Comment: As I read the blurb ... (Score 4, Informative) 152
How do you hide something unreadable within something readable?
As I read the blurb (I have no inside knowledge) they're not making the PAYLOAD look unencrypted. They're circumventing the type-of-flow identification mechanisms built into router filtering by encapsulating the encrypted data within an outer layer (and addressed to the port of) another protocol. (They may even have put a layer on top of the existing service so that, unless it identifies the flow as an encapsulated TOR flow, it actually PERFORMS the service.)
The result would be that, if they intercept the flow and try to parse it as what it purports to be, it may not make sense. But if their router look at the parts of the packets that are characteristic of what the flow purports to be, it will identify it as normal traffic and let it through. And if the router tries doing something like a keyword search through the bodies of the packets it won't get hits because the bodies are encrypted.
You can use this approach with any protocol that can handle the traffic patters of a TOR connection (possibly with added padding packets to make the characteristics look more like the purported flow).
Downsides might be:
1) If you do a masked TOR only server on the port they might try to connect to the purported flow and detect that this server is not what it seems.
2) If you do a diverting pancake you need a way to flag for the pancake that this is the masked TOR flow. If that's well known they might write a filter for it. (Eric Wustrow, Scott Wolchok, Ian Goldberg, and J. Alex Halderman have developed a steganographic method for applying such a tag. It is embedded in their own "TELEX" network-based firewall bypasser but might be adapted to this purpose. paper a href="https://telex.cc/"code")