I want to use a private obfs4 tor bridge, without tor

Question

I got my own server somewhere out there in the free internet, and I would like to connect to it via obfs4 and use it as proxy to circumvent local censorship. As far as I know, obfs4 requires a tor bridge. When I try to start it directly:

 [ERROR]: obfs4proxy - must be run as a managed transport

So now I have my private tor bridge, and can connect through this to the tor network. But actually, I do not need the "Tor" part of it ... I trust my server, and I would prefer higher speed and no restrictions on commercial servers because of a tor ip address.

Do I have to recompile the source to allow single SingleHop Connections? How am I supposed to use obfs4 standalone?

edit: Can I use it, by just having a second server (maybe even a virtual machine) and forward the tor traffic through a "private tor network"? Is obfs4 actually any better than scramblesuit for proxy purposes?

Answer 1

You need to use it with Tor, because the bridge - after passing through OBFS4(and any pluggable transport) expects a tor protocol, it's not a transparent proxy

Answer 2

obfs4 does not have a standalone mode like obfs3 does. It talks to Tor using the Pluggable Transport protocol (specification), so to use it for something else you could write a program implementing that protocol.

Shameless plug: I have written a Python 3 program that create a standalone tunnel from pluggable transports. The documentation still needs work, but the code is working. You will need Python 3 and the obfs4proxy binary for the server side, plus rsocks for the client side. Once set up, the client takes incoming TCP connections, obfuscates the traffic and sends it to the server, where the traffic is de-obfuscated and forwarded to your specified destination.