Reza Sharifi Executive Consultant - Cybersecurity Specialist, CGI Deutschland
I’m a cybersecurity professional with a background in network security and internet infrastructure research. My focus is on the intersection of technology and civil liberties, particularly how network-layer protocols are used—and misused—by state actors to control access to information.
Talk: Internet Blackout 2026 in Iran — Next-Level Internet Censorship: A Technical Breakdown of Techniques and Tactics.
Talks will be streamed on YouTube and Twitch for free.
Internet shutdowns are often described as a single action — “turning the Internet off.” In practice, they are the result of carefully orchestrated, multi-layered technical controls applied across national infrastructure. Building on my previous talk at BSides, which introduced the fundamental mechanisms of Internet censorship and shutdowns, this session presents a deeper and more comprehensive technical analysis of the 2026 Internet blackout in Iran.
This talk treats large-scale censorship not as a political phenomenon, but as a network engineering and security operation. We examine who has the technical authority to execute shutdowns, how different censorship techniques are layered and coordinated, and when specific tactics are selectively deployed to maximize impact while maintaining internal network functionality.
The analysis spans multiple layers of the stack. At the routing level, we examine BGP route withdrawals, path manipulation, and international transit isolation. At the access and transport layers, we analyze ISP-level service suppression, mobile network data blackouts, and traffic throttling. At the protocol and application layers, we explore deep packet inspection (DPI), protocol fingerprinting, encrypted traffic degradation, and selective blocking of VPNs, QUIC, and TLS-based services.
Special attention is given to the role of national intranet architectures, which allow domestic services to remain reachable while international connectivity collapses, creating the illusion of partial availability. The session also addresses the technical limits of alternative access methods, including satellite Internet, and why such technologies are not a universal solution under state-scale controls.
Using timelines, traffic behavior, and protocol-level indicators, the talk demonstrates that modern Internet shutdowns are graduated, adaptive, and measurable rather than binary events. Attendees will learn how these techniques manifest on the wire, how they can be detected from inside and outside the affected region, and why many common circumvention strategies fail under coordinated, nation-state enforcement.
This presentation is intended for security professionals, network engineers, and researchers interested in Internet resilience, censorship measurement, and large-scale network interference, offering a technically grounded continuation of prior research and real-world observations.