The recently released 4.0-alpha-1 version of Tor Browser includes meek, a new pluggable transport for censorship circumvention. meek tunnels your Tor traffic through HTTPS, and uses a technique called “domain fronting” to hide the fact that you are communicating with a Tor bridge—to the censor it looks like you are talking to some other web site. For more details, see the overview and the Child’s Garden of Pluggable Transports.

You only need meek if your Internet connection is censored so that you can’t use ordinary Tor. Even then, you should try other pluggable transports first, because they have less overhead. My recommended order for trying transports is:

obfs3 fte scramblesuit meek flashproxy

Use meek if other transports don’t work for you, or if you want to help development by testing it. I have been using meek for my day-to-day browsing for a few months now.

All pluggable transports have some overhead. You might find that meek feels slower than ordinary Tor. We’re working on some tickets that will make it faster in the future: #12428, #12778, #12857.

At this point, there are two different backends supported. meek-amazon makes it look like you are talking to an Amazon Web Services server (when you are actually talking to a Tor bridge), and meek-google makes it look like you are talking to the Google search page (when you are actually talking to a Tor bridge). It is likely that both will work for you. If one of them doesn’t work, try the other.

These instructions and screenshots are for the 4.0-alpha-1 release. If they change in future releases, they will be updated at https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek#Quickstart.

How to use meek

First, download a meek-capable version of Tor Browser for your platform and language.

Verify the signature and run the bundle according to the instructions for Windows, OS X, or GNU/Linux.

On the first screen, where it says Which of the following best describes your situation?, click the Configure button.



On the screen that says Does this computer need to use a proxy to access the Internet?, say No unless you know you need to use a proxy. meek supports using an upstream proxy, but most users don’t need it.



On the screen that says Does this computer's Internet connection go through a firewall that only allows connections to certain ports?, say No. As an HTTPS transport, meek only uses web ports, which are allowed by most firewalls.



On the screen that says Does your Internet Service Provider (ISP) block or otherwise censor connections to the Tor Network?, say Yes. Saying Yes will lead you to the screen for configuring pluggable transports.



On the pluggable transport screen, select Connect with provided bridges and choose either meek-amazon or meek-google from the list. Probably both of them will work for you, so choose whichever feels faster. If one of them doesn’t work, try the other. Then click the Connect button.



If it doesn’t work, you can write to the tor-dev mailing list, or to me personally at dcf@torproject.org, or file a new ticket.