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We have discussed the Chinese company Geedge Networks (็งฏ่ณ). Last year, there was the news that Geedge had provided equipment for VPN blocking in Myanmar. One of the founders of the company is ๆนๆปจๅ ด (Fang Binxing), the famous "father of the Great Firewall". Another Geedge principal, ้่ถ (Zheng Chao), is a coauthor of censorship-related research papers we have discussed: #275, #282, #444.
Today, there are many news articles and reports about a leak of Geedge Networks internal documents, including from Jira (bug tracker), Confluence (wiki), and GitLab (source code). They say that several news organizations and technologists have worked together for a year to analyze the documents. This is the primary reporting from the people who worked directly with the documents, as best as I have been able to determine:
- The Globe and Mail: Leaked files show a Chinese company is exporting the Great Firewall's censorship technology (archive)
- Der Standard: Wie China seine Totalรผberwachung des Internets ins Ausland exportiert (archive)
- Follow the Money: China exports censorship tech to authoritarian regimes โ aided by EU firms (archive)
- InterSecLab: The Internet Coup (archive) PDF 76 pages (archive)
- Amnesty International: Shadows of Control: Censorship and mass surveillance in Pakistan (archive) PDF 102 pages (archive)
- Justice for Myanmar: Silk Road of Surveillance (archive) PDF 47 pages (archive)
As far as I can tell, the actual contents of the leak have not been made public. Even so, there is a lot of information across these public articles and reports. They include, at least, evidence of exports to other contries including Myanmar, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, and at least one other unidentified country; operation in the Chinese provinces of Xinjiang, Jiangsu and Fujian; technical information about Geedge's products; and collaboration with MESA, a research lab at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Activity
[-]Leak of Geedge Networks internal documents (100,000+ from Jira, Confluence, source code)[/-][+]Leak of Geedge Networks internal documents (100,000+ from Jira, Confluence, GitLab)[/+]wkrp commentedon Sep 11, 2025
Here are notes and highlights from the three news articles.
The Globe and Mail: Leaked files show a Chinese company is exporting the Great Firewall's censorship technology
The leak of internal documents shows that Geedge works directly with governments and ISPs to install products for censorship and surveillance. They offer capabilities including tracking users' locations and network access history, and blocking services and circumvention systems.
Geedge is involved in at least five other countries: Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Myanmar (#369), Pakistan, and an unidentified one known only by the codename A24. Kazakhstan was an early customer after being founded in 2018.
Myanmar is treated specially in the Justice for Myanmar Silk Road of Surveillance report. Pakistan is treated specially in the Amnesty International Shadows of Control report.
About Pakistan, this Globe and Mail article says that Geedge installed their new systems, including the Tiangou Secure Gateway (TSG), on existing equipment left behind by Sandvine. (Sandvine is now called AppLogic.)
The article cites the same hiring advertisement that was posted in #369 (comment) that mentions a further four countries: Malaysia, Bahrain, Algeria, and India:
Besides foreign contries, the documents show Geedge involvement in the Chinese provinces of Xinjiang, Jiangsu, and Fujian. This could be a sign of a more distributed, regional, firewall system, as has been discussed in relation to Henan in threads such as #416 and "A Wall Behind a Wall".
Geedge is closely aligned with MESA, a research lab at the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. We have previously mentioned MESA at #471 (comment), in a reading group post about MESA's "SAPP" network analysis platform. Geedge's chief technology officer ้่ถ (Zheng Chao) was a co-founder of MESA in January 2012.
The company does individualized research on circumvention systems and VPNs in order to block them.
Der Standard: Wie China seine Totalรผberwachung des Internets ins Ausland exportiert
Machine translation into English: How China is exporting its total surveillance of the internet abroad
This article lists additional capabilities of Geedge's technology, beyond tracking users and blocking access: injection of malware into HTTP sessions, and directly launching DDoS traffic volume attacks.
It has the same information about Geedge software being deployed on repurposed Sandvine hardware in Pakistan. Evidently, Geedge places a priority on decoupling software from hardware.
A French company, Thales Group, provides license enforcement to Geedge. Geedge used at least one server in Germany for the purpose of software downloads. (Perhaps to avoid interference by the GFW, if the download server had been hosted in China.)
Follow the Money: China exports censorship tech to authoritarian regimes โ aided by EU firms
This article gives an outline of various Geedge products, which may be sold to customers in a bundle or selectively. Cyber Narrator is a kind of high-level dashboard that nontechnical users can interact with directly. Tiangou Secure Gateway (TSG) is the actual network surveillance and blocking device. TSG Galaxy is a data storage and analysis pipeline. Network Zodiac is a manager and monitor for the other systems.
