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Tor Browser disabled NoScript, but can't update

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Re: Tor Browser disabled NoScript, but can't update

#111
post #49

> Turns out an unrelated 3rd party can suddenly remotely disable Tor anonymity protections at their whim Am I the only one annoyed by people pushing this "they flicked a switch" narrative? No. They provided shitty software that didn't work under certain conditions (in this case date related) and thus broke your shitty software. A third party having remote control capability is something entirely different.

Lack of understanding of the technology and excessive paranoia will lead to that, I guess. "I'm telling you people, the man's after us!", and this man gets to feel like he's the hero exposing some conspiracy.

Definitely a looney if they care about Mozilla having essentially a live backdoor into your computer if you’re running Tor. It’s not like they are a US company that the government can manipulate at will as long as they properly insinuate terrorism or child pornography. These guys can just be trusted, right?

Re: Tor Browser disabled NoScript, but can't update

#112
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems that Firefox skips revocation checks for CA certs [1]. [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Revocation_Checking_in_Firefox

Where does it say that? The link says they centrally manage revocations using OneCRL and then push a single revocation list to browsers (independent of browser updates). Which means they can revoke any certificate they want using that mechanism.

Ah, you're correct. Seems they skip CA CRL/OCSP in favor of their own CRL. Thanks for the correction.

Re: Tor Browser disabled NoScript, but can't update

#113
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The malicious code may well have the necessary permissions to write to the profile folder, but not to modify the executable. Under the Unix security model, for example, that would be pretty likely: your profile's owned by your account, the executable & its containing folder are owned by root & go-w, so code running as you can tamper with the former but not the latter.

The malicious code can simply write an executable somewhere in the profile (or /tmp, or anywhere). It is highly unlikely that the profile (usually in /home/${USER}/) is on a filesystem mounted with the "noexec" flag. Or just inject code the browser at runtime. Under the Unix security model, the UID is the permission boundary. Even if the binary is owned by root, it inherits the user's UID when they run it.

Well, true, but all this is a lot more conspicuously fishy than "flip a setting that the user might have legitimately flipped themselves". You're not going to get far hiding a whole new Firefox install in $HOME before someone asks why theirs suddenly got 200MB bigger, for one thing.

Re: Tor Browser disabled NoScript, but can't update

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That very page acknowledges your concern & presents their counterargument - namely, they consider security software to be part of the Windows model, and expect that to intervene in the case of modified binaries: > By baking the signing requirement into the executable these programs will either have to submit to our review process or take the blatant malware step of replacing or altering Firefox. We are sure some will…

Replacing FF stable with FF dev edition would not constitute modifying the program, it's installing a new browser. A lot of installers shipped chrome, this was even encouraged by google. So I do not think this addresses the issue.

In reality though, this change has been live for a year. How many of the malicious actors switched to the model of uninstalling Firefox Stable and installing Firefox Developer Edition? (And presumably updating all the user’s aliases, start menu items, etc to point to the new browser).

I haven’t heard of this actually happening.

Re: Tor Browser disabled NoScript, but can't update

#115
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, since the original intent of the change to block unsigned plugins was to prevent third party software installers from adding malicious plugins without user consent, leaving a preference to toggle it back would have been pretty pointless as the third party installers could have just toggled the preference themselves (about:config is just some sort of easily modifiable data format on disk). TBH it’s not hard for…

> For instance, I already use a master password to encrypt/decrypt the password database in Firefox. This feature uses SHA-1. [1] > Why not allow the master password to also protect the settings and store them encrypted so a third party can’t modify them? It cannot protect against such. It can protect against a household adversary such as a 4 year old, and that's about it. [1] https://palant.de/2018/03/10/master-pass…

That’s disappointing to see. I had assumed it used PBKDF or something sane.

Of course if Mozilla had wanted to secure the config settings they could just fix the master password hashing functionality at the same time.

Re: Tor Browser disabled NoScript, but can't update

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tor project is US government op, true. It's good at hiding government employees using untrusted networks from hostile third parties. It is also good for foreign whistleblowers releasing data to US government. Tor is NOT good at keeping you private from government. It is good at keeping you private from your ISP or employer however. Don't do anything illegal using tor and thinking you are safe.

How could Tor both be " good at hiding government employees using untrusted networks from hostile third parties " and " NOT good at keeping you private from government "?

[deleted]

Re: Tor Browser disabled NoScript, but can't update

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replacing FF stable with FF dev edition would not constitute modifying the program, it's installing a new browser. A lot of installers shipped chrome, this was even encouraged by google. So I do not think this addresses the issue.

In reality though, this change has been live for a year. How many of the malicious actors switched to the model of uninstalling Firefox Stable and installing Firefox Developer Edition? (And presumably updating all the user’s aliases, start menu items, etc to point to the new browser). I haven’t heard of this actually happening.

"attack widely known and observed in the wild" is usually not the bar by which computer security systems are measured.

Re: Tor Browser disabled NoScript, but can't update

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, that's how interview questions work. If someone immediately recommends a solution, that's someone who probably needs to grow in their field a little before being given a position where this is a potentially real situation.

And as an interviewer I don't really want an answer. What I really want is to watch your brain grind away at a problem. So ask these questions, even rhetorically. Talk through all. Your angles of attack.

A good signal is when the question is: Who else is on my team?

Re: Tor Browser disabled NoScript, but can't update

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tor project is US government op, true. It's good at hiding government employees using untrusted networks from hostile third parties. It is also good for foreign whistleblowers releasing data to US government. Tor is NOT good at keeping you private from government. It is good at keeping you private from your ISP or employer however. Don't do anything illegal using tor and thinking you are safe.

How could Tor both be " good at hiding government employees using untrusted networks from hostile third parties " and " NOT good at keeping you private from government "?

This article sums up all the issues with tor

https://restoreprivacy.com/tor/

In particular, silk road shutdown, and various pedophile rings successfully de-anonymized and operators arrested. There is good evidence that powerful enough entity (esp. entity spanning multinational geographic regions) can successfully de-anonymize tor traffic.

If you keep low profile and just use tor to browse regular internet privately, you are fine. But if you do wide scale illegal activity, you most likely will pay the price.

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