June 17: Outline Psiphon Integration: A New Era in Circumvention Tech
Slide Decks for this presentation
https://www.canva.com/design/DAGPt81XjpQ/cMlmkZjjqSpijxGYCveRrA/view
Notes
Introducing: Psiphon Fallback in Outline SDK
Outline SDK is now equipped with Psiphon fall back capabilities, and Psiphon now uses Outline’s shadowsocks strategy in its app as well. The integration of both technologies provides a fail-safe redundancy, empowering service providers to keep users better connected.
If you are running an SDK-enabled app, you will now have more built-in options to keep your service online during moments of crisis. This partnership is a first step toward an ecosystem where multiple circumvention tools act as mutual backups – increasing resilience for users worldwide and potentially transforming the field.
You can configure multiple fallbacks with prioritized order, to be used if proxyless fails to connect. Outline supports multiple fallbacks, and they are evaluated in the order defined. Note that due to how connection timeouts and parallelism are handled internally, lower-priority fallbacks may be initiated before higher-priority ones have fully timed out. This can result in non-strict fallback ordering under certain network conditions.
Psiphon integration walkthrough
The Psiphon library components are now bundled into the Outline SDK. Integration steps:
1) Outline SDK provides adaptors to create StreamDialer using Psiphon as a fallback, leveraging our circumvention technology and network infrastructure
2) Add the -psiphon build tags and build the Psiphon smart Dialer
3) Include the Psiphon config that you get from us
4) Run the Psiphon tests!
About Psipon
Psiphon API was designed for adoption and is easy to integrate. They also provide onboarding documentation and support, and the codebase supports various platforms, including IOS, Android, WIndows and Linux, facilitating seamless integration across all your applications Ongoing development and research partnerships helps ensure Psiphon stays ahead of new censorship methods and network restrictions. Examples where Psipon was used during social media blocking events:
- Jordanian TikTok ban on December 16th, 2022.
- Iraq banned Telegram on August 6th, then reinstated it on August 13th.
- Senegal blocks access on Mobile networks on July 31st, removing restrictions a week or so later, then bans TikTok on August 4th
- Guinea blocks numerous apps on May 17th, opening up again on May 30th
Outline Updates
Core Strategy Enhancements
- Shadowsocks-over-Websockets: Adds an additional transport layer for better censorship resistance.
- Separate UDP/TCP Configuration: Offers more granular routing for improved performance and reliability.
- Prefix Disguise Support for UDP: Makes UDP traffic harder to detect and block.
- Multi-Hop Support: Enables traffic to be routed through multiple proxy servers for enhanced privacy and resilience.
Improved Metrics
- Per-AS (Autonomous System) Breakdown: Provides more detailed analytics on users’ networks of origin.
- Tunnel Time: Offers insights into how long users stay connected in a privacy-preserving way.
New Tools and Infrastructure
- Caddy Server: Easier and more flexible server management.
- Bug Fixes: Ongoing stability and security improvement
Community Resources
- NEW Developer Portal (for providers & developers): developers.google.com/outline
- NEW Help Center (for providers & end users): support.google.com/outline
Outline SDK Updates
- Mobile Proxy v0.0.3
- New Strategies:
- Multi-Split: Breaks traffic across multiple paths.
- Disorder: Introduces randomization to evade detection.
- Fallback to Proxy: Improved reliability if primary connection fails.
- Psiphon Fallback: : Expands circumvention capabilities using trusted third-party tools.
- Coming Soon:
- Strategy Caching: Reduces latency and increases performance.
- Pre-Built Released Libraries: Simplifies integration for developers.
