[ux] Suggestion to unblock bridges in China

soncyq47 soncyq47 at protonmail.com
Mon Dec 16 02:06:17 UTC 2019


I heard in some of Roger Dingledine's talks that for Tor bootstrapping, if an Obfs4 bridge is on a dynamic IP, so long as one bridge is still working, it will automatically find the new IP of that bridge when the IP changes. That means when the Great Firewall requested all the IPs of the bridges one by one at https://bridges.torproject.org/ (same as the request button on tor browser) and the gmail bridges at torproject.org bucket, and added them to the blacklist, they automatically get updated when the dynamic IP changes. (Remember the Obfs4 protocol works in China, it's just the bridge distribution that's the problem)

The seemingly simple answer is to not update tor users during bootstrapping when the bridges dynamic IPs changes. That would get the massive list of bridge IPs at https and gmail pools out of the nasty hands of the Great Firewall. So many Obfs4 bridges would start working again in China! I am aware that users will have to find a bridge IP again, but it requires a massive resource for the Great Firewall to find them all again, and only a short time for a user to click 'request a bridge from torproject.org' (which works through meek). I assume it would have to be implemented at the rely/directory side rather than the client side for it to work. Implementing my idea should be as easy as removing a harmful feature.

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