Glossary

The protocols and technologies people ask about most: what they are, what they are for and what they cannot do.

• VLESS VLESS is a transport protocol from the Xray project with no encryption of its own. Why it was designed that way, how it differs from VMess, and why it is almost always paired with Reality.
• Reality Reality disguises a connection as a visit to a real third-party site without needing your own domain or certificate. How the mechanism works and where its limits are.
• Shadowsocks Shadowsocks does not imitate a website; it aims to have no recognisable features at all, so the stream looks like random bytes. What that buys and where it stops working.
• Hysteria2 Hysteria2 runs over QUIC and UDP and behaves differently on links that drop packets. Where the gain comes from, and when there will be none.
• WireGuard WireGuard is deliberately minimal: roughly four thousand lines against hundreds of thousands in its predecessors. What follows from that for speed and for visibility.
• AmneziaWG AmneziaWG takes WireGuard and removes the constant packet shape by which the connection is recognised. What exactly changes, and what it costs.
• SNI SNI carries the requested site name at the very start of the handshake, before encryption. Why that was needed and what ECH changes.
• MTU MTU sets the largest packet that fits in the network. Inside a tunnel it is smaller than usual, which produces an odd symptom: small things work, big things hang.
• XTLS XTLS removes double encryption: data already protected by TLS inside is not encrypted again outside. How that works and what it saves.
• Trojan Trojan invents no handshake of its own: it rides plain TLS and serves a real web page when the password is wrong. The trick and what it costs.
• Subscription link A subscription link describes a list of servers, not an application. Which is why the client can be swapped while the link stays the same.
• Split tunnelling Split tunnelling decides which apps and addresses use the protected connection and which go direct. Why it is useful and where the traps are.