Hi,
New update: In the last few weeks, internal political conflicts and other events in Turkmenistan have led to another wave of censorship on Tor and anti-censorship tools. Tor bridges have been one of the few free alternatives for people in Turkmenistan to connect with the world and access the open Internet.
If you have access to an IP range that has never seen the light of day, a stable residential connection, or access to your university network, you can help thousands of people connect to the internet in Turkmenistan.
Tor bridges running on residential connections, on dynamic IPv4 address, or on unblocked IP ranges are effective, but are regularly discovered and blocked by censors, thus making us to call for new bridges. These bridges must run on specific obfs4 ports: 80, 8080, or 443. See below the example of torrc for your bridge. If it's your first time running a bridge, please follow our official guide.
Finding an IP range that is unblocked-in the country is not easy. However, bridges in universities and IP ranges in US have been of great help to people in Turkmenistan. Please note that it's not possible to run IPv6-only bridges and Turkmenistan has a very small adoption of IPv6.
If you run a bridge to help people in Turkmenistan, send your bridge line to frontdesk@torproject.org. We will share your bridge with people that really need it!
A bridge line is composed of:
IP:OBFS4_PORT FINGERPRINT cert=obfs4-certificate iat-mode=0
If you need help to build your bridge line, please check the official guide post-install.
Other Pluggable Transports
-
Snowflake has been blocked in the country since 2021:
- STUN servers are running on blocked IP ranges
- When we found an available STUN server, it didn't find a proxy to
match (probably because of the TM’s IP range rules). For more information, see this ticket.
-
Meek (domain fronting) is one of the few techniques that consistently works, but with reduced speed. While there is a dedicated bridge for TM, its cost is high.
-
Conjure was successfully tested, but more development hours are still needed for its maintenance and stabilization. Currently it is only available on Tor Browser Alpha and some other Tor powered apps.
-
WebTunnel could potentially work, but like obfs4 bridges, it depends on whether the website is hosted on an IP range that is not blocked in Turkmenistan.
Research and other resources
If you would like to learn more about censorship in Turkmenistan, ntc.party is a great resource (posts in Russian): Turkmenistan - NTC
And this paper (2023) about measuring Internet censorship in TM: “Measuring and Evading Turkmenistan’s Internet Censorship: A Case Study in Large-Scale Measurements of a Low-Penetration Country” (Sadia Nourin, Van Tran, Xi Jiang, Kevin Bock, Nick Feamster, Nguyen Phong Hoang, Dave Levin) 2023-04-17
Tor metrics
You can follow a rough estimate of Tor usage in Turkmenistan here:
Bridge usage
Vanilla Tor connections
torrc example
BridgeRelay 1
ORPort 127.0.0.1:auto
AssumeReachable 1
ServerTransportPlugin obfs4 exec /usr/bin/obfs4proxy
ServerTransportListenAddr obfs4 0.0.0.0:8080
ExtORPort auto
Nickname helptm
ContactInfo please-add-your-email
Log notice file /var/log/tor/notices.log
# If you set BridgeDistribution none, please remember to email
# your bridge line to us: frontdesk@torproject.org
BridgeDistribution none
Thank you,
Gus