NOT bypass TSPU ECH blocking, but combining both techniques did circumvent it. TSPU has also added TCP reassembly capabilities that defeat previously effective fragmentation-only bypasses.

2025-niere-encrypted §5, Figure 5 dpirst-injectionmiddlebox-interference

The GFI's HTTP and HTTPS filters are now stateful (requiring initial SYN packet with matching sequence numbers) and have been activated on all TCP ports—not only standard ports 80 and 443 as reported by prior studies. This is a significant departure from previous work that found stateless HTTP/HTTPS blocking limited to standard ports. The HTTP filter injects a 403 Forbidden blockpage (not RST packets as used by the GFW), while HTTPS injects a single RST+ACK packet. The GFI also exhibits TCP non-compliance (not requiring a full three-way handshake to trigger filtering), enabling outside-in measurement without in-country servers.

2025-tai-irblock §2.1, §3.2 dpirst-injectionpacket-injectionmiddlebox-interference

China's Great Firewall showed anomalous inconsistency: 13 test vectors produced mixed outcomes—TCP RST injection on some executions and a clean server response on others—with circumvention rates between 10% and 35% across 100 executions per vector. The authors attribute this to heterogeneous GFW infrastructure components applying different HTTP parsing logic, a departure from the GFW's usual consistency.

2024-m-ller-turning §5.2 dpirst-injectionkeyword-filteringmiddlebox-interference