snowflake

snowflake is a tor bridge system that bounces your connection through volunteers' browsers using webrtc, built to beat censorship with sheer numbers.

snowflake tackles censorship differently from fixed bridges: instead of secret relay addresses, it recruits an army of disposable, short-lived entrances. volunteers install an extension or keep a browser tab open, and their browser temporarily acts as a relay for one censored user via webrtc.

a broker service matches clients to volunteers - the client tells the broker it needs help, a volunteer signals availability, and they connect peer to peer. from the censor's perspective the traffic resembles ordinary webrtc video call chatter, which is extremely costly to block wholesale because legitimate services depend on it.

the trade-offs are honest ones: individual snowflake connections tend to be slower and less stable than obfs4 bridges, since a volunteer closing a tab drops your path and forces a rematch. they shine when fixed bridge lines are scarce, blocked, or too risky to distribute.

for most users in mildly censored regions, obfs4 remains the first choice and snowflake is the fallback that keeps working when bridges get enumerated. both appear in tor browser's connection settings with one-click setup.