Questionnable request: obfs4 bridge IPv4 address rotation

Support Relay Operator
1

hello peeps,

the email address assigned to my obfs4 bridge received the following email:

  1. is anyone familiar with this requestor (Ahmet) or has anyone received a similar email? I tried searching Ahmets email and potential username on https://forum.torproject.org/ with no results.
  2. what is a “TM”?
  3. is there a reputable, actively maintained list of blocked non-exit nodes to help me to figure out if my bridge is “blocked”?
  4. if blocked, how can I best mitigate the block? I assume that I restart my router so that my WAN IP changes, causing my obfs4 to use a different IPv4 address.

To: REDACTED
From: REDACTED
Subject: ip changes

Hi,

Due to the unstable situation with the internet and high-level censorship in Turkmenistan, we would like to ask you to rotate the IP address of your bridge, since the current one has already been blocked in TM. Feel free to reach me out if you prefer to implement modification on your bridge, I would appreciate it!

Here is the bridge line:

obfs4 <my bridge identity key fingerprint REDACTED> 1443 <my bridge identity key fingerprint REDACTED> cert=7bc00WSC8hIQlzI2YPi+13FheLvQe9KwDSp8kOHN9j223wD/u43Zwai6ncZz2Ke/CFqJVQ iat-mode=0

Thank you!

Regards,

Ahmet

thanks for any and all input!

2

Hi @streamstrad,

  1. Yes, there are some people from Turkmenistan requesting bridges directly from bridge operators and we have asked them to stop doing that.
  2. TM = Turkmenistan
  3. Your bridge IP is blocked in Turkmenistan. So users can’t use your bridge there.

We’ve been recommending that users in Turkmenistan use Snowflake, as it is currently the most effective Tor pluggable transport for bypassing censorship in the country.

3 Likes
3

Ahmet asked me to change my port number from 4443 to 8080 which I did