Tor at the heart: bridges and pluggable transports
Censors block Tor in two ways: they can block connections to the IP addresses of known Tor relays, and they can analyze network traffic to find use of the Tor protocol. Bridges are secret Tor relays—they don’t appear in any public list, so the censor doesn’t know which addresses to block. Pluggable transports disguise the Tor protocol by making it look like something else—for example like HTTP or completely random. ...