Tor bridges

Most pluggable transports, such as obfs4, rely on the use of "bridge" relays. Like ordinary Tor relays, bridges are run by volunteers; unlike ordinary relays, however, they are not listed publicly, so an adversary cannot identify them easily.

Using bridges in combination with pluggable transports helps to conceal the fact that you are using Tor, but may slow down the connection compared to using ordinary Tor relays.

Other pluggable transports, like meek and Snowflake, use different anti-censorship techniques that do not rely on finding bridge addresses. You do not need to obtain bridge addresses in order to use these transports.

Getting bridge addresses

Because bridge addresses are not public, you will need to request them yourself. You have a few options:

• Visit https://bridges.torproject.org/options and follow the instructions, or
• Email bridges@torproject.org from a Gmail, or Riseup email address
• Use Moat to fetch bridges from within Brave.
• Send a message to @GetBridgesBot on Telegram. Tap on Start or write /start or /bridges in the chat.

Using Moat

From Brave, click on Settings in the hamburger menu (≡) and then on "Privacy and security" in the sidebar. Look for Tor connection settings and click on it. Toggle the Use a bridge, option "on", then select Request a bridge from torproject.org, click Request a New Bridge... for BridgeDB to provide a bridge. Complete the Captcha and click Submit.

Entering bridge addresses

From Brave, click on Main Menu --> Settings and then on Privacy and security in the sidebar. Look for Tor connection settings and click on it. Select the checkbox Use a bridge, and from the option Provide a bridge, enter each bridge address on a separate line.

If the connection fails, the bridges you received may be down. Please use one of the above methods to obtain more bridge addresses, and try again.

(Based in part on https://tb-manual.torproject.org/bridges/)