Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jul 13, 2026

Flash proxy

Flash proxy is a pluggable transport and proxy which runs in a web browser. Flash proxies are an Internet censorship circumvention tool which enables users to connect to the Tor anonymity network via a plethora of ephemeral browser-based proxy relays. The essential idea is that the IP addresses contingently used are changed faster than a censoring agency can detect, track, and block them. The Tor traffic is wrapped in a WebSocket format and disguised with an XOR cipher.

Last revised
Jul 13, 2026
Read time
≈ 1 min
Length
262 w
Citations
5
Source
Wikipedia ↗

Flash proxy is a pluggable transport and proxy which runs in a web browser. Flash proxies are an Internet censorship circumvention tool which enables users to connect to the Tor anonymity network (amongst others) via a plethora of ephemeral browser-based proxy relays. The essential idea is that the IP addresses contingently used are changed faster than a censoring agency can detect, track, and block them. The Tor traffic is wrapped in a WebSocket format and disguised with an XOR cipher.1

Implementation

A free software2 implementation of flash proxies is available. It uses JavaScript, WebSocket, and a Python implementation of the obfsproxy protocol,3 and was crafted in the Research Project in Computer Security course at Stanford University in 2011.4 This work was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) and the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific under Contract No. N66001-11-C-4022.5

See also

See also

References

References

  1. Gallagher, Sean (2014-08-14). "A portable router that conceals your Internet traffic". Ars Technica. Retrieved 2016-04-10.
  2. "Welcome to nginx". gitweb.torproject.org. Retrieved 27 January 2022.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link)
  3. "Combined flash proxy + pyobfsproxy browser bundles | The Tor Blog". Blog.torproject.org. 2013-02-23. Retrieved 2016-04-10.
  4. "Flash Proxies". Crypto.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2016-04-10.
  5. Jones, Martin (2011). "Biting the Hand That Serves You: A Closer Look at Client-Side Flash Proxies for Cross-Domain Requests". Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 6739. pp. 85–103. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-22424-9_6. ISBN 978-3-642-22423-2. {{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help); Missing or empty |title= (help)
External links