Starting with 1.3.0, Hysteria has support for multi-port addresses on the client side. Format:

server:port1,port2-port3,...

Examples:

example.com:1145,5144 means that the server is available on ports 1145 and 5144 (2 ports in total)

example.com:20000-50000 means that the server is available on ports 20000-50000 (30001 ports in total)

example.com:1145,5144-10240 means the server is available on ports 1145 and 5144-10240 (5098 ports in total)

There is no limit to the number of ports you can specify.

The client will randomly select a port to connect to, and randomly hop to a new port every once in a while (default to 10 seconds, controlled by hop_interval in the client config). The hopping process is transparent to the upper layers and should not cause any data loss/connection interruption under normal circumstances.

⚠ Be aware ⚠

This feature currently only supports UDP protocol.

Port hopping relies on QUIC connection migration added in 1.3.0. Both the server and the client must be running 1.3.0 or higher.

Server configuration #

Hysteria server does not have built-in support for multi-port addresses (you cannot use the above format as a listening address). It must be used with an external port forwarding mechanism.

Forwarding UDP ports 20000-50000 on eth0 to port 5666 on Linux:

# IPv4
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p udp --dport 20000:50000 -j DNAT --to-destination :5666
# IPv6
ip6tables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p udp --dport 20000:50000 -j DNAT --to-destination :5666

The server can then listen on port 5666, while the client connects with example.com:20000-50000.

Naturally, just because the server is available on multiple ports does not mean that clients must use them all. If a client does not want to enable port hopping, it can still just pick a single port to connect to.

Why is this useful? #

Users in China often report that their ISPs block/restrict persistent UDP connections to a single port. Port hopping should invalidate this kind of mechanism.