Tor Browser Exposed: Anti-Privacy Implantation at Mass Scale

https://hackernoon.com/tor-browser-exposed-anti-privacy-implantation-at-mass-scale-bd68e9eb1e95#.gdy1zklnp

by Jerry2 • 10 years ago

122 62 10 years ago

Mizza7• 10 years ago

Tor is not, nor has it ever been, trustworthy. Hell, you can still try active deanonymization for youself: https://github.com/Miserlou/Detour

This didn't used to be a problem, as it was essentially run as a sandbox project for the academic anonymity community. It was very up front about its capabilities and limitations.

Unfortunately, in recent years, the US government has been bankrolling more "privacy" software development through its propaganda arms (OTF, RFA, etc.), and the Snowden revelations have led private foundations to follow suit.

As such, the organization doubled down on rebranding to be a "human rights" _tool_, as this is what grant giving organizations love to promote (free speech in Iran, activist publishing, etc.) This combined with a overly-enthusiastic do-gooders gaining more and more prominence in the Tor organization has led to the dangerous situation of promoting inherently insecure software as a security solution to vulnerable people. This is a general problem in the scene (remember when those activists in South America got vanned for using CryptoCat?) - and one that I've been guilty of myself in the past.

I really hope the new boards steers them back to the academic realm and slaps a big red USE AT YOUR OWN RISK warning on the tin. Unfortunately, I think the opposite will happen.

PieterH• 10 years ago

A more dangerous side-effect of branding Tor as a "human rights" tool is that whereas if it's a "privacy" tool, people in oppressive regimes can legitimately use it (e.g. people working for such regimes), whereas as a "human rights" tool, its simple presence on a computer is evidence of guilt.

bruo2• 10 years ago

I haven't live in a lot of oppressive regimes, but usually this is not how it works. I lived two close examples

When i was a kid a friend of my grand mother was arrested because a neighbor said he was a communist. He was tortured for a week and his party, kind of center/right wing took him out as they were a close party to the current government. Oppressive regimes usually don't need evidences.

A friend of mine was arrested for two years, accused for terrorism. The proofs? a war and peace copy (not even a photocopied book) and a guns and roses poster. And this was in "democracy"... so stupid proofs are also used, and whatever can be a proof, like a book about cubism was considered that was a book of cuba's ideology.

Tor has been for years looked by "regular"/"normal"/"common" people as a tool for drug dealers or child molesters. The switch to a human rights tool doesn't seem to really put it more into the illegal line.

Anyway, oppressive regimes do whatever they want, Tor can avoid some of the spying but if the state is already taking your computer you are screw up with Tor or without it.

wybiral• 10 years ago

Most of the issues seem to revolve around accessing clearnet resources through Tor. Hidden services within Tor still seem secure (whatever that word means these days).

kevinr• 10 years ago

This combined with a overly-enthusiastic do-gooders gaining more and more prominence in the Tor organization has led to the dangerous situation of promoting inherently insecure software as a security solution to vulnerable people.

What is the inherently secure alternative available to these vulnerable people?

I really hope the new boards steers them back to the academic realm and slaps a big red USE AT YOUR OWN RISK warning on the tin.

What causes you to believe that activists and vulnerable people would stop using Tor if this warning were in place?

Mizza7• 10 years ago

Are you asking what they should use instead? Because there is no alternative. My point isn't that they should be using some other specific piece of software, or even that they shouldn't be using Tor, just that they should be aware that Tor is old software with many known vulnerabilities, a poor track record of security including active RCE attacks by governments and private companies, etc. If you go to the homepage, you'll see none of that.

This might not deter people from using Tor entirely, but at least they'd understand the threat model a bit better so they could change their behavior accordingly, for instance maybe not using it at their own home, not using it for Facebook, etc.

As much as we might want to believe that we can code our way out of anything, human rights demands more than software.

nickbail3y3• 10 years ago

I'm not sure where this narrative is coming from. TOR was developed as an anonymous network by the US Naval Research Lab. It was designed for use by military and intelligence. TOR was never just some academic experiment.

