[HN Gopher] Tor Browser 11.0
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Tor Browser 11.0
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 165 points
Date : 2021-11-09 18:52 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.torproject.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.torproject.org)
| superkuh wrote:
| The first major release that lacks all support for most tor onion
| service domains. Tor v2 code was removed for security reasons.
| But the community still mostly uses v2.
|
| Follow along with the death of most tor onion services in the
| plots at: https://www.encryptionin.space/tracking-hsdirs-and-the-
| versi... (here's a snapshot mirror if the site is slow under
| load, https://i.ibb.co/9NzVcsz/plot.png)
| brokenmachine wrote:
| What's a HSDir?
| Koshkin wrote:
| According to Google, it's either a high school directory or a
| hidden service directory.
| bberenberg wrote:
| Is this a strong enough push to change community behavior?
| superkuh wrote:
| Doubtful. At some point it is likely the tor project will use
| their control of things to push a version consensus flag that
| will block v2 supporting relays from participating in the
| network.
| the_other wrote:
| I've not been following Tor protocol news. Is this good for
| users?
| superkuh wrote:
| Yes, it probably is. Most people use tor because they
| just want a pseudoanonymous proxy to the clear web. For
| them the switch to v3 internally is important and
| probably required. For users of the .onion and onion
| services in general it's more split but I think most
| would say v2 going away is good. Soon it will be possible
| to spoof v2 domain prefixes at a feasible cost.
|
| I personally don't like that v2 is being shut off instead
| of let run alongside v3. I thought I owned my tor domain
| I've been using the last decade but it's clear the tor
| project has the same amount of control as any registrar.
| I thought I could work on building a community like I
| have on the clear web but the tor project doesn't
| consider that a priority and will throw 15 years of
| history away to make sure non-technical users don't
| accidentally use v2 services. Tor is not really a place
| for community building. My mistake. I just won't use it
| anymore.
| sowithit wrote:
| I am curious: why can't you redirect your community to a
| new v3 address? Deprecating v2 onion services has been
| publicly planned for several years now, and it is being
| done for security reasons (e.g. name collisions and weak
| crypto). Honestly, it would seem irresponsible of the Tor
| community _not_ to stop supporting insecure versions of
| Tor.
| fsflover wrote:
| You may be interested in I2P then.
| I_Byte wrote:
| The depreciation of v2 addresses is the best course of
| action in this case. v2 addresses consist of the first 80
| bits of the SHA-1 hash of the hidden services 1024 bit
| public RSA key. This sentence alone is enough to make any
| cryptographer cringe, it is really _bad_! (SHA-1 has been
| shown to be broken and it is suspected that 1024 bit RSA
| can be cracked by any determined well funded state actor)
|
| Also, Tor Project has had v2 address depreciation on it's
| roadmap for 2 years now, they have given hidden service
| operators plenty of time to prime their community for the
| v2 --> v3 switch. This gradual change is way better than
| scrambling to depreciate v2 addresses in response to some
| state actor publicly breaking the RSA keys of v2 hidden
| services.
|
| > I thought I owned my tor domain
|
| You may now, but if v2 is kept around soon you won't be
| the only one with the domains private key.
| brokenmachine wrote:
| > v2 addresses consist of the first 80 bits of the SHA-1
| hash of the hidden services 1024 bit public RSA key.
|
| What is the danger of exposing the hash of the services
| public key? Public keys are public anyway.
| laverya wrote:
| It's not the fact that the hash of the public key is
| exposed, it's the fact that
|
| 1. so little of the hash is exposed (only 80 bits of 160
| for sha1), making it easier to find a collision
|
| 2. the hash is so weak (sha1 is widely considered
| broken), making it easier to find a collision
|
| 3. the underlying public key is so small, making it
| easier to derive the private key from the public key
|
| IIRC if you find a collision you can use that to take
| over / contest an onion address, and obviously reversing
| the public key into a private key gives you as much
| control over an onion address as the original creator.
| helios_invictus wrote:
| Yes, but like IPV4 to IPV6 transition it's work.
| georgyo wrote:
| Unlike IPv4 IPv6, there isn't an authority name service
| to advertise both connectable addresses. This makes
| discovery for the end user an explicit action.
|
| If they cannot connect on V2, the method to discover v3
| is almost definitely out of band and potentially in the
| prone to hijacking.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I thought there was some meta tag you could stick in your
| page's HTML that said what its onion address was;
| couldn't you just add that with the v3 onion address and
| clients connecting over v2 would see it and switch over
| just as if they'd started from non-TOR?
| Aachen wrote:
| So it would be best if those services simply advertise
| their new address on the v2 domain right? Rather than sit
| still and lose their traffic when everyone's forced to,
| or when attacks really become feasible.
|
| It's not even a hard upgrade, afaik it's literally just a
| change of what address users have to copy/bookmark and
| nothing else. I just don't get what the reason to not
| upgrade is.
