What is the most current, up-to-date pluggable transport for traffic obfuscation available? Are there any new
developments in this space? Is the choice between snowflake and obfs4 depend on use case?
For the Tor Project specifically, the most up-to-date (that is, the most recently developed) are Conjure and WebTunnel.
Here is the Tor Project’s repo group for pluggable transports. And here’s the Tor Project’s anti-censorship roadmap.
I also asked roughly the same question a while ago on Matrix.
About non-Tor-Project ones: I’m not very knowledgeable in this area, but I’ve heard of v2ray and x-ui, which are resilient against active probing (like WebTunnel), I heard they’re used in Iran and China, when Snowflake and obfs4 Tor bridges don’t work.
Also check out
About this: I’d say it depends on what works for you, no other significant differences. For example, in Russia they blocked Snowflake using DPI (I believe should be working again as of now), but a lot of obfs4 bridges are still working.
One of the Chinese developers said on GitHub you have to use a “streaming request.” I asked for clarification of what he meant by “streaming request.” Here is the thread on GitHub: Call for WebTunnel bridges · Issue #263 · net4people/bbs · GitHub
These new PTs require Tor Browser Alpha. Is there any way to use the Alpha version on Whonix?
webtunnel and conjure are under development, is great if people do test them and give us feedback. But is not recommended to depend on them. The same for Tor Browser Alpha, is meant for testing purposes, but don’t use it as your daily driver.
For anybody interested you can download the Tor Browswer Alpha version using the cli within a whonix workstation:
The following command could be used to download the alpha version only once:
A) tb-updater command line interface (CLI) version: update-torbrowser --alpha
I was able to do it on any launched terminal, it wasn’t necessary to use the tb-updater CLI
Tor Alpha is much faster I find and when getting WebTunnel bridges, be sure to check off the “IPv6” option
when requesting bridges because if not you may not get anything returned.
Can you explain more about the drawbacks of using Tor Alpha with WebTunnel bridges?