Cupcake Bridge helps users makes bridges automagically! Get the Cupcake browser extension for Chrome.
- Chrome - download on google
The browser extension for Firefox is being rewritten as it has difficulty making websocket connections.
Cupcake is a wrapper for a pluggable transport called Snowflake. This makes it easy for people who want to contribute some of their bandwidth to create special Tor pathways that are harder to block. As with all circumvention projects, there's a lot more to it than that, but that is the jist.
Cupcake can be distributed in two ways:
- As a chrome extension (turning your computer in to a temporary pathway)
- As a module/theme/app on popular web platforms (turning every visitor to your site in to a temporary proxy). These are currently being rewritten to accomodate Snowflake.
The easiest way to help the project is by installing one of the browser extensions. It's not resource intensive at all -- Snowflake uses about as much bandwidth in a day as a 5-minute YouTube video.
- Translation - Help Out!
- incognito:split This is useful during testing, so that incognito won't use cookies from standard browsing mode.
- incognito:spanning When deployed, prevents incognito windows from creating additional Cupcake processes. Proxy will continue even if all the browser windows are in incognito mode.
- permissions:background is used so that the extension will notify of updates and display the post-installation page. Also used so that Cupcake will start/run on startup, before the browser is started (Windows only).
- permissions:cookies allows reading/writing of cookies, but may not be necessary, since Cupcake doesn't currently use the Cookies API.
In 2015, a full security audit of both Cupcake and Flashproxy was conducted by Cure53. Both projects passed the audit with compliments. The full report is available here.
Most of the Cupcake Bridge projects are self-funded by @glamrock, but major modifications to the first versions of Chrome and Firefox extensions were covered under a generous grant from the Open Tech Fund from 2013-2014.
Previously, Cupcake included Flashproxy rather than Snowflake. Cupcake has existed since 2012, and Snowflake was created a couple of years after Cupcake. Over time, it became clear that Snowflake was becoming more useful for at-risk users, so I made the switch in early 2019. The old readme is available here.
My software is free to use, free to give to friends, & open-source, so everyone can make sure it's safe for people to use. Want to make changes? Go for it! 🐶 Cupcake uses the Revised BSD license -- see license.txt for more legal info.
[1] https://snowflake.torproject.org/ [2] https://crypto.stanford.edu/flashproxy/