Snowflake moving to Stable

Snowflake is committed to providing a seamless, always up-to-date experience for our users while also delivering ever-increasing value through rapid development and continual innovation.

Snowflake is a system that allows people from all over the world to access censored websites and applications. Similar to how VPNs assist users in getting around Internet censorship, Snowflake helps you avoid being noticed by Internet censors by making your Internet activity appear as though you're using the Internet for a regular video or voice call.

What is Snowflake?

Snowflake is a pluggable transport that uses a combination of domain fronting and peer-to-peer WebRTC connections between clients and volunteers to circumvent Internet censorship. Snowflake, which is the spiritual successor to flashproxy, aims to lower the barrier for running anti-censorship proxies, resulting in a large pool of proxies for users to connect to. Instead of requiring a server with consistent up-time, Snowflake proxies run as an addon or extension in your browser. These proxies can move locations as users connect to different networks, providing a moving target that is more difficult to block. We currently have about 8 thousand available Snowflake proxies each day. When a user connects to Snowflake in order to circumvent censorship, they are matched with a currently available proxy. If this proxy "melts," or disappears, the user will be seamlessly matched with a new proxy.

Snowflake currently uses domain fronting for the initial connection to match users with Snowflake proxies, and to allow each peer to exchange the connection information necessary for WebRTC. This channel is highly censorship resistant, and used only for the initial bootstrapping of the connection. As such, it requires much lower bandwidth and shorter connections than existing domain fronting pluggable transports like meek, making it a more scalable alternative.

For more technical details on how Snowflake is designed, see our documentation, the source code, and the Snowflake technical report.

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How can I use Snowflake?

Snowflake is available in Tor Browser stable for all platforms: Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux, and Android. You can also use Snowflake with Onion Browser on iOS.

If you're running Tor Browser for desktop for the first time, you can click on 'Configure Connection' on the start-up screen. Under the "Bridges" section, locate the option "Choose from one of Tor Browser's built-in bridges" and click on "Select a Built-In Bridge" option. From the menu, select 'Snowflake'. Once you've selected Snowflake, scroll up and click 'Connect' to save your settings.

From within the browser, you can click on the hamburger menu ("≡"), then go to 'Settings' and go to 'Connection'. Alternatively, you can also type about:preferences#connection in the URL bar. Under the "Bridges" section, locate the option "Choose from one of Tor Browser's built-in bridges" and click on "Select a Built-In Bridge" option. From the menu, select 'Snowflake'.

Snowflake user survey

Beginning in March 2021, Snowflake launched a social media campaign to recruit more alpha testers of Snowflake as a client in order to stress test the system, identify any unreported bugs, and compare Snowflake’s latency between different geographical locations. To provide Tor Browser Alpha users with a structured way to feed back and aid our reporting, the campaign was accompanied by an anonymous 14 question survey – from which we’d like to share a few highlights:

The response to the survey was amazing, and we’re incredibly thankful to all participants for taking the time to reply. Of the 726 participants who confirmed they use Snowflake as a pluggable transport, mobile was by far the platform of choice – with desktop coming in a distant second.

243 confirmed Snowflake users volunteered their location, with the five most popular locations being the United States (46), Russia (26), India (16), Germany (13) and Mainland China (9). However, it must be noted that anglophone locations and those with fewer instances of censorship may be over-represented due to the nature of the study.

For some questions, freeform text responses have been quantified using simple string-matching methods. Despite the full responses not being made public to protect the privacy of our participants, they have been gratefully received and read by the team. Overall, 75% of users held a positive view of Snowflake, despite some having experienced connection troubles and slow speeds while browsing

If you'd like to read the report in its entirety, you can download it in PDF format here.

Use Snowflake to Bypass Censorship

Unlike VPNs, you do not need to install a separate application to connect to a Snowflake proxy and bypass censorship. It is usually a circumvention feature embedded within existing apps. Currently Snowflake is available inside Tor Browser on Desktop and Android, Onion Browser on iOS, and Orbot on Android and iOS. If you have downloaded and installed any of these apps, and they are censored in your country, you can bypass the censorship by activating Snowflake through the apps' settings page.