Meek
A pluggable transport that tunnels Tor traffic through allowed CDN or cloud front domains, useful when direct Tor connections are blocked.
Meek is a pluggable transport that disguises Tor traffic as HTTPS requests to a major, hard-to-block web service. It relies on domain fronting: the visible connection goes to an allowed CDN or cloud hostname, while a header inside the encrypted request routes it to a Tor bridge hosted behind that provider.
Why it matters
Censors face a collateral-damage calculation. Blocking a bridge address is cheap; blocking the front domain of a hyperscale cloud or CDN can cut off large parts of the legitimate internet, so meek has historically worked in regions where ordinary bridges and even obfs4 were filtered.
Limits and common mistakes
Meek is slow and expensive to operate, and its foundation is provider goodwill: the major cloud platforms restricted domain fronting in 2018, shrinking where meek can run and leaving availability dependent on current provider policy. It is a reachability tool, not an anonymity upgrade — it changes how the connection to Tor looks, nothing about what happens inside the circuit. For most censored users, Snowflake or obfs4 bridges are tried first.
Category: Censorship