Support Ukraine, Run a Tor Bridge

Putin’s government has a deep history of repression. Ukrainians and Russian dissidents alike fear retaliation for sharing anti-Putin sentiments–and rightfully so. It was less than two years ago that a prominent political opponent of Putin was nearly assassinated by an potent nerve agent. For this reason, Russian dissidents and the innocent people in occupied Ukraine must be exceedingly cautious with their political rhetoric. The Tor network is the best available option for those individuals seeking anonymous internet access and communication, but the success of Tor depends on the efforts and resources of volunteers to keep it running. Tor is in desperate need of volunteers, and if you have a little bit of technical background and $5 dollars, you can support free speech in Ukraine, Russia, and across the world.

Tor is the present-day gold standard for anonymous communication. At a high level, it works by routing its users’ internet traffic through a series of (usually) three relays. A user’s Tor browser encrypts their traffic with a series of keys only known to the user and each relay. The relays each remove a layer of encryption, as the traffic passes through on its way to the final destination–a process called onion encryption. This ensures that none of the relays know the contents of the traffic, nor do they know both the user’s IP and the destination’s IP. This provides relationship anonymity, i.e., no one can associate a user with the websites they are connecting to.

Tor is an excellent tool for dissidents, but oppressive governments aren’t stupid. Since Tor relays are publicly known, censoring governments can (and do) block access to them. They do this by blocking the IPs associated with known Tor relays.

The designers of Tor have built in a mechanism to help affected users circumvent this type of censorship. The mechanism is called a bridge relay. A bridge is just like a normal relay, but its IP address is not publicly advertised—users must request them individually as-needed.

Tor is heavily used all over the world. Everyday more than two million people connect to the Tor network. Despite this, there is an ongoing shortage of Tor relays, only about 7000 in the whole world. Tor relays are run by volunteers, and they require real servers with appropriate networking capabilities—so it’s not surprising there are so few. Bridge relays, in particular, are sparse–less than 2500 are operational at the moment. To make matters worse, would-be censoring governments are constantly on the lookout for bridges, and they will block them as soon as they find them. Since the bridges have to be made available to people without confirming their identities, this means that all bridges get blocked eventually. The solution: churn. Bridges need to be restarted from new IPs every few weeks.

The remaining question is: how can you help Ukraine? Unsurprisingly, bridge use has gone through the roof in both Ukraine and Russia.

These are likely people trying to avoid the prying eyes of a certain tyrannical government. If you have the computer chops to set up a bridge, this is a tangible way to help journalists and political dissidents communicate.

The following is how I started running a bridge. It can reasonably be done by any computer-savvy person (e.g. a software engineer) in about twenty minutes. This isn’t the only way to setup a bridge and I can’t guarantee that it’s the cheapest (though, it’s only $5 per month), but it is certainly quick and easy.

I used Digital Ocean to provision a machine. It is a reputable company that will guarantee high uptime for your instance. If you have a machine with appropriate specs, you could use that instead (and skip to Running Tor).

If you’re using Digital Ocean, follow these steps:

In the logs, one line will look something like

If you go to the Tor metrics relay search and enter the fingerprint, details about the relay will appear. Note that it will not show up until the relay has undergone some automated validation, which may take a few hours. Also note, that it will be beneficial to restart your relay from a new machine (or droplet in Digital Ocean) every couple weeks to evade censorship.

For additional details and debugging advice, see the Tor website.

This is a difficult time for many people, and if you are like me, you probably feel pretty useless right now. Running a Tor bridge is no replacement for donating money to the Ukrainian cause or the work people are doing on the ground in Ukraine. But it will help Ukrainians and Russian dissidents communicate safely–and that’s worth something.