There may be may more installations of Geedge equipment such as TSG than even the countries mentioned in this leak, because Geedge's public marketing web site says "40+ global service providers":
A Geedge support ticket from February 2023 has to do with blocking social media in Ethiopia. This correlates with known blocking (#210) in Ethiopia at the time.
At least one Jira support ticket shows evidence of plaintext capture of email:
wkrp commentedon Sep 12, 2025
The InterSecLab report (PDF 76 pages) is really good, with lots of specific technical detail. It explains more about Geedge's suite of products, its alignment with the MESA research lab, and the timeline of deployment in various countries.
p.7
Geedge products
Tiangou Secure Gateway (TSG) is the name of the multi-purpose firewall and surveillance unit. TSG contains all the main DPI, filtering, tracking, throttling, and attack functions. Data extracted by TSG goes into TSG Galaxy for storage and analysis.
p.22
TSG may be installed on an integrated hardware platform called TSGX, or it may work with a customer's existing hardware. (The report says that in Pakistan, Geedge's TSG was installed on equipment that was left behind by Sandvine.) TSG runs an operating system called TSG-OS, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Docker (cf. "A Flexible and Efficient Container-based NFV Platform for Middlebox Networking" by ้่ถ (Zheng Chao) et al.)
As many TSG nodes can be installed as are needed, with a packet broker called Ether Fabric load-balancing traffic over all the nodes by 5-tuple hash. There is a system for managing a TSG cluster called Central Management or ๆฏๆน (Bifang).
TSG relies on a userspace networking system called MARSIO. That is, it does its own routing and packet handling, bypassing the Linux kernel for efficiency. It uses DPDK. (Again cf. "A Flexible and Efficient Container-based NFV Platform for Middlebox Networking" from 2018.)
TSG Galaxy is a data storage and aggregation system (Extract, Transform, Load data warehouse) that holds such information as metadata about TCP and UDP sessions and protocols including TLS, SIP, DNS, and QUIC. Information in Galaxy can be queried by Cyber Narrator.
p.20
Cyber Narrator is a user interface, designed for nontechnical users, that allows for querying and displaying information collected by TSG and stored in TSG Galaxy. Blocking of services and protocols can be controlled in Cyber Narrator, and it offers the function of finding identifiers of users who have accessed specific content. Cyber Narrator uses a remote WebSketch service that annotates identifiers such as IP addresses with metadata from third-party data brokers or Geedge's own research.
p.19
Network Zodiac or ๅชๅ (Nezha) is a system for monitoring the other components, similar to Grafana. Apparently, the Network Zodiac dashboard has the capability to SSH into any other host (such as a TSG node), which is obviously a huge concentration of risk if a Network Zodiac host were to be compromised.
p.33
TSG capabilities
TSG has the typical multi-protocol deep packet inspection and blocking capabilities, but also surprising throttling, injection, tracking, and offensive features.
Mirrored mode and in-line mode
TSG and Ether Fabric may be installed in either an on-path ("mirrored" or "passive") mode, or an in-path (flow-blocking or "active") mode.
p.37
Compare this to a statement from an official in Pakistan in 2024:
Deep packet inspection
The report mentions the protocols HTTP, DNS, email, TLS, QUIC, and SIP.
Server name indication (SNI) can be extracted from TLS and QUIC. (For censorship based on QUIC SNI in China, see "Exposing and Circumventing SNI-based QUIC Censorship of the Great Firewall of China".)
p.20
TLS traffic can be decrypted if a MITM certificate is installed at the client; otherwise TSG has to rely on encrypted traffic classification heuristics:
p.23
Traffic throttling
p.25
Injection and modification
TSG is capable of injecting traffic and modifying traffic. It can do this for the purpose of blocking, or even to infect users with malware or cause them to DDoS a target, Great Cannon style.
p.23
p.26
p.27
Attribution of network flows to real identities
p.25
p.49
Identifying and blocking circumvention tools
Geedge has paid VPN accounts and operates a network of mobile devices with VPN apps installed, in order to study their network behavior:
p.24
p.63
There is a database of application network fingerprints called AppSketch, with fingerprints for lots of specific applications, such as individual VPN services. See the screenshot above.
Footnote 10, on the gathering of AppSketch fingerprints, mentions the technologies SAPP (#471) and Maat (#444), which we have discussed before.
An interesting and surprising capability is discovering new VPN endpoints by watching the behavior of past known VPN users. (Reminiscent of "Identifying VPN Servers through Graph-Represented Behaviors", whose authors are affiliated with MESA.)
p.9
p.26
Unidentifiable high-bandwidth flows may also inform blocking:
p.25
The report (p.63) talks about Tor bridges, Snowflake, and WebTunnel. The report suggests that Geedge has a way of enumerating Tor bridges, though whether it is in-house or outsourced is uncertain. An advertising screenshot of Cyber Narrator contains the string "Snowflake". The leak contains research by MESA students about WebTunnel, though they had not discovered a blocking technique at that time.
