I(ra)nconsistencies: Novel Insights into Iran’s Censorship
Authors: Felix Lange (Paderborn University), Niklas Niere (Paderborn University), Jonathan von Niessen (Paderborn University), Dennis Suermann (Paderborn University), Nico Heitmann (Paderborn University), Juraj Somorovsky (Paderborn University)
Year: 2025
Issue: 1
Pages: 7–12
Abstract: Iran employs one of the most prominent Internet censors in the world. An important part of Iran’s censorship apparatus is its analysis of unencrypted protocols such as HTTP and DNS. During routine evaluations of Iran’s HTTP and DNS censorship, we noticed several properties we believe to be unknown today. For instance, we found injections of correct static IPs for some domains such as google.com on the DNS level, unclear HTTP version parsing, and correlations between DNS and HTTP censorship. In this paper, we present our findings to the community and discuss possible takeaways for affected people and the censorship circumvention community. As some of our findings left us bewildered, we hope to ignite a discussion about Iran’s censorship behavior. We aim to use the discussion of our work to execute a thorough analysis and explanation of Iran’s censorship behavior in the future.
Copyright in FOCI articles are held by their authors. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