TOR is still a valid tool. No, it wasn't designed to foil NSA level surveillance, because it was built by the US. But this vulnerability isn't even related to TOR, it has to do with the TOR Browser.

The Snowden leaks contain slides where the NSA clearly laments the use of TOR, so saying that it never has been trustworthy is simply not true.

Mizza7• 10 years ago

It was "designed" for military use in the sense they were computer scientists working for the Naval research, but the community felt like an academic one. For instance, it was originally published at USENIX. The majority of discussion of Tor was related to papers on Anonbib, not about code itself. TBB didn't even exist until much later. I've never seen any evidence that it was ever used "in production" by the military before it was made public.

Re: The NSA Tor slides - they're really not as damning as you say - http://i.imgur.com/cnOeVQf.png - and they're also made before the FBI was caught using remote code execution exploits against Tor users.

openasocket2• 10 years ago

Tor is not, nor has it ever been, trustworthy. Hell, you can still try active deanonymization for youself: https://github.com/Miserlou/Detour

Is it even possible to protect against end-to-end time correlation attacks without massively increasing latency?

Mizza7• 10 years ago

I'd call that an "open problem."

mdadm• 10 years ago

The entire security of the Tor Browser ecosystem relies on the integrity of a single TLS certificate that has already been previously compromised.

Seriously? That seems like a really weird - to say the least - decision to make about something this important...

throwanem2• 10 years ago

It's the certificate used to sign TLS for addons.mozilla.org. Since "Tor Browser" is a lightly modified Firefox that hasn't had its automatic addon update checking disabled, and Mozilla's addon signing process is an automated rubber stamp, that's a problem.

To be clear, I don't think it's so much a problem on Mozilla's part; perhaps manual review would be a good idea, but I doubt they have the resources. The problem here is that Tor Browser has claims made for it that aren't supported by the amount of work that's actually gone into making it secure. That would appear to be entirely on the people who run the Tor foundation, or whatever nonprofit structure it is that they use.

willvarfar• 10 years ago

The same MitM update attack can be leveled against all Firefox users, and not just Tor browser users?

MBCook• 10 years ago

It doesn't like like it:

1. You'd need to be able to MitM all of them (where controlling a ton of TOR exit nodes comes in handy)

2. You'd need to know an extension lots of people have (I'm guessing NoScript is default on TOR browsers)

necessity2• 10 years ago

Yes, but being the man in the middle is much easier when the target willingly places you in the middle of his connection...

The whole situation can be worked around by using a custom prefs.js that disables auto updating addons (there are various other attacks that can be prevented by tweaking settings in about:config such as the webrtc related ones) and there are various websites providing privacy oriented prefs.js. A better workaround would be for the TOR browser maintainers to ship such a file with it, and a solution would of course be Mozilla fix things on their side.

necessity2• 10 years ago

Yet again, TOR gets blamed for a Firefox vulnerability. Surprise, surprise...

eli• 10 years ago

To be fair it's the Firefox that comes as part of the popular official Tor bundle.

mtgx• 10 years ago

The fact that Mozilla is so slow in implementing real per-process sandboxing in Firefox and that it doesn't even plan to rewrite most of the browser in Rust over the next few years, makes me think that maybe Tor should just bite the bullet and rebuild on top of Chromium, while vigilantly watching out for anti-privacy features in it that they can remove.

indolering• 10 years ago

They can't use Chromium because the Chrome team refuses to maintain certain features required by Tor, such as routing all traffic through the SOCKS proxy [0]. They would have to literally create a new browser.

0: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=80722#...

lucastx• 10 years ago

From /r/TOR:

"Old news. This was fixed in 6.0.5.

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-605-released

Interesting note: The author is part of the rotor browser fork that is going no where so far. Doesn't look like the reported issue has been fixed there. In fact, no commits since before this blog post."

https://www.reddit.com/r/TOR/comments/53u1cd/tor_browser_exp...

4ad• 10 years ago

Old news. This was fixed in 6.0.5.

6.0.5 was released five days ago. There is no universe where this qualifies as old news.

throwanem2• 10 years ago

The highest-scoring response to that comment is

I'd honestly suspect the author was COINTELPRO were it not for the fact that so many of his statements and code are literally laughable.

