[tor-dev] Hello, I am a Tor Browser user in China. Currently, many obfs4 bridges are blocked by China's firewall.

[David Fifield]

On Thu, Oct 01, 2015 at 08:55:33PM +0800, Li Xiaodong wrote:
> Hello, I am a Tor Browser user in China. Currently, many obfs4 bridges are
> blocked by China's firewall. When will SkypeMorph Pluggable Transports and
> Dust Pluggable Transports be deployed in Tor Browser? There are no directory
> servers in I2P network. Can Tor learn from I2P? If Tor user have to access
> directory servers by bridges, I feel that Tor will be easily blocked by China's
> firewall. Can Tor no longer use directory servers in future? Since 2010 China's
> firewall has blocked all of the IP addresses of Tor directory servers. Thank
> you very much for your help. I really appreciate it. All the best with your
> work. Good luck in all that you will achieve.

Tor does not use directory servers when you are using bridges (including
obfs4 bridges). The bridge has a copy of the directory information.
Blocking the directory servers does not cause bridges to be blocked. But
the IP address of the bridge itself could be blocked. It seems that this
is what has happened in your case.

I don't know about a schedule for deploying SkypeMorph and Dust. They
may not help in your case anyway. The GFW is probably blocking the IP
addresses of your bridges, not detecting the obfs4 protocol itself.

You might have luck with the meek-amazon or meek-azure transports. They
are not as likely to have their IP addresses blocked. With a little
effort, you can customize it to use domains that you choose.

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek#Quickstart
https://program-think.blogspot.com/2014/10/gfw-tor-meek.html
http://www.atgfw.org/2015/02/torgfwpk1-meektor.html
https://plus.google.com/+GhostAssassin/posts/26zCmDmjYXP