Evaluating Practical Enumeration and Blocking Attacks on the Snowflake Circumvention System
Abstract: Proxy-based Internet censorship circumvention tools like Snowflake rely on large, dynamic pools of third-party proxies to resist IP-based blocking. We focus on two assumptions underpinning the security of Snowflake: that adversaries cannot easily enumerate proxy IPs, and that blocking those proxies would incur unacceptable collateral damage. In this paper, we test these assumptions by studying practical enumeration and blocking attacks against Snowflake conducted by malicious clients. We combine bounded, ethical real-world measurements with large-scale simulation to evaluate both present-day enumeration and blocking risk and broader attacker capabilities. Over 48 days of real-world measurements from May--June 2025, our attack enumerated over 21,000 unique proxy IP addresses belonging to almost 1,000 autonomous systems. Despite this high number, we find that proxy churn limits the overall effectiveness of enumeration over time, and reduces the impact on clients of individual proxy addresses being blocked. However, at the network level, blocking the top 1% of observed autonomous systems blocks more than 30% of observed Snowflakes while affecting 0% of Tranco Top 100 domains and ~2.5% of Top 1M domains. We discover that the broker's load-aware matching reveals stable, high-capacity proxies to attackers early, especially during periods of elevated demand such as the censorship even in Iran of June 2025, subsequently exposing the networks that contribute disproportionately to system connectivity. In simulation, increasing attacker scale sharply improves both enumeration and blocking success, while higher proxy churn significantly reduces blocking effectiveness. We conclude by discussing and evaluating practical mitigations, some of which have been integrated into Snowflake.