Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tor Browser 10

blog.torproject.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 106 posts

Re: Tor Browser 10

#91

Post by bakuninsbart »

jonfw wrote: post #68
MiroF wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's way too much noise in this measurement for it to be seriously meaningful, unless ownership of tor was itself a crime.

Maybe in the west that'd be true- since we can freely trade information over the public internet, TOR doesn't have much utility. Let's say you're in a more totalitarian government that censors more information- TOR might look like a practical solution there, and might have people using it for more practical purposes.

Yes, who would dare use something like a VPN in a totalitarian country like China?

Re: Tor Browser 10

#92

Post by schoen »

throw0101a wrote: post #84
tialaramex wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously your web browser doesn't know if this is "just" some Wix brochureware site where you don't actually care about security or if it's a bank or your webmail or the passport office. So to keep browser users safe we need to deliver the security they expect all the time. The rule has to be consistent, either the rule is "TLS 1.0 is no good, stop that" or it's "TLS 1.0 is fine, First Bank of Springfield can keep r…

Well that's fine, but banks and Gmail (and even Wix sites) will advertise TLS 1.2+ and be just dandy as the web browser will choose the latest and greatest. But what harm does allowing 1.0 if you want to read a static HTML web page from 2001 about the Cowboy Bebop anime series?

The idea is that the browser doesn't know whether you're accessing the static HTML page or a bank that failed to upgrade.

Re: Tor Browser 10

#93

Post by bzb5 »

identity0 wrote: post #87
bzb5 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> since we can freely trade information over the public internet No we can’t.

Don't be pedantic, you're doing it right now.

There are many things you can’t post online because you’d get in trouble.

Re: Tor Browser 10

#94

Post by kart23 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #43
belorn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For users wanting to prevent their ISP from sniffing around then tor works as intended. Against advertisers it also work decently as a self cleaning browsers that constantly change its IP address. For developers and sysadmins that want to get an outside look at their own services or investigate third party websites (like fraudulent lookalike) it work pretty effective with some caveats. It also works mostly fine again…

>> It is not recommended by anyone to depend on tor against that threat model. That depends as much on the use case as the threat. Traffic analysis attacks require traffic . Short burst communication via tor (chat/email/bot control commands etc) are not traced as easily as large file downloads or random web browsing. Attacks on the client (malware) are also very hardware dependant. A target using the same Tor client…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullrun_(decryption_program)

I think you may be underestimating them here, I don't doubt their ability to keep their capabilities secret.

Re: Tor Browser 10

#95

Post by Pick-A-Hill2019 »

nisuni wrote: post #5

What's the current status of Tor? I remember seeing in the past many de-anonymizing attacks against it.

A huge caveat regarding the comment that said general browsing is ok

Browsing with JavaScript disabled (not just for some sites via the use of No-Script etc) is considered generally safe if browsing hidden services (ignoring traffic correlation attacks, adversary knocking nodes off line to increase the chances that your Tor circuit will use a guard and a relay node that they own and other tricks).

Browsing the clear web however is a rather different matter. Because exit nodes are a mixture of honeypots, servers run by kind hearted volunteers, servers run by three letter agencies and corporately sponsored servers, “Exit traffic” to the web should be considered at a 'roll the dice' level of probability.

Consider the example of person XYZ who is under an active investigation or there is a need for parallel construction. At (timestamp), Person XYZ activated a new Tor connection. This sort of info can be gotten from logs obtained from either your ISP or from any data centre or any point the connection that exited your building and connected to the guard node. Ok, so what, right? Agreed. However when correlated with Person XYZ also logged in to (or Googled ‘bad stuff keyword’, went to visit a site and was using a DNS server that logs queries, logged in to social media, sent an email, connected to IRC etc, etc) at (timestamp) then the ‘so what’ rapidly risks becoming rather more than a face-palm level of problem.

Let’s take a look at a real life example of someone that emailed a fake bomb threat at a US University https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/12/20/use-of-tor-point... Spoiler alert, the fact that it made the news sort of tells you already that it didn’t end well for him.