| saurik wrote:
| > afaik it's literally just a change of what address
| users have to copy/bookmark and nothing else
|
| ...and all of the links that everyone has embedded in
| content all over the ecosystem.
| Aachen wrote:
| Sure, but that's not effort on the site's behalf so they
| can switch over and make the V2 show the redirect notice.
| If IPv6 would have been this simple, just show a
| redirect, we'd have upgraded long ago...
| 0des wrote:
| It's most like going from https to https2 (whatever that
| may be) in that it changes the fundamental systems
| beneath it resulting in having stronger keys, longer
| keys, composed with different tech.
| 0des wrote:
| It's most like going from http to https in that it
| changes the fundamental systems beneath it resulting in
| having stronger keys, longer keys, composed with
| different tech. You notice the new onion addresses are
| much longer, and created differently, this is that
| change.
| giga_chad wrote:
| TOR has been an invaluable tool for me for its ability to
| circumvent state censorship in an undetectable way.
|
| At some point in my career I was involved in some journalistic
| reporting in Saudi Arabia; had I used a regular VPN, it could
| have been easily detected, and in best case defeated, worst case
| put me in serious legal trouble, which in Saudi Arabia can easily
| end in corporal punishment and/or death. TOR allowed me to
| circumvent all that and keep reporting on government official and
| police force corruption in a safe way, in a country that frankly
| could use a lot more of this type of journalism.
|
| Thank you, TOR project!
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| That is impressive. People throw around impressive too much,
| but I couldn't imagine pissing off any official in that
| country.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I don't know the parent or their situation, but if you need
| similar security I would be very cautious about taking the
| parent literally. Sorry if I sound like a jerk; it sounds like
| the parent has taken great risks for the public good, but I
| don't want people to be hurt:
|
| I'm almost certain that Tor use is easily detected; that is
| what I've always (100%) read from security experts and it makes
| sense to me: Traffic patterns, packet fingerprints (encryption
| implementations, size, etc.), and of course all the traffic is
| going to and from a Tor node, a list of which is available to
| every Tor user.
|
| The attacker may not be able to read the contents or metadata,
| but they will know you are using Tor. Tor users are a very
| small population; it's a red flag.
|
| The same is true for websites, etc. that you visit: They can
| easily see that your traffic is coming from a Tor exit node.
| Also, exit nodes are of course as vulnerable to attack as any
| other server, and they provide access to the ip addresses you
| connect with and, when https isn't used or properly
| implemented, to the contents of the communication.
|
| Tor is not a panacea. Also, don't conflate Tor with Tor
| Browser, which I've read is possibly the worst security choice
| among browsers - a huge target without the resources to secure
| itself.
| pfundstein wrote:
| I'm not sure if you're aware but Tor has a specific mode for
| OP's situation, where it disguises traffic by using standard
| TLS on standard ports which looks no different to any other
| HTTPS traffic for example, among other things.
| jchw wrote:
| Tor on it's own is definitely not a panacea. However,
| interested parties should look into Qubes OS. If detection is
| a huge concern, there is always the potential you could
| bridge your sensitive traffic in a less obvious manner. I
| believe you can configure this with a Qubes Whonix setup by
| selecting the "Tor is dangerous or censored in my area"
| option. It's pretty powerful. I haven't personally tried this
| as I don't actually use Qubes except to play around with its
| neat VM setup.
| pfundstein wrote:
| Tor has long been billed as a tool for journalists to fly under
| the radar and avoid persecution, but it's great to hear these
| case studies from the horse's mouth. Thanks to you and other
| journalists who risk life and limb to report on and within
| these abusive regimes.
| triter wrote:
| Great to see the project still going strong, we need this type of
| tools more than ever.
| spurgu wrote:
| Same. The world would feel quite dystopian without Tor, Signal
| and other similar software aiming to preserve your privacy. I
| rarely use Tor but I'm soooo happy it exists.
|
| Just started wondering: If Tor disappeared off the face of the
| earth right now, what would be the replacement?
|
| 1. Would it be an existing alternative that would become
| dominant in the space?
|
| 2. Would an identical software/network be built?
|
| 3. Would something new (and better) be built to replace it (and
| how would that look like)?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| If TOR went away tomorrow, I assume i2p would pick up the
| slack; it's already there and AFAIK a good alternative, just
| with a smaller network and less emphasis on exit nodes.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I don't know about the low level / security details. But the
| Tor team constantly pushed good upgrades for a long time.
| Seriously impressive. Works great and is slick on pc and
| mobile.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I've wondered about the fact that (AFAIK) Tor routes only TCP:
|
| 1. Is that (still) correct?
|
| 2. Can't web pages include non-TCP traffic, and if so, is it
| routed via Tor? For example, doesn't some some streaming media
| use UDP?
|
| 3. QUIC doesn't use TCP (deliberately, I think). Won't that
| affect Tor's long-term viability if everyone eventually moves to
| QUIC?
| zamadatix wrote:
| 1. For now 2. That kind of traffic mostly died out with plugins
| like Flash, streaming media today is usually encapsulated in
| small frequent chunks over the same https channels as the rest
| of the page are delivered as that's what's available in
| JS/native. WebRTC reintroduced some UDP stuff and can be used
| for streaming but is still mostly used for peer to peer calls.
| 3. https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor-browser-
| spec.git/plain/pos...
