REALITY

REALITY is an anti-censorship transport used with VLESS in the Xray project. Its trick is to borrow the TLS identity of a real, unrelated public website: to a censor performing deep packet inspection or active probing, the connection looks exactly like a legitimate visit to that site, including a valid certificate. This removes the tell-tale signs earlier disguises left behind, making the proxy extremely hard to detect or block. It is one of the most advanced obfuscation methods in current use.

REALITY has the client complete what appears to be a normal TLS handshake toward a chosen decoy domain, while the server, which holds the real keys, transparently steers authenticated clients to the proxied destination and lets everyone else reach the genuine site. Because a probing censor sees an authentic certificate for a real website, there is no fake certificate or anomalous fingerprint to flag. The scheme is powerful but intricate, and its stealth depends on choosing suitable decoy domains and configuring both ends carefully.

s4m does not implement REALITY. It runs a transparent, conventional stack: WireGuard and OpenVPN for the VPN and authenticated SOCKS5 and HTTP proxies. For privacy and IP masking these are straightforward and honest. REALITY belongs to the specialised world of defeating sophisticated national censorship, which is a different problem than the datacenter-proxy and VPN services s4m provides.