So there's that!

nixos3• 10 years ago

Using Tor may actually be less secure that using a normal browser.

At least when I connect to Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc. I don't expect to get hit by a driveby JS exploit, and Google does help with "safe browsing".

With Tor, you're one HTTP website (or not HSTS website) away from a driveby virus, with no way to tell that you're connecting to a dangerous exit node

tedks3• 10 years ago

Tor Project runs several scanners for this behavior. Arguably, unless your ISP, ISP's ISP, coffee shop, etc., are all 100% on top of their game, this could happen in any one of those environments too.

nixos3• 10 years ago

So they shut down a node, the node operator notices and restarts it.

The problem is that people actually make money from malware. It's not bored college kids showing off skills. It's pros.

So think like a pro. You use a zero day to hack into Verizon to feed malware, get noticed, and your hack gets reversed after an hour.

You open an exit Tor node on a VPS, use it to feed malware, profit. They close it, you re-open it on another host. They play wack-a-mole, and you rake it in.

makomk• 10 years ago

Last time I checked, the Tor Project's handling of malicious exit nodes was one guy who didn't really care all that much about reports of active MITM attacks that were actually robbing people of money (well, Bitcoins anyway). Just flat out refused to pull the nodes doing it.

kevin_thibedeau• 10 years ago

The security conscious should be running noscript anyway.

nixos3• 10 years ago

But then you'd become fingerprintable by staying out of the crowd

heinrich5991• 10 years ago

When you connect to Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc., you're connecting via HTTPS, so there's nothing malicious a Tor exit node could do in these cases.

rnhmjoj• 10 years ago

Is it really so easy to control a significant portion of tor exit nodes? I seem to remember there are automatic systems and members of the project checking for suspiscious nodes.

nilved3• 10 years ago

Yes, it's happened at least once before with Carnegie Mellon.

FiloSottile• 10 years ago

This piece is charged with the personal bias of the author (https://twitter.com/movrcx) who launched an hostile fork of the Tor Browser Bundle because "untrustworthyness".

I recommend you read this instead, which provides a more level-headed and technically correct analysis of the vulnerability (which was there, even if not properly in the terms described by OP):

https://hackernoon.com/postmortem-of-the-firefox-and-tor-cer...

nzp4• 10 years ago

Oh but not just any kind of “untrusworthyness”, from what I gathered from Twitter at the time, he did it after the Appelbaum affair broke out to provide a “non-SJW” fork of Tor Browser. And If I'm not mistaken, he initially forked the wrong repo, it was a running joke for a couple of days... Nice to see the farce still going strong.

EDIT: s/Tor/Tor Browser/

PhasmaFelis• 10 years ago

a “non-SJW” fork of Tor

Hahaha, what?

wyager• 10 years ago

As I recall, the board of the Tor Project recently changed substantially amid some drama. is this related to that?

petertodd3• 10 years ago

Actually, people thought he forked the wrong repo because he forked the browser, not the Tor node repo... and then he finds this bug in the browser.

I suspect that wasn't planned, but regardless, he did fork the "right" repo.

jwcrux• 10 years ago

Nevermind the fact that this hostile fork explicitly disabled code signing for extensions [0] in order to meet an arbitrary shipping date [1].

[0] https://github.com/IndependentOnion/rotor-browser/commit/916...

[1] https://github.com/IndependentOnion/rotor-browser/issues/7

throwaway7767• 10 years ago

Thanks for the background, I got the sense that the author had an axe to grind.

Still, I seem to recall that when the tor browser auto-update mechanism was deployed, the idea was that HTTPS with pinning was only the first step, and that going forward the updater would also check PGP signatures. It's a bit disappointing to see that hasn't happened yet.

Especially with reproducible builds and several trusted signers independently verifying the built binaries and signing the resulting package, this would add considerable security to the update process.

nijiko• 10 years ago

Using Tor

This is the joke right?

Tor Browser Exposed: Anti-Privacy Implantation at Mass Scale

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