Snowflake

Infraestructura P2P

A pluggable transport for the Tor network that uses ephemeral volunteer browser proxies to help censored users circumvent internet blocks. Volunteers run lightweight WebRTC proxies (via browser extension, webpage tab, or standalone binary) that relay traffic to a Tor bridge, disguising the connection as ordinary WebRTC video/voice traffic.

Comunidad

Enlaces

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Detalles

Licencia

BSD-3-Clause (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake)

Estado de Desarrollo 🟢 Activo

Detalle del Estado de Desarrollo

Released (production)

Propietario

Tor Project, Inc. / Originally created by Serene (hacker / former Google engineer)

Órgano de Gobierno The Tor Project, Inc. (non-profit)

País

USA

Año de Inicio 2016

Stack

Go (snowflake client + standalone proxy); JavaScript (browser proxy extension); WebRTC (data channels for P2P traffic)

Financiamiento

OTF (Open Technology Fund) — funded Snowstorm (Rust rewrite, 2023); Tor Project general funding; volunteer-operated bridges raise funds via Open Collective

Última Investigación 9 mar 2026

Dominios de Caso de Uso

Evolución de Plataformas y Soberanía

Capacidades

Autoalojable

Infraestructura P2P Atributos

Orígenes

Flashproxy (predecessor, deprecated); uProxy (Google Ideas/Jigsaw, 2013-2016) — Snowflake evolved the ephemeral proxy concept with WebRTC + automatic NAT traversal

Base de Datos

N/A (transport relay, no data store)

Formatos de Datos

Arbitrary (application-agnostic transport; disguised as WebRTC data channel)

Soporte Móvil

N/A (volunteer proxy infrastructure)

Soporte Web

Yes (browser extension for Firefox and Chrome)

Aplicaciones Nativas

Yes (standalone binary for Linux/macOS/Windows; gomobile for Android)

Términos

Free (volunteer bandwidth donation; no compensation to proxy operators)

Fondos

OTF grant (amount undisclosed); Open Collective community donations for bridge operating costs

Basado En

Flashproxy (ephemerality concept); WebRTC (P2P transport); domain fronting (broker rendezvous via CDN)

Arquitectura P2P

Ephemeral WebRTC peer-to-peer proxy mesh; domain fronting for broker signaling

Red de Superposición

Global broker-mediated (clients matched to available proxies via centralized broker using domain fronting; traffic flows P2P)

Direccionamiento por Contenido

Local-First

N/A (routing infrastructure, not storage)

Cifrado de Extremo a Extremo (E2EE)

Yes — traffic encrypted by Tor's onion encryption layers; WebRTC DTLS for transport

Tolerancia a Fallos Bizantinos

Firma

TLS (DTLS for WebRTC transport); Tor circuit encryption layers

Permisos

N/A (open relay; no access control — any censored user matched by broker)

Madurez del Protocolo / Estandarización

Community Standard (Tor pluggable transport v2.1 spec; open specification, active community development)

Función de Infraestructura

Censorship circumvention; Relay / proxy

Modelo de Amenazas

State-level censorship; DPI (Deep Packet Inspection); ISP-level blocking; IP enumeration blocking

Modelo de Nodo Voluntario

Volunteer-operated (browser extension or tab); Embedded (runs on user device while browser is open)

Visibilidad del Tráfico

No content (encrypted payload only); Partial metadata — proxy sees client IP and Tor bridge destination but not content or final destination

Escala de Despliegue Activo

~140,000 unique proxy IP addresses concurrently (2024); ~35,000 daily users connecting via Snowflake; ~29 TB daily traffic relayed