Ansible for Tor Network Snowflake Bridges

Ansible role for the installation, configuration, and operation of Snowflake proxies.

Background

Snowflake bridges are one of the systems the Tor network uses to combat censorship. This type of bridge, currently under development, adds to the range of anti-censorship alternatives and efforts within the Pluggable Transports (PTs), such as obfs4 and meek-azure. These bridges are designed as access options for people in regions where the Tor network is blocked.

In broad terms, Snowflake bridges disguise traffic to make it look like WebRTC protocol traffic, aiming to bypass censorship barriers—even when Tor is blocked by a telecommunications provider.

Ansible role for Snowflake bridges

With this Ansible role, you can install, configure, and operate Tor network bridges.

Features

  • Support for Ubuntu Focal, Debian Buster, Debian Bullseye, Debian Bookworm, Debian Trixie, ArchLinux, Fedora, and FreeBSD
  • Systemd unit to manage the Snowflake service on GNU/Linux and rc script for FreeBSD
  • Compatible with Ansible 2.9 or higher

Role usage

Installing Ansible with pip

python -m pip install --user ansible

For other Ansible installation methods: Installation Guide

Download the role from the Galaxy repository

ansible-galaxy install nvjacobo.snowflake

Creation of the playbook site.yml

- hosts: snowflake
  roles:
      - nvjacobo.snowflake

Creation of the file with name inventory

[snowflake]
ip-adress

We run our playbook

ansible-playbook -i inventory site.yml -u root

O con sudo

ansible-playbook -i inventario site.yml -u nombre-de-user -b

Management of snowflake-proxy with systemd on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, ArchLinux

ansible all -i inventory -a 'service snowflake status' # service status
ansible all -i inventory -a 'service snowflake start' # start
ansible all -i inventory -a 'service snowflake stop' # shutdown

Upgrade

To update snowflake to the latest available version, it is necessary to run our playbook.

ansible-playbook -i inventario site.yml -u root

Or with sudo 

ansible-playbook -i inventario site.yml -u nombre-de-user -b

Recommendations

  • Enable automatic security updates for the operating system
  • Enable automatic security updates for the operating system

References