[tor-relays] Bridge Sees 100x Clients Starting 2019-08-31

[Philipp Winter]

On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 08:46:53PM -0700, Porcelain Mouse wrote:
> I run RPM-base distro and would prefer to stick with packages I can get
> easily.  But, I could build tor for myself, if it came to that.  I was
> specifically thinking of obsf4 when I asked this question, but I only looked
> into it, briefly, and don't know exactly how it works.  I seems like it
> answers connections for tor, ala inetd and tcp wrappers, and you can just
> add it to your torrc. Is that not right?  Anyway, I guess it doesn't matter,
> the issue has passed.  I just saw your call for obsf4 and couldn't figure
> out what it does that is useful to the project.  I want my node to be
> useful.

Yes, that is correct.  When a client is using obfs4, it's talking to the
bridge's obfs4 port (exposed by obfs4proxy), and not to its OR port
(exposed by tor).  The idea of pluggable transports is to decouple
obfuscation from anonymity.  Obfuscation is currently provided by
obfs4proxy while anonymity is provided by tor.