Conduit (Psiphon)

P2P Infrastructure

A volunteer-operated proxy relay application within the Psiphon censorship circumvention network. Volunteers outside censored countries install Conduit on Android, desktop, or server to share bandwidth as proxy nodes. Censored users (primarily in Iran) connect through Psiphon, which routes their traffic through available Conduit nodes via the inproxy protocol, forwarding it to Psiphon's cloud server network and onward to the open internet.

Hybrid Community Low capture risk

Links

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Details

License Open source

Dev Status Released

Owner Psiphon Inc. (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)

Country Canada

Start Year 2023

Stack React Native / Expo, Go, Python

Funding OTF

Last Investigated Mar 10, 2026

Use Case Domains

Platform Evolution & Sovereignty

Affordances

Self-hostable

P2P Infrastructure Attributes

P2P Architecture Centrally brokered volunteer proxy (inproxy): censored users matched to available Conduit volunteer nodes by Psiphon broker; traffic relayed via encrypted tunnel to Psiphon cloud servers

Overlay Network N/A (traffic forwarded to Psiphon cloud; no content-addressing)

Content Addressing N/A

Local-First N/A (relay only; data passes through, not stored)

E2EE Yes — SSH core tunnel with obfuscation; encrypted between Psiphon client and Psiphon server; Conduit node sees only encrypted proxy traffic

Byzantine Fault Tolerance No

Signature SSH public keys (pre-shared for server authentication); obfuscation keys

Permissions Broker reputation system (nodes build reputation by uptime; broker preferentially routes to established nodes)

Infrastructure Function Censorship circumvention; Relay / proxy; Bandwidth sharing

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

Volunteer / Node Model Volunteer-operated (bandwidth donation); Hybrid (volunteer Conduit nodes + Psiphon commercial cloud servers)

Traffic Visibility No content (encrypted payload only); Partial metadata — Conduit node sees encrypted traffic from matched user; does not see browsing history or content

Active Deployment Scale 200,000+ Conduit stations activated January 2026 (Iran-focused deployment surge); ~3M+ weekly Psiphon users globally