meek is another PT that makes it look like Alice is talking to a website in the Amazon or Microsoft cloud.įirst, Alice should consider whether or not her adversary is even capable of extracting information from her ISP.
obfs4 is a popular PT that makes the Tor traffic between Alice and her bridge look like encrypted garbage. Pluggable transports make Tor traffic look different so it can (hopefully) not be fingerprinted and then blocked. If this seems to be the case, then Alice should try using a bridge with pluggable transport. If that doesn’t work, maybe her traffic is being blocked because it looks like Tor traffic. If she was getting blocked because she was trying to connect to an IP known to be a Tor relay, this would help. A bridge is simply an unlisted Tor guard relay. But apparently, the firewall wouldn’t block a VPN.Īlice should try using a Tor bridge first. Maybe her company has a really strict firewall or her country has a super strict firewall. I prefer to discuss this as a series of reasons why someone would even think about using a VPN in this way.’įor whatever reason, Tor is blocked for Alice. Now I’ll start with what is easiest to actually accomplish and is recommended most often. This brings up the question: If Alice chooses she 100% trusts her VPN provider and wants to use Tor with a VPN, does the VPN add any value? I will address this question in two parts based on whether the VPN comes “before” or “after” Tor. So why use a tool that requires the user’s trust, when she can use a tool that doesn’t? Using a VPN, she has to completely trust her VPN provider.
Using only Tor, she doesn’t have to trust any single entity. Are they completely trusted by their users? Yes, whether the users realize the amount of trust they are placing in the provider or not.Īssume for just a moment that using only Tor gives Alice the same about of “protection” as using only a VPN. Should VPN-provider-X be completely trusted? Maybe. to be competent at keeping their network and machines secure.to not share information with their adversary.As long as the right ones aren’t compromised, working together, or otherwise malicious, the user stays protected. Users don’t have to trust every Tor relay that they use in order to stay safe with Tor. A VPN is fully, 100%, a single point/entity that you must trust. With Tor, you do not have to trust any single entity or any single point.
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