Who is the owner of Tor Browser Built in Bridges (Obs4) ?
i mean if the built in bridges are operated by the Tor itself , maybe it will be slow because of having lots of traffic,but it
will be more secure and trustworthy than unknown bridges and relays which might be running by Evil Authorities trying to de-anonymize you? any idea ?
Built-in bridges are maintained by these Tor volunteers:
These bridges can help in some situations like your university is blocking Tor, but it won’t work in Russia/China/Iran.
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i know that the main reason of using Bridges are to bypass the censorship and hide the fact that we are using Tor, but is it ok to consider that using Built-in bridges as Entry node is more safe than connecting to some random Entry node?
They don’t hide the fact you are using Tor, the exit nodes are known.
By the way, since obfs4 is easier to detect, why isn’t it phased out? Is it the case that while it is easier to detect, it’s still expensive for a non-government entity to do so they don’t bother?
“Safer” in what sense? What’s the threat here?
Generally speaking, the recommendation to follow what others users are doing and blend in is a good advice.
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since obfs4 is easier to detect
What do you mean with “obfs4 is easier to detect”? The only case I know off censors detecting obfs4 is by blocking anything that looks random, and AFAIK no censor has run this kind of mechanism for long I assume because it blocks too many other things.
A paper related to this “block random looking things”: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec23fall-prepub-234-wu-mingshi.pdf
Well like gus said, obfs4 didn’t work in China/Iran (but then again the paper you linked was able to solve that easily. Does it still work?), and in my country also I couldn’t connect using obfs4, but I could connect using meek. Although like you said they couldn’t do this for long, but that’s because the government was ousted. Had it not been, I can’t really say how long they were planning to keep operating like that.
AFAIK censors don’t block obfs4 bridges by detecting obfs4 protocol, but by discovering the bridges the same way users do and blocking them one by one. In some places like China or Iran they do spend more energy on this and are more successful. That doesn’t mean obfs4 as protocol is a problem, the problem is how to distribute bridges so people can get one that works but censors can’t list all of them.
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