Have you ever wondered what makes the Tor protocol fingerprintable, and makes pluggable transports necessary? Have you wondered how obfs3 obscures byte patterns in Tor? What a flash proxy WebSocket connection actually looks like, and why it defeats IP blocking but not DPI?

Then I have the wiki page for you:

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/AChildsGardenOfPluggableTr...

It's a visualization of different pluggable transports, meant to be an aid to understanding. At the top is an ordinary Tor handshake, with some fingerprintable data fields highlighted. The following sections, one for each transport, show how those fields are hidden--or not. I tried to demonstrate aspects of different transports that I think are hard to intuit, such as what flash proxy rendezvous looks like, and how transports look under the encrypted layer that is visible to a censor.

There are sections for obfs3, ScrambleSuit, FTE, flash proxy, meek, and Bananaphone. The page is missing a few more from https://www.torproject.org/docs/pluggable-transports. If you know how to run any of those transports, and you know an effective way to visualize it, please add it to the page.

David Fifield