Geedge has a specialized tool for enumerating Psiphon endpoints called Psiphon3-SLOK. It correlates with observed changes in Psiphon connections in Myanmar in May 2024, when Geedge entered the country.
p.64
Remote access to customer networks
Customer data stored in TSG Galaxy is accessible to students and researchers at MESA(!) and may be used for research.
p.21
p.24
Deployment to countries outside China
The report has detailed summaries of Geedge deployments in Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Myanmar. Even more detailed information about Pakistan and Myanmar are available in the Shadows of Control and Silk Road of Surveillance, respectively.
Deploying Geedge equipment involves Geedge staff traveling physically to the ISP where it is to be installed, and working directly with ISP personnel. (Incidentally, this fact exposes ISPs like Frontiir in Myanmar, who lied when asked about Geedge p.53.)
p.35
In the leak, countries are identified by codenames. All codenames but one (A24) are identified with a specific country. In most cases, the codename is the first letter of the name of the country, plus a two-digit year (which, apparently, does not always match the year of first deployment).
Kazakhstan (codename K18, K24)
Geedge was founded in 2018. The leak indicates that the government of Kazakhstan was its first customer, starting in 2019. The report relates the Geedge deployment to the government's aspirations for country-wide TLS MITM, such as we have seen in #6, #56, and #339.
p.42
Ethiopia (codename E21)
Geedge started working in Ethiopia in 2021.
This section mentions ้่ถ (Zheng Chao) by name:
p.45
We've mentioned that TSG can operate in either mirrored mode or in-line mode. The report makes the claim that switching the system from mirrored mode to in-line can precede a shutdown, and makes a connection to the February 2023 social media blocking.
p.46
Pakistan (codename P19)
Geedge started in Pakistan in 2023, the same year Sandvine exited the country. In the Shadows of Control report, Amnesty International calls the Geedge-operated firewall "WMS 2.0" (web management/monitoring system 2.0), to distinguish it from the earlier version of WMS that it replaced.
Geedge's presence in Pakistan matches what has been previously reported about Chinese involvement in the national firewall. Quotes from a Pakistan official match known capabilities of Geedge's TSG:
p.48
Geedge's Sanity Directory has the ability to attribute network activity to a specific SIM card. In Pakistan, SIM cards are in turn linked to real-life identities:
p.49
Myanmar (codename M22)
Myanmar is significant because it was the first time the work of Geedge in a foreign country became publicly known, when Justice for Myanmar reported on it.
Besides the previously reported Frontiir, the leak notes data centers of every ISP in Myanmar. Frontiir had previously falsely denied doing any surveillance projects, when asked.
p.53
There's information about a list of apps and VPNs that the government of Myanmar wanted to block:
p.54
Codename A24
One Geedge customer is known only by the codename A24. The business relationship was apparently in an early state at the time of the leak.
p.55
Regional firewalls in China
The report shows Geedge's involvement in regional, province-level firewalls in China, particularly in Xinjiang.
p.9
Xinjiang (codename J24)
Xinjiang is identified by the codename J24. The leaked document directly say that a regional firewall in Xinjiang is to be a model for national deployment in China.
p.56
In common with most other Geedge deployments, the one in Xinjiang follows a structure with a central command center connected to "operator" data centers.
p.57
The requirements for the Xinjiang deployment show intense and invasive surveillance, consistent with what we know about the oppression in the province.
p.57
Fujian, Jiangsu, and other provinces
There is some documentation about Geedge working in the provinces of Fujian and Jiangsu, but less compared to the other regions.
p.58
p.59
wkrp commentedon Sep 13, 2025
Enlace Hacktivista has what looks like the contents.
All together, the files are around 600 GB in size. 500 GB of that is in one file, mirror/repo.tar.
The file mesalab_git.tar.zst is 64 GB and appears to contain Geedge/MESA source code repositories, including Git commit history. None of the reports so far have looked at this source code in depth, so there is still plenty to study and learn.
The files inside mesalab_git.tar.zst are Git bundles. You can clone from a bundle just like you can from an SSH or HTTPS URL. Here's an example:
Issue numbers like "OMPUB-1170" can be looked up in geedge_jira.tar.zst:
Here's a listing of the contents of mesalab_git.tar.zst:
File listing of mesalab_git.tar.zst
Based on a skim of the filenames, these are some repositories I would prioritize to look at first:
If there's interest, maybe we can organize teams to divide the source code repositories and investigate them.