This is mostly David Fifield's words from an email exchange. --- I re-read proposal 203 the other day and wondered how it was related to the meek pluggable transport. As I might not be the only one, I thought it could be worthwhile to share David's answer. Feel free to improve! proposals/203-https-frontend.txt | 28 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 28 insertions(+) diff --git a/proposals/203-https-frontend.txt b/proposals/203-https-frontend.txt index 26101b3..df30cd5 100644 --- a/proposals/203-https-frontend.txt +++ b/proposals/203-https-frontend.txt @@ -245,3 +245,31 @@ Side note: What to put on the webserver? "Something to add to your HTTPS website" rather than as a standalone installation. +Related work: + + meek [1] is a pluggable transport that uses HTTP for carrying bytes + and TLS for obfuscation. Traffic is relayed through a third-party + server (Google App Engine). It uses a trick to talk to the third + party so that it looks like it is talking to an unblocked server. + + meek itself is not really about HTTP at all. It uses HTTP only + because it's convenient and the big Internet services we use as cover + also use HTTP. meek uses HTTP as a transport, and TLS for + obfuscation, but the key idea is really "domain fronting," where it + appears to the censor you are talking to one domain (www.google.com), + but behind the scenes you are talking to another + (meek-reflect.appspot.com). The meek-server program is an ordinary + HTTP (not necessarily even HTTPS!) server, whose communication is + easily fingerprintable; but that doesn't matter because the censor + never sees that part of the communication, only the communication + between the client and CDN. + + One way to think about the difference: if a censor (somehow) learns + the IP address of a bridge as described in this proposal, it's easy + and low-cost for the censor to block that bridge by IP address. meek + aims to make it much more expensive: even if you know a domain is + being used (in part) for circumvention, in order to block it have to + block something important like the Google frontend or CloudFlare + (high collateral damage). + +1. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek -- 1.7.10.4