On Mon, Dec 12, 2022 at 08:19:53PM +0000, Gary C. New via tor-relays wrote:
I am having some issues or misunderstandings with implementing Snowflake Proxy within Tor. I assumed that implementing Snowflake Proxy within Tor would be similar to OBFS4Bridge in that Tor would initialize Snowflake Proxy as a managed Pluggable Transport listening on the assigned ServerTransportListenAddr. I can see Snowflake Proxy initiate outbound requests, but I don't see it listen on the specified ServerTransportListenAddr and Port.
The Snowflake proxy is not a pluggable transport. You just run it as a normal command-line program. There is no torrc involved, and the proxy does not interact with a tor process at all.
Unlike, say, obfs4, in Snowflake the bridges are centralized and the proxies are decentralized. If you run a proxy you don't also run a bridge.
If it helps the mental model: the standalone proxy program in Snowflake does exactly the same thing as the browser extension proxy (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf...). Those browser proxies don't have an attached tor process; neither does the command-line proxy.