ObfuscaTOR

What

ObfuscaTOR is a compilation of Captcha generation libraries, with a common interface to allow them all to be integrated and to allow easy additions of new libraries.  The overall purpose is to allow mass distribution of Tor bridge information without that information being automatically collected and filtered.  The goal of ObfuscaTOR is only to provide an interface to many Captcha libraries to allow easily obfuscating text and displaying the information.  Because bridge information can come from many different sources, it’s up to the implementor to gather the information.

Why

It’s not hard to block Tor if you can block all the known relays.  If you put up a text list of relays, they can all be collected and blocked by, say, China.  If you put up a few sites with scrambled relay information, those sites can be blocked, and then relay information is no longer accessible.  So our idea is to make it very easy to create CMS/Blog/etc plugins that will grab bridge information and display it in an obfuscated form.  If these plugins are easy to create, easy to use, and serve a good purpose, we believe a large amount of people will install the plugins, and several things will happen:

  1. Bridge information will be somewhat common place, and therefore easy for users to find.
  2. There will be too many sites running the plugins to try and filter all of them(and maintain and expand those filters).
  3. The information is obfuscated, so it won’t be easy for a computer to automate filtering the information, but users can still read the bridge information.

Where

You can also find the latest ObfuscaTOR library on GitHub. 

Implementations

Currently there is a WordPress plugin using this library,