The Tor Project, the organization that is responsible for managing and maintaining the Tor network, has announced that it will switch to Microsoft Azure to continue offering domain fronting.
The organization writes that the decision follows the decision of Google and Amazon to restrict the practice. The move to Azure is expected to be temporary, however, because there would be signs that Microsoft also wants to call a halt to domain fronting. The Tor Project writes – “Unfortunately, it does not look like there is a quick solution, we were not informed in advance of these changes, so we are thinking hard about possible solutions to ensure that our friends are in oppressive regimes over the access the open web all over the world. ”
According to the organization, it is impossible to disguise that a user connects to the Tor network. Moreover, it is possible for a government, for example, to block all relays, so that access to the anonymous network is blocked. In order to solve this problem, so-called pluggable transports have been created that adjust internet traffic to the access point. One of these methods, called meek, uses domain fronting, according to the Tor Project.
This is a method to prevent the destination of Internet traffic from being different than it actually is. For example, traffic from outside to Google, Amazon, or in this case, for example, seems to be Azure, but in reality, it is destined for a Tor relay. This week, Open Whisper Systems, the company behind the Signal chat app, published an e-mail from Amazon. In it, the company asked the organization to stop domain fronting. Signal used this technique for the first time in 2016. Among others, the civil rights organization Access Now is critical about blocking technology by large internet companies.
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