Mallory KnodelDec 30, 2022
Your periodic reminder that domain fronting is the best defence against internet censorship in the most restrictive regimes. If you’re too big to block, the least you can do is leverage the hard won phenomenon of ubiquitous encrypted https traffic to forward requests from dissidents in Iran et al. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/11/1063107/big-tech-iran-protests-domain-fronting/
Big Tech could help Iranian protesters by using an old tool

Until 2018, domain fronting enabled by Google, Amazon, and Microsoft allowed web users to circumvent internet bans and surveillance. Will they reinstate it in Iran?

MIT Technology Review
Show threadSteve

@mallory I work in censorship evasion, and we’ve also had success with some protocols that masquerade as video or voice chat calls. Not my project, but the Snowflake allows people to connect to Tor https://snowflake.torproject.org/ IIRC it pretends to be SRTP, and I think is still working.

Domain fronting definitely works too. I’m one of the maintainers of a library called Envoy that helps you add domain fronting (and other techniques) to Android apps: https://github.com/greatfire/envoy

Snowflake

Jan 2, 2023 at 11:51pmWeb
Show threadMallory KnodelJan 3, 2023
@scm more is more when it comes to circumvention techniques. That’s why pluggable transports like snowflake and others you describe are necessary— yes, and!