[tor-dev] obfs4, meek, active probing and the timeline of pluggable transports

Carolin Zöbelein contact at carolin-zoebelein.de
Sat Oct 27 22:07:05 UTC 2018


Hi :),

I can't give you an answer to your history questions, since I wasn't
involved in the history of PTs but I have the feeling you have this
fundamental question "Why we should work on an other PT, as long as the
stuff which we already have works fine?" (?)

Simple answer: You should always have an active role (beeing faster
like the other party in development) and not a passive role (waiting
until your stuff doesn't work anymore before you work on something new)
in the fight against censorship.

Best regards,
Carolin

Am Samstag, den 27.10.2018, 17:20 +0530 schrieb Piyush Kumar Sharma:
> Hello all,
> I have a few specific questions related to the pluggable transports.
> 
> 1.) I believe that obfs4 stops active probing(the latest problem as
> brought to notice by Ensafi et al, IMC 2015 and Shinying Cho, FOCI
> 2018), and hence discovering obfs4 Tor bridges using active probing
> is not possible. Is that true? If so, then we are good to go and
> hence we don't need any other pluggable transport to work for us as
> long as obfs4 is working? 
> 
> 2.) What was the motivation to bring in meek as a pluggable
> transport, given the fact that obfs4 works great to cover all the
> existing problems with Tor detection. Was the motivation just the
> fact that, it will be much easier for the users to use meek than
> obfs4 or something other than this?
> 
> 3.) I searched a lot but could not find the timeline in which
> pluggable transports were built. As in what was developed and
> deployed first, obfs4 or meek? 
> 
> Regards
> 
> Piyush
> IIITD 
> _______________________________________________
> tor-dev mailing list
> tor-dev at lists.torproject.org
> https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev


More information about the tor-dev mailing list