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Tails 3.0 Released

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Re: Tails 3.0 Released

#71

Post by jerheinze »

ryanlol wrote: post #18
WillyOnWheels wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you suggest I should be running Firefox in Tails?

The safer solution is to run the modern browser of your choice (probably chrome) in an isolated VM routed through a torified gateway. Hardware isolation would of course be preferable. If you're using Tails you'd probably be much better off using Whonix instead. With Tails, an attacker capable of breaking your browser will m̶o̶s̶t̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶l̶y̶ definitely also be capable of easily grabbing your IP address.

> The safer solution is to run the modern browser of your choice (probably chrome) in an isolated VM routed through a torified gateway.

This is bad and dangerous advice that can potentially put people in trouble. As I said elsewhere in this thread: If you don't use the Tor Browser you're exposing yourself to all the fingerprinting attacks that the Tor Browser tries to protect from: https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/

Not only that, using the particular setup you're describing, you wont have stream isolation, so all of your website browsing can be watched by a single exit node (whereas with the Tor Browser each site has its own circuit) which makes correlation attacks much damaging (whole browsing history in a session vs 1 site).

Re: Tails 3.0 Released

#72

Post by NoGravitas »

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #54
unexistance wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

since there's no reply, I'm guessing it's because Tor Browser is using Firefox ESR, even though Fx ESR are guaranteed for a security update... any other reason?

IIRC, the highlights of the anti-Tor-Browser argument are something like: - Various people who are very interesting to intelligence agencies, police, organized crime syndicates, and private security for major corporations use Tor Browser, increasing the demand for and thus price of black market exploits specifically targeted at it. - Tor Browser incorporates patches and default settings that receive less testing and…

An addition to this summary: Tor Browser is generally good for anonymity, because it creates a pool of users with identical browser fingerprints. But it is bad for security, for the reasons above. And I suppose that if your security is broken, your anonymity probably is, though at one remove.

Re: Tails 3.0 Released

#73

Post by Tepix »

mrmondo wrote: post #45
d33 wrote: post #2

Those two changes seem particularly important: * Tails 3.0 works on 64-bit computers only and not on 32-bit computers anymore. Dropping hardware support, even for a small portion of our user base, is always a hard decision to make but being 64-bit only has important security and reliability benefits. For example, to protect against some types of security exploits, support for the NX bit is compulsory and most binarie…

I can't honestly say I've seen a 32bit computer in what must be nearly a decade now?

Sure but cheap Intel Atom N270 netbooks are probably still being used in poor countries even though they were released around 2008/2009.

Re: Tails 3.0 Released

#74

Post by sr2 »

tptacek wrote: post #12

For the love of Christ don't use Tor Browser. Every other modern browser, including mainline Firefox, is safer.

There are people that customize Firefox with plugins to make it look like TorBundle. All you need is FoxyProxy[0] hooked up to tor and a useragent spoofer which mimics common TorBundle useragent strings and you're set. This is very dangerous though as FoxyProxy could potentially leak your IP, aswell as a slew of other things that could go wrong.

TorBundle devs have stripped out a tonne of things which increase attack surfaces and the fingerprintability of mainline Firefox. Best just blending in and looking like everyone else and use TorBundle.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxyproxy-sta...

Re: Tails 3.0 Released

#75

Post by jerheinze »

sr2 wrote: post #74
tptacek wrote: post #12

For the love of Christ don't use Tor Browser. Every other modern browser, including mainline Firefox, is safer.

There are people that customize Firefox with plugins to make it look like TorBundle. All you need is FoxyProxy[0] hooked up to tor and a useragent spoofer which mimics common TorBundle useragent strings and you're set. This is very dangerous though as FoxyProxy could potentially leak your IP, aswell as a slew of other things that could go wrong. TorBundle devs have stripped out a tonne of things which increase attack…

Indeed, https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/

Not only that, using the particular setup you're describing, you wont have stream isolation, so all of your website browsing can be watched by a single exit node (whereas with the Tor Browser each site has its own circuit) which makes correlation attacks much damaging (whole browsing history in a session vs 1 site).

Re: Tails 3.0 Released

#76

Post by dogma1138 »

boondaburrah wrote: post #46
dogma1138 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel early centrinos are not 64bit (Dothan / Banias) so are the initial Core / Core Duo CPUs (Yona). Intel didn't release a mobile 64bit CPU until 2006/7 with Core 2 Duo. Also the initial implementations of Intel64/EMT64 lack certain functions so even tho they technically support 64bit they might lack certain other features that are required by modern operating systems. So overall if you have a 10 year old laptop yo…

not even. If you have a netbook from 2009 the ubiquitous Intel Atom N270 that powered all of those was a single-core 32-bit CPU.

I forgot about the Atoms completely, are they even 64bit now?

Re: Tails 3.0 Released

#77

Post by jnbiche »

jwilk wrote: post #67
jnbiche wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How does that work? Does Tails automatically choose kernel version appropriate for your hardware, or what? No, you run `uname -m` and then download the appropriate version of Tails (although it appears Tails 3.0 is only available on 64-bit now).

