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We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

fingerprint.com

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Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

#171

Post by grumbelbart2 »

Cider9986 wrote: post #163

Being fingerprinted across Tor is different from being deanonymized—it basically just "psuedonomizes" you. You now have an identifier. It is a significant threat, but it is not hard to "psuedonomize" someone based on stylometry and some of the people with the highest threat model—operating an illegal site, will be pseudonymous anyway. Don't get your opsec advice from HN. Check whonix, qubes, grapheneos, kicksecure fo…

This fingerprint persists over private and non-private Firefox sessions until you restart Firefox. State actors might be able to connect your Google-login in FF window 1 with your tor session in FF private window 2.

Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

#172

Post by anthk »

angry_octet wrote: post #117
anthk wrote: post #26

The best for Tor would just be Links2/Links+ with the socks4a proxy set to 127.0.0.1:9050, enforcing all connection thru a proxy in the settings (mark the checkbox) and disabling cookies altogether.

The best is probably tor in a VM, chromium in a separate VM, javascript disabled, on a private virtual network, with a egress firewall (not just guest VM firewalls, but enable those too) that only allows traffic from a specific origin port on the tor machine. You would also want the VM to spoof the processor features and unique IDs. System time drift/offset remains a vector which is hard to deal with. Dump the render…

Links can force to pass all connections to a proxy, so a FW might be redundant. Forget almost mouse, Links can be render the page either to plain X11 or a terminal.

Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

#173

Post by anthk »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #139
anthk wrote: post #26

The best for Tor would just be Links2/Links+ with the socks4a proxy set to 127.0.0.1:9050, enforcing all connection thru a proxy in the settings (mark the checkbox) and disabling cookies altogether.

> enforcing all connection thru a proxy in the settings (mark the checkbox) Just use a network namespace individual pieces of software are way too easy to misconfigure.

Links litteraly put your a graphical (X11) or terminal based checkbox to enable that to enforce everything through the proxy with the settings menu. Not too easy. If you are going to use Tor you shouldn't be just using Tor Browser by default neither if it enables some JS options. Firefox' base is too huge to configure so nothing ever leaks. There are too many components. A/V, WebGL, telemetry, WASM, WebRTC...

Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

#174

Post by akimbostrawman »

shevy-java wrote: post #12
bawolff wrote: post #10

From the sounds of this it sounds like it doesn't persist past browser restart? I think that would significantly reduce the usefulness to attackers.

Would it though? I guess state agencies already know all nodes or may know all nodes. When you have a ton of meta-information all cross-linked, they can probably identify people quite accurately; may not even need 100% accuracy at all times and could do with less. I was thinking about that when they used information from any surrounding area or even sniffing through walls (I think? I don't quite recall the article bu…

All Tor nodes are publicly known. Just knowing them doesn't help tracking at all because of onion routing, they would need access to all nodes.

https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html

Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

#175

Post by vscode-rest »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #130
piccirello wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This excerpt from the article describes the risk well. > In Firefox Private Browsing mode, the identifier can also persist after all private windows are closed, as long as the Firefox process remains running. In Tor Browser, the stable identifier persists even through the "New Identity" feature, which is designed to be a full reset that clears cookies and browser history and uses new Tor circuits.

I wonder why "New Identity" wasn't implemented as a fork-and-exec with a newly created profile?

Follow the money.

Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

#176

Post by fsflover »

handedness wrote: post #89
Barbing wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why Qubes OS? >Physical isolation is a given safeguard that the digital world lacks … >In our digital lives, the situation is quite different: All of our activities typically happen on a single device. This causes us to worry about whether it’s safe to click on a link or install an app, since being hacked imperils our entire digital existence. >Qubes eliminates this concern by allowing us to divide a device into man…

Qubes OS is a great solution for this threat model. By my (admittedly cursory) understanding of this attack, one would have to chain the attack to escalate to dom0 to get around it. Having said that, fsflover exhibits a poor grasp of how this stuff works and all should be aware that even in Qubes OS, one would need to spawn new disposable VMs for each identity; relying on the Tor Browser's new identity creation withi…

> one would need to spawn new disposable VMs for each identity

This is by design how everyone should always be using Qubes OS for any task, according to its documentation and approach to security.

> relying on the Tor Browser's new identity creation within the same disposable VM would be little different from running Tor Browser on a traditional OS

Yes, if you use a single VM on Qubes OS for everything, then all security you get is from the OS running in this VM. This is not how you use Qubes, https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/r4.3/introduction/faq.html#how-d...

I run Qubes as a daily driver according to the docs, and my workflow was not vulnerable to the discussed attack.

Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

#177

Post by wongogue »

autoexec wrote: post #157
mmooss wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many users leave their browsers open for months.

Open enough tabs and you'd be lucky to keep firefox running for more than a couple weeks.

I have 488 tabs in the session with more than 50 loaded. The running session has 72 processes.

Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

#178

Post by fsflover »

handedness wrote: post #99
fsflover wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here you go: https://qubes-os.org .

You should note that improperly using Qubes OS, creating a New Identity inside of Tor Browser, even in a disposable Whonix workstation VM, would leave one vulnerable to this. A user would have to manually start a new disposable VM for each identity.

https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Multiple_Whonix-Workstation#Mult...

Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

#179

Post by fsflover »

handedness wrote: post #90
fsflover wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Qubes, you do not create a new identity in the same VM. This would go against the Qubes approach to security/privacy. Using separate VMs for independent tasks is the whole point of using Qubes.

> On Qubes, you do not create a new identity in the same VM. This would go against the Qubes approach to security/privacy. Using separate VMs for independent tasks is the whole point of using Qubes. This is technically incorrect information and could get people in trouble if followed literally. On Qubes OS, if a user creates a new identity inside a Whonix workstation disposable VM via the browser's new identity funct…

You are right, and I am saying exactly the same thing. You seem to misunderstand that Qubes saves you whenever you use it as designed by its security approach. To benefit from Qubes security, you have to use virtualization to compartmentalize your tasks. Only virtualization is a guarantee of security. Everything running in the same domain is assumed to be not isolated, and a compromise would affect everything in it. Even root access has no password by default in VMs. So what you're saying is obvious to any Qubes user. This is why I didn't mention it. (But I should have indeed.)

By you reasoning, Qubes doesn't provide more protection than the underlying operating systems. I've seen this myth on HN multiple times.

Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

#180

Post by fsflover »

handedness wrote: post #93
fsflover wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different VMs result in different identifiers.

Creating a new identity in the browser in a disposable VM does not start a new disposable VM.

I never said that. I only assumed that a user followed the docs when using Qubes-Whonix.
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