Bear in mind that as soon as you turn off JavaScript then you begin to stand out from the crowd (the Tor FAQ has a whole section on browser fingerprinting)

Re: Tor Browser 10

#96

Post by abdullahkhalids »

throw0101a wrote: post #86
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason is that encrypted websites are a bit harder to hack and inject malicious code into. In particular MITM attacks are much harder to pull off - such as those by airport/mall free wifis. Using the latest version of TLS makes us safe from hacking.

Using TLS in general , regardless of version, makes us safe(r) from hacking as it prevent injection. What how does disabling 1.0 specifically do?

Good question. Because it is an old protocol, vulnerabilities have been discovered in it over time [1]. Got to keep things updated!

[1] https://www.acunetix.com/blog/articles/tls-vulnerabilities-a...

Re: Tor Browser 10

#97

Post by a1369209993 »

jonfw wrote: post #69
remexre wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That GitHub page in particular, versus any GitHub page? That'd involve a TLS break, no?

Just did some research, and you're right! TLS obscures the URL by default. I didn't know that. Only nuance being that an attacker can draw conclusions about the length of the URL- which won't be very helpful on Github.

> length of the URL

Also the length of the response, which is significantly more 'helpful', although probably not enough for a working attack unless you're willing to harrass a significant fraction of your intellectual workforce over false positives.

Re: Tor Browser 10

#98

Post by 0xggus »

als0 wrote: post #47
pabs3 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some ways to mitigate some of the threats that you mention. Using Qubes or Whonix could prevent network access to other programs. The unencrypted requests can be blocked by turning on the EASE option in the HTTPS-Everywhere preferences. Tor doesn't have any way to protect against global adversaries performing timing analysis or attacks though.

Yeah I'm surprised HTTPSEverywhere with EASE isn't a part of the Tor browser. Maybe a contributor on here can comment?

https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-...

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?classification=Clie...

Re: Tor Browser 10

#99

Post by pvg »

gruez wrote: post #24
pvg wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It's a hacked up, out of date, insecure version of Firefox. It is the opposite of worth it to ever run Tor Browser.

I'm not sure where you got the idea that it's out of date. It's based on Firefox ESR and is kept up to date with upstream patches. I'm also not sure how you came to the conclusion that it's "hacked up", considering many of its privacy enhancing patches made it into Firefox.

ESR is basically a stripped and reconfigured browser for organizational deployments where the trade-offs and defaults are geared towards organizational efficiency and management issues, not individual security and privacy. It pretty much says so right on the tin. It's a weird thing to use that as a starting point for a supposedly security and privacy-focused browser. That's before they add their own cruft.

Tor Browser is the browser equivalent of adding sparklers around the gas tank of a Ford Pinto and then claiming you've now got a vehicle uniquely suited for demolition derbies and bank robberies.

Re: Tor Browser 10

#100

Post by tialaramex »

throw0101a wrote: post #86
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason is that encrypted websites are a bit harder to hack and inject malicious code into. In particular MITM attacks are much harder to pull off - such as those by airport/mall free wifis. Using the latest version of TLS makes us safe from hacking.

Using TLS in general , regardless of version, makes us safe(r) from hacking as it prevent injection. What how does disabling 1.0 specifically do?

The RFC that tells people who weren't paying attention to stop using TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 will explain this, here's the current draft of that document:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tls-oldversions-depre...

Examples of things mentioned:

SHA-1 sucks, this hash is too short by modern standards and we know it's flawed even though collision (the exciting headline making flaw) isn't especially relevant to TLS. But in TLS 1.0 SHA-1 is either the only hash permitted (in some places) or it's the best option left (MD5 is allowed but that's worse).

TLS 1.0 doesn't explain the necessity of guarding against padding oracles or how to do so. Now, of course it also doesn't ban you from guarding against them. But wait, if you're going back to upgrade your software to mitigate padding oracle attacks on TLS 1.0 why aren't you just upgrading to TLS 1.2 ? The stacks we're confident have effective mitigations all... offer TLS 1.2 anyway.

TLS 1.0 specifically requires you can do 3DES (in the terminology it's "Mandatory to implement" or MTI). But 3DES sucks, it's very slow and not as secure as a modern cipher. So you would never want to actually use 3DES, but it's mandatory in TLS 1.0 so now you're implementing a cipher that's very bad and you never want to use, just so you can support an obsolete protocol version. Or we can deprecate that protocol version and tell people to just use a newer protocol.

Post reply on HN