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| 2. So there is some non-TCP traffic. What happens when you
| load that page in Tor Browser, for example? Does it leak back
| to your clear Internet connection? Is it simply dropped? This
| seems like a critical issue.
|
| 3. Thanks. Do you know when that was written? To save others
| clicking the link and finding the applicable section, I'll
| paste it below. Designing and building your own protocol for
| Internet transport, compatible with the entire net and
| performing competitively enough to be usable, sounds like
| quite a project for a small organization. Note that Google
| didn't do that; they used UDP for QUIC.
|
| _7 Tor Network Compatibility Concerns
|
| Our final area of concern is continued compatibility of the
| Tor network with future versions of the HTTP proto- col. It
| is our understanding that there is a desire for future
| versions of HTTP to move to a UDP transport layer so that
| reliability, congestion control, and client mobility will be
| more directly under control of the client user agent.
|
| At present, the Tor Network is only capable of carrying TCP
| traffic. While it will be possible to support the transit of
| UDP datagrams using our existing TCP overlay network without
| significant anonymity risks within a year's time or sooner,
| it is unlikely that this level of support will be sufficient
| to warrant the use of a finely-tuned UDP version of HTTP
| rather than a TCP variant.
|
| Long term, our goal is to transition the entire Tor network
| to our own datagram protocol with custom con- gestion and
| flow control to better support both native datagram transport
| and end-to-end flow control. However, additional research is
| still needed to examine the anonymity implications associated
| with this transition[12]. Our present estimate is that a full
| network transition to UDP is at least five years away.
|
| We are also concerned that even after a full network
| transition to a datagram transport, it is likely that the
| congestion, flow, and reliability control of a UDP version of
| HTTP may still end up performing poorly over higher-latency
| overlay networks such as ours.
|
| For these reasons, we are especially interested in ensuring
| that overlay networks are taken into account in the design of
| any UDP-based future versions of HTTP, and also prefer to
| retain the ability to use future HTTP versions over TCP,
| should the UDP implementations prove sub-optimal for our use
| case._
| scandinavian wrote:
| 2. TOR browser is built without webrtc support. There is no
| other way afaik, as firefox doesn't have a socket API for
| extensions anymore.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| It's easy to get a webrtc fingerprint just using a public
| stun server, maybe people smarter can deploy their own. I've
| used it in our ad tracking js.
|
| I'm not sure if Tor Browser turns off by default, searching
| found this one ticket which suggest that default flag but
| maybe it's not implemented out of the box.
|
| [1] https://privacycheck.sec.lrz.de/active/fp_wrtc/fp_webrtc.
| htm...
|
| [2] https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/trac/-/issues/8178
| olddb wrote:
| > streaming media today is usually encapsulated in small
| frequent chunks over the same https channels as the rest of
| the page are delivered as that's what's available in
| JS/native
|
| $> --- HLS ---<3
| georgyo wrote:
| QUIC and HTTP3 are great technologies, but they are never
| likely to become the only protocol a service supports.
|
| For one thing, convection to a website via one of those
| protocols first, and then a header informs the client that it
| can reconnect via QUIC/HTTP3. IE they have to have a working
| http 1 or 2 webserver first.
|
| UDP is disallowed in many many places, and many ISPs treat UDP
| as hostile and rate limit it.
|
| In the places it works, it provides some benefits. But we're
| unlikely to see it take over as the sole protocol any time
| soon.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > we're unlikely to see it [QUIC] take over as the sole
| protocol any time soon
|
| Agreed, but I'm not talking about soon. I mean the long term.
| Even FTP has been deprecated.
| georgyo wrote:
| I think when that starts to become a reality solutions will
| be discovered.
|
| But since it is provably a non-issue today because it
| requires upgrading from TCP, it's going to be low priority.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| Tor lost all credibility for sticking to firefox, not to mention
| all the other security issues discovered over the past few years
| pfundstein wrote:
| If you actually looked at the numbers you'd see FF has had
| fewer security issues than any other major browsers.
|
| Also Torbrowser uses a security-hardened version of FF LTS, so
| it's pretty useless to assume FF vulnerabilities all apply to
| Torbrowser.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| TOR is a privacy tool first; rebasing to a browser that
| aggressively undermines privacy at every turn would be a
| questionable use of resources.
| mike_hock wrote:
| Firefox as opposed to what?
| Shadonototra wrote:
| Chromium
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(page generated 2021-11-09 23:00 UTC)