VLESS

Understanding Russia's TSPU: How DPI Filtering, DNS Manipulation and Traffic Throttling Work

Russia's TSPU system combines hardware filters from RDP.ru with EcoFilter and EcoDPI software to perform both simple IP/port/transport blocking and advanced protocol recognition. The platform inspects DNS queries, SNI fields in TLS handshakes, QUIC packets and HTTP headers to enforce domain blacklists or apply throttling. When simple blocking fails, operators fall back to traffic shaping that drops packets or limits bandwidth after an initial window. Multiple bypass techniques including encrypted DNS tunnels, ECH, and specialized proxies such as Hysteria 2, NaiveProxy and Shadowsocks are examined in detail. The article also outlines future developments including expanded residential whitelists and neural-network-based traffic classification.

Following the White Rabbit: Developer Builds Custom Rust VPN PAYPHONE Using QUIC and Obfuscation to Evade Detection

A Russian developer has released PAYPHONE, an experimental IPv4 VPN written entirely in Rust that uses QUIC datagrams and optional TLS-over-TCP transport with custom obfuscation. The project aims to provide an alternative to AmneziaWG and Xray/VLESS+REALITY stacks that are commonly used to bypass Russian internet filtering. The article details the full packet path from TUN interface through a 16-byte PAYPHONE header, session management with Ed25519 tokens, and multiple post-launch bugs including MTU miscalculations, self-routing loops on macOS, and timer lifetime issues in Tokio. Key technical choices include RFC 9221 datagram support to avoid head-of-line blocking for multiplexed TCP flows and token-bucket rate limiting tied to subscription tokens. The author also describes route monitoring every 400 ms and interface-bound sockets to prevent the tunnel from swallowing its own control traffic.

Hydrat Project Builds Automated WireGuard Gateway for Resilient VLESS and Tor Routing

A developer has released Hydrat, a self-hosted gateway that connects devices via WireGuard while automatically managing VLESS and Tor backends to survive server blocks and quality degradation. The system maintains a pool of tested proxies, performs continuous health checks, and switches routes without requiring client-side profile changes. Two Go processes handle control logic and network enforcement separately, using SQLite for state and nftables plus Xray for traffic routing. TCP and UDP can be assigned independent exits, with geoip.dat support and custom rules to keep marketplace apps functional. The project emphasizes stability over direct connections and is designed for deployment on servers in Russian jurisdiction.

Amnezia VPN Survives Coordinated Russian Censorship Campaign Targeting AmneziaWG Protocol Fingerprints

Amnezia VPN has published a detailed post-mortem on the multi-wave blocking campaign conducted by Russian authorities against its Amnezia Free and Amnezia Premium services during June and July. The company describes a shift from simple protocol blocking to sophisticated fingerprinting of AmneziaWG traffic combined with infrastructure DDoS attacks and automated IP-subnet blacklisting. Engineers closed multiple detection vectors including zero-length UDP packets, fixed-size keepalive messages, handshake timing patterns, and nonce zero bytes. The incident forced accelerated migration to AmneziaWG 2.0, discontinuation of legacy client support, and development of AmneziaWG 3.0 while expanding VLESS infrastructure as a backup. Self-hosted users largely avoided direct protocol blocks but still faced subnet-level restrictions. The report highlights how Roskomnadzor now applies cumulative scoring across multiple traffic features rather than single definitive markers.

VPN Encryption Alone Cannot Hide Traffic from Network Detection Systems

A Habr user known as mr_tom detailed why encrypted VPN connections remain detectable despite their encryption. Observers can identify connections through visible metadata such as server IP addresses, ports, transport protocols, handshake patterns, packet sizes, timing intervals, and overall flow behavior. Simple DPI systems block traffic by restricting known IPs or ports, while advanced filters build traffic fingerprints and use active probing to verify suspicious endpoints. The popular combination of VLESS, XHTTP, and REALITY operates across different layers rather than functioning as three equivalent VPN protocols. Even traffic on port 443 can be distinguished from standard HTTPS by analyzing handshake details and subsequent packet behavior. The core conclusion is that no universally unblockable VPN exists, as detection can rely on IP blocking, new signatures, or active verification regardless of encryption strength.

Configuration Drift Silently Breaks Multi-Hop Chains in sing-box Reality Fleet

A post-mortem analysis of a censorship circumvention network using sing-box and Reality revealed that four out of seven nodes were unreachable due to outdated allowlists, even though all monitoring reported green status. The fleet consisted of 14 endpoints across seven machines and four providers, with traffic routed in two hops where entry nodes only knew client identities and exit nodes only knew destinations. White-list rules on entry nodes permitted only five addresses instead of all required relays, causing urltest to silently discard most chains without logging failures. Canary checks, external probes, and the relay-lockdown.sh script all passed because none compared the allowlist against the full signed configuration. Two private paid nodes lacked any route section entirely, exposing them to potential abuse. The issue stemmed from configuration drift over time, with no single person maintaining an overview of the entire system. Automated fixes were implemented with safeguards to prevent fleet-wide lockouts.