I mean, "uname -m" gives you information about the kernel, not about the hardware. If "uname -m" says "i686" it means that your kernels is 32-bit (or pretends¹ to be so). It doesn't necessarily mean that your hardware is not capable of running a 64-bit kernel. So unless I'm missing something, the above procedure does not work correctly. Instead, you should run something like this: $ lscpu | grep -w mode CPU op-mode(s…

That's a fair point. I misunderstood your question.

Re: Tails 3.0 Released

#78

Post by ryanlol »

jerheinze wrote: post #71
ryanlol wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The safer solution is to run the modern browser of your choice (probably chrome) in an isolated VM routed through a torified gateway. Hardware isolation would of course be preferable. If you're using Tails you'd probably be much better off using Whonix instead. With Tails, an attacker capable of breaking your browser will m̶o̶s̶t̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶l̶y̶ definitely also be capable of easily grabbing your IP address.

> The safer solution is to run the modern browser of your choice (probably chrome) in an isolated VM routed through a torified gateway. This is bad and dangerous advice that can potentially put people in trouble. As I said elsewhere in this thread: If you don't use the Tor Browser you're exposing yourself to all the fingerprinting attacks that the Tor Browser tries to protect from: https://www.torproject.org/projects…

>This is bad and dangerous advice that can potentially put people in trouble. As I said elsewhere in this thread: If you don't use the Tor Browser you're exposing yourself to all the fingerprinting attacks that the Tor Browser tries to protect from: https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/

And if you do use Tor Browser you're exposing yourself to an old insecure browser. This situation has dramatically improved recently, but it's still far from optimal.

I think for most people fingerprinting is the far lesser threat, especially when discussing an install that'll presumably always remain behind Tor.

>Not only that, using the particular setup you're describing, you wont have stream isolation, so all of your website browsing can be watched by a single exit node (whereas with the Tor Browser each site has its own circuit) which makes correlation attacks much damaging (whole browsing history in a session vs 1 site).

Both Firefox and Chrome should grab KDEs proxy settings and therefore automatically benefit from stream isolation on Whonix, no?

Re: Tails 3.0 Released

#79

Post by jerheinze »

ryanlol wrote: post #78
jerheinze wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The safer solution is to run the modern browser of your choice (probably chrome) in an isolated VM routed through a torified gateway. This is bad and dangerous advice that can potentially put people in trouble. As I said elsewhere in this thread: If you don't use the Tor Browser you're exposing yourself to all the fingerprinting attacks that the Tor Browser tries to protect from: https://www.torproject.org/projects…

>This is bad and dangerous advice that can potentially put people in trouble. As I said elsewhere in this thread: If you don't use the Tor Browser you're exposing yourself to all the fingerprinting attacks that the Tor Browser tries to protect from: https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/ And if you do use Tor Browser you're exposing yourself to an old insecure browser. This situation has dramatically…

> And if you do use Tor Browser you're exposing yourself to an old insecure browser.

1) The Tor Browser is based on the Firefox 52 ESR, sure, it's not the most secure browser in the market, but it's far from being "old and insecure".

2) If you're considering the alpha Linux 64 version, it includes Selfrando, which should provide more protection than a vanilla Firefox. See "Real-world Exploits against the Tor Browser" pages 9-10 where they conclude [1],

> The reason is that these function pointers are only accessed through an indirection layer, i.e., memory objects on the heap contain a pointer to a virtual table which is located in the code or data section of the application and contains a number of pointers to virtual functions. Since the attackers can only disclose the virtual table pointer, but not the virtual table itself, as it is not on the heap, they cannot disclose gadget addresses. Note that, when only ASLR is applied, the address of the virtual table is randomized with the same offset as the ROP gadgets. Therefore, such an attack can bypass ASLR but not selfrando.

> We therefore conclude that selfrando can thwart most real-world exploits. Attackers can only succeed in rare cases where they can disclose the complete heap and data section.

It's only for Linux for now, but that may change in the future.

3) Would you consider the Tor Browser with the security slider set to High or even just Medium to be "insecure"?

4) You still provided no alternatives.

> I think for most people fingerprinting is the far lesser threat, especially when discussing an install that'll presumably always remain behind Tor.

Sorry, shoving up all your traffic through Tor while not caring about your browser's fingerprint is useless, 29 bits of identifying information just from screen resolution output alone. It's just too easy...

And it's not just about fingerprinting, I'm afraid, see the other problems mentioned in the Tor Browser Design document.[2]

> Both Firefox and Chrome should grab KDEs proxy settings and therefore automatically benefit from stream isolation on Whonix, no?

No, unfortunately, these two different browsers will use two different catch-all circuits, but you wont get _first party_ stream isolation on them, _which was my whole point_. In other words, your Chromium (I assume that Chrome in your comment was just a typo) will use a single circuit for all of your websites, whereas with the Tor Browser each website will get its own circuit. That means that it's much much easier for an adversary who controls a portion of Tor relays to de-anonymize ALL your traffic with Chromium, when he can de-anonymize only a single website with the Tor Browser.

Also since you mentioned Whonix, note that they actually recommend using the Tor Browser without Tor for clearnet browsing instead of other browsers since it's (quoting their lead dev) "better hardened than regular Firefox".[3]

[1] : https://people.torproject.org/~gk/misc/Selfrando-Tor-Browser... [2] : https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/ [3] : https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tbb-dev/2017-April/00...

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