What are Snowflake Proxies and how do they work?
Snowflake Proxies are a really cool plugable transport for the Tor Browser.
Snowflakes are small, ephemeral and in numbers. By using the design philosophy that of a snowflake you can have a pretty unique and difficult to censor way of connecting to a network.
So that’s exactly what Snowflake Proxies are!
So in order to keep that design philosophy of: “Many small and ephemeral”;
Insteed of the tippical way you would have, let’s say, the tor daemon run on some sort of remote server that people could then connect to.
Snowflake proxies are just run on your browser.
That’s right!
Either as a browser extension or just a normal/embedded website.
An easier way to think about this is thought an analogy.
Think about the connection to a snowflake to that of a connection to, let’s say, a discord call.
To anyone that is monitoring the network, they can only see that a call is taking place.
They cannot see the actual data that is being exchanged on that call.
Also on the other side, neither party (Reciving or Transmiting) needed to open/forward any ports!
Therefore, allowing people to run snowflakes and connect to them, even behind restrictive NATs.
This is because there is an intermediary “Broker” to help facilitate this data transfer.
(See diagram above)
But what if instead of a regular voice call, instead, actual web data is being exchanged?
That’s exactly what snowflakes do!
They are like a friend who you phone and ask to browse the tor network for you!
How can I connect to a Snowflake Proxy?
You can connect to a Snowflake just like you whould connect to any other regular bridge inside the Tor Browser.
You can find the option in the tipical setings menu for bridge connections.
How can I run and volunteer my bandwith for a Snowflake?
You can either install the Snowflake browser extension and have it always on.
Or you can simply use an embeded/website version and leave a browser tab open for it.
(Both the extension and the embeded/website version are the same and work identically)
Use embeded/website and leave this browser tab open
Or install the extension for your browser
Whoa, How can I embed the proxy inside my own website?
The website badge you can see above looks and behaves exactly like the extension.
It based on this version provided by the tor project: https://snowflake.torproject.org/embed.html
(If you got a third party cookie error you can try to visit that link directly)
You can use the following HTML, which will embed that website inside a simple iframe:
<iframe src="https://snowflake.torproject.org/embed.html" width="320" height="240" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>If you use a CMS, like im using here WordPress, you will need to find the option to add custom HTML to your website.
In WordPress you can do this easilly by using the “Custom HTML” block.
Sources/Further reading:
- Snowflake Proxies | torproject.org
- Example Website Embeding Snowflake Proxies | Science & Design