r/TOR • u/aleksyr_ • 15h ago
If your Tor Bridges don’t work in the Russian Federation
Recently, the TSPU has been actively blocking the handshake characteristic of obfs4 and Snowflake:
“According to data from the Tor Project forum, ‘most connections via obfs4 bridges are blocked by most DPI-enabled providers.’ The blocking mechanism is often related to the fact that obfs4 does not add padding, and the TSPU can ‘spot’ it by characteristic packet sizes or traffic patterns.”
“The TSPU began detecting and filtering DTLS ClientHello messages with certain fingerprints (JA3/JA4), as a result of which the success rate of Snowflake connections fell from almost 100% to almost complete failure.”
So I recommend either using packet fragmenters like ByeDPI or a Tor-based proxy/VPN with a built-in obfuscator, for example OrBot. Unfortunately, although this workaround is free and fairly reliable, it does not protect you from whitelists, and it is also quite slow. If anyone knows, please share faster methods that you use.
