okay.
in this video, we're going to be discussing an overview to tour bridges and entry guards.
these are very important to know as they assist you in tor circumvention of censorship.
so let's discuss the process of connecting to tor and why a bridge might be needed.
so we've talked about this before.
we've shown you this chart where you connect your isp, which then connects to tor and tor to the rest of the internet.
so that creation of the circuit is really where tor comes into play.
and along the way, there's three hops, three nodes that you go through and then your data is sent.
the main issue though is that node one, that 1st node can be at risk of censorship.
you might not even be able to get into the tor network because it might be blocked.
so how do you go about connecting to tor when that entry node or the nodes on tor are blocked?
because these are on a list publicly and people can just scan for them and know that they're tor.
so how do you prevent this?
well, you have two things.
you have an entry guard.
this is that 1st relay in the circuit we're referencing.
so this is not necessarily anything different than what you're using.
most of your entry points are going to be an entry guard.
but an entry guard specifically being that 1st relay is meant to protect against traffic correlation attacks.
it's usually when you connect on tour, you're going to use the same entry node or the entry guard for months.
and doing so reduces your exposure to potentially compromised guards that exist out there.
so whenever you want to connect to a circuit, notice if you go to different websites that your 1st hop is usually the same.
that is your entry guard.
if you do select the new identity, it will select a new entry guard and change that.
a bridge is slightly different.
it is an entry relay as well, but this is a relay that's not on the public node list.
it also uses pluggable transports, which we just talked about in the last video, uses that on top of them to help better circumvent and hide the activity that you may be doing.
and it's really helpful for those who are subject to censorship and need to connect to tor but can't because it's blocked or monitored or otherwise stopped.
so that is the point of bridges while entry guards are more of just protection generally in the tor network with your 1st node.
so that's really it.
that's the difference between entry guard and bridges and a high level understanding of what a bridge is.
if you have any questions, of course, let me know.
otherwise, we're going to continue on and talk about the ultimate privacy checklist with tor so you can get the best understanding of how to be the most secure, private and anonymous that you can be.
thank you.
see you in the next one.