pluggable transport

A transport layer mechanism that disguises or obfuscates Tor traffic to bypass network filtering and DPI (deep packet inspection). Instead of sending plaintext Tor handshakes, pluggable transports wrap the connection in another protocol—making it look like something else entirely: HTTPS, DNS, meek (cloud traffic), or obfs4 (random noise). Your ISP or network admin sees encrypted traffic to a legitimate service, not Tor. You run a pluggable transport on your client; the bridge or exit node runs the corresponding endpoint. This matters when Tor itself is blocked or heavily monitored. Common transports: obfs4 (lightweight obfuscation), meek (disguises traffic as calls to CDNs like Azure or Akamai), Snowflake (proxies traffic through volunteer WebRTC peers). Pluggable transports don't make Tor faster or more anonymous—they make it reachable. Useful in censored regions, corporate networks, and anywhere Tor is explicitly throttled or denied. Not a magic bullet: sophisticated adversaries can still fingerprint the traffic if they control endpoints.