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THE STATE OF IRANIAN NETWORKING

Morgan Sennhauser

Project Coordinator, NedaNet

July 09, 2009

THE STATE OF IRANIAN NETWORKING ________________________________________________________________ 1

URPOSE

____________________________________________________________________________________________________ 1

ISTORY

____________________________________________________________________________________________________ 1

RAFFIC

ANIPULATION

____________________________________________________________________________________ 3

Overview _________________________________________________________________________________________________ 3

IP Blocking ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 3

Traffic Classification ____________________________________________________________________________________ 4

Deep Packet Inspection _________________________________________________________________________________ 4

What Else is Possible ____________________________________________________________________________________ 5

Where Manipulation Occurs ____________________________________________________________________________ 5

ESPONSE

___________________________________________________________________________________________________ 7

Normal Usage ___________________________________________________________________________________________ 8

Special Usage ___________________________________________________________________________________________ 11

ONCLUSION

_______________________________________________________________________________________________ 12

PURPOSE

This document is an examination of the current state of the Internet infrastructure in Iran.The intended audience is non-technical people who have interest in knowing how, in a generalsense, the government is doing what they are doing, and which methods will work best forcircumvention.

HISTORY

After the election in Iran on June 13th, the Iranian government began to limit civilian's basicfreedoms in strict and unjustifiable ways due to allegations of election fraud. They prevented themfrom protesting peacefully with batons, teargas, and eventually, automatic weapons. They cut off land-line and cellular phones, preventing people from being able to contact their friends and familyin and out of Iran. They also began limiting the Iranian people's access to the Internet.However, they did not block several sites which proved to be key in helping the Iranianpeople get out photographs, video, and their thoughts on the crackdown against protesters. Themost notable site for the torrent of information coming out of Iran was Twitter, where content tagslike #iranelection and #gr88 (Green Revolution 1388, the current year on the Islamic calendar)took control of the most used tags for over two weeks.During the early days after the election, as people watched the footage of protesters beingbeaten, and became far too familiar with the concept of the Basij militia, they wondered what theycould do.Initially, it was easy to help. You simply set up a proxy

, following easily accessibleinstructions for doing so, and sent the IP and port of the proxy to one of several volunteers who hadpromised to spread the proxies into Iran. Unfortunately, most proxies were quickly blocked,meaning that it took a constant rush of people setting up proxies on thousands of computers tokeep the lines of communications even partially open.Obviously, this pace could not be continued indefinitely, and it was becoming clear that thiswas going to be a long struggle for the Iranian people. To make matters worse, rumors werecirculating that the Iranians were enabling previously unused hardware, meant to make themajority of proxies (HTTP proxies specifically) obsolete.

Proxy: a network connection which allows a client to connect to a server by means of an intermediaryconnection.