A measurement study of RuStore — Russia's domestic Android marketplace promoted after 2022 sanctions isolated Russian users from Google Play — finds that APKs bundle certificate material and trust-configuration artifacts independently of the OS trust store. The study combines ecosystem-wide measurement with a weighted top-application analysis to characterize how this app-level certificate bundling expands the effective TLS trust boundary.

Application packaging and software supply chains in Russia's Android ecosystem can expand the effective TLS trust boundary beyond OS-level controls, enabling MITM attacks on TLS connections for apps that bundle or inherit Russian-controlled certificate authorities. This bypasses the assumption that the OS trust store constrains which CAs can intercept encrypted traffic.

Abstract detection

RuStore provides a state-adjacent software supply chain through which APKs containing certificate material can reach Russian Android users at scale, creating a vector for expanding TLS trust anchors outside the OS trust store and outside Google's certificate governance. The 2022 sanctions that drove RuStore adoption also concentrated this distribution power in domestically controlled infrastructure.

Abstract deployment

The paper directly challenges the assumption that TLS provides a sufficient security fallback against hostile networks, demonstrating that Russia's Android ecosystem enables trust-anchor expansion through app packaging that undermines OS trust store boundaries. The implication is that TLS interception in Russia may be feasible at the app level without requiring OS-level compromise or user consent.

Abstract policy

The paper demonstrates that two protocol-specific censorship changes — QUIC blocking reaching 100% and DNS-over-TCP blocking reaching 96.68% — both occurred in the scan conducted immediately before Iran's June 18 full blackout, and that similar shutdown preparations were also documented before Iran's January 2026 shutdown. The authors hypothesize that continuous long-term measurement of protocol-specific censorship rates could provide advance warning of impending shutdowns before they come into full effect.

2026-anon-insights-into-iranian §3, §4 http3-quic-blockdns-poisoningmeasurement-platform

A code-level audit of 737 Chrome VPN and proxy browser extensions found that 520 of 522 sampled packages routed all non-loopback browsing traffic to a single shared SOCKS5 infrastructure; 274 of the 737 impersonated 66 known VPN or privacy brands across at least 40 developer accounts, and 516 of the identified extensions remained live in the Chrome Web Store at the time of data collection.

2026-anon-vpn-ai-deepseek §免费VPN扩展的核心问题 measurement-platform

Chrome Web Store metrics—including cumulative installation display counts totaling 75,486, five-star ratings, and brand-similar icons—provided no reliable signal of proxy operator trustworthiness among the 737 identified malicious VPN extensions; 516 remained listed throughout the study period despite routing traffic to a shared centralized infrastructure.

2026-anon-vpn-ai-deepseek §免费VPN扩展的核心问题 measurement-platform

Comparative analysis of 73 unmatched events (2022 onward) between IODA's automated network-level detection and Access Now's #KeepItOn Shutdown Tracker reveals systematic documentation gaps — shutdowns recorded by human reporters are frequently absent from automated measurement platforms and vice versa.

2026-cheek-gaps-record-observability Abstract / §1 Introduction measurement-platformbgp-hijackactive-probing

Application-layer blocking — where censors restrict specific applications or services without disrupting IP connectivity — is invisible to network-level measurement systems like IODA that monitor BGP, active probing, darknet telescope, and Google Search traffic, making it a growing blind spot in automated shutdown detection.

2026-cheek-gaps-record-observability Abstract / §3 Detection Gap Categories measurement-platformdpi

AS-targeted shutdowns — where censors restrict connectivity at specific ISPs or autonomous systems rather than imposing country-wide outages — evade country-level aggregation in automated detection systems, which are calibrated to detect national-scope disruptions.

2026-cheek-gaps-record-observability §3 Detection Gap Categories measurement-platformasn-blackholing