[anti-censorship-team] Question about snowflake security

[Justin Tracey]

Hi Luna,

Tor is a network designed for private internet connections -- it is very 
very difficult to figure out who is connecting to what when the 
connection is using Tor, because the traffic is bounced through at least 
three hops. However, by default, it is easy for an internet provider to 
see which of its customers are connecting to Tor itself, and block them. 
So, Tor added "bridges", which are secret first hops that get handed out 
via various channels to users. Snowflake is part of that system of 
bridges. When you set up a Snowflake proxy, the people connecting 
through you don't connect to whatever site they're accessing directly, 
they just connect to Tor, which then connects them to whatever site 
they're accessing. That is, because Snowflake is the first hop in the 
connection, you can see people connecting through your proxy, but 
neither you nor your internet provider can see where the connection is 
ultimately going. (The "exit node" in that quote is the last of the 
hops, so the one who can see where the traffic is going, and the IP 
traffic looks like it's coming from for the website operator. Snowflake 
can't run as an exit node, so it's just saying you don't need to worry 
about things like websites blocking you for connecting too many times, 
etc..)

Hopefully that helps. If you have more questions, you can try Tor's 
support page:

https://support.torproject.org/

or the Tor forum:

https://forum.torproject.net/

  - Justin

On 2022-09-23 12:56, Luna Manaugh via anti-censorship-team wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> I don't have a background in programming. Would you care to explain to 
> me in plain language and convincing evidence that it is entirely safe to 
> volunteer for snowflake to help those in heavily censored countries 
> access internet? How's that possible if they can anything with my IP?
> 
> While I read this on your website, I'm not quite sure I understand what 
> it means: "There is no need to worry about which websites people are 
> accessing through your proxy. Their visible browsing IP address will 
> match their Tor exit node, not yours".
> 
> Best
> 
> Luna
> 
> Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android 
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> 
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