7 ms·

Mozilla CTO: "Maybe we should just adopt, support, and bundle Tor in Firefox..."

151 points by andreypopp 13y ago

glomph 13y ago
The thing about that is the browser bundle they provide significantly reduces the number of variables they need to consider when making tor work to secure privacy. If everyone used it with the default firefox there would be significant problems for anonymity in terms of browser sniffing. I think a more helpful move in response to the exploit would be working towards having tor base their bundle on more up to date versions of firefox.
- duaneb 13y ago
  If TOR were to behave similarly to google incognito, I think it'd be fine.
  - slacka 13y ago
    exactly. Why does everyone assume "Tor mode" would have the private browsing features disabled? Mozilla isn't stupid.
- doublec 13y ago
  The bundle available at the time included the fix. This post on June 26 says it's based on Firefox 17.0.7esr. https://blog.torproject.org/blog/new-tor-browser-bundles-and-tor-02414-alpha-packages https://blog.torproject.org/blog/new-tor-browser-bundles-and... The number of affected users must be due to not upgrading. Does the tor bundle automatically update?
  - DuskStar 13y ago
    I do not believe it does, though the default homepage will alert you if you are using an outdated version of the browser bundle.
octatone2 13y ago
They may want to fix that JS heap spray exploit first in their ESR ...
- blueveek 13y ago
  Tracking bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=901365 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=901365 edit: seems to be already fixed in ESR 17.0.7
  - riquito 13y ago
    ESR 17.0.7 dated 25 June 2013. How exploiting an old bug on an old version became a "0 day" is beyond me
    - makomk 13y ago
      It took about a day before anyone figured out what exactly the exploit was doing; I guess all the normal researchers are off at Black Hat without their usual tools.
recuter 13y ago
There's no technical support necessary mind, Tor is just another proxy you can point your browser to with one click. It is 'support' as in activism in the vain of "Know your rights" first-run messages Firefox runs, 'etc. It frustrates me when the solutions hacker types come up with either exclusively revolve around code or are not well thought out (like this suggestion).
- wmeredith 13y ago
  Not well thought out? This is a Tweet, not a press release. It seems to me like he's basically thinking out loud to get some discussion going.
- sp332 13y ago
  It's a lot more complicated. If you send cookies with session information over Tor, you've basically trashed your anonymity. https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en#warning https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en#wa...
- jimktrains2 13y ago
  It's also complicated because you either need to disable a lot of extensions/plugins or ensure that they don't leak across the normal internet.
Achshar 13y ago
The only reason why I am not using tor right now is because of it's barrier of entry. I can probably figure it out, but currently the effort outweighs the return.
- thelukester 13y ago
  Maybe I'm missing your sarcasm, you place no value in your digital privacy, or you're just completely computer illiterate. If you're capable of installing any app on your computer, you can run the tor browser. There is nothing more involved to it than downloading the tor browser bundle, running the setup file, and finally click on "Start Tor Browser.exe". My 90 year old grandmother could figure this out.
  - Tloewald 13y ago
    Wow your grandmother rocks. Aside from all that, if you don't significantly modify your browsing habits, all you've now done is increase your interestingness to the NSA et al. and made your browser run slower and use more RAM.
  - Achshar 13y ago
    From barrier to entry I mean the browser itself. Chrome is just more convenient and up to date. I am a web dev and if the latest html5 gig doesn't work it might be a dealbreaker for me. Now I understand I don't have to use onion browser as my primary browser, but I just don't use more than one browsers, at all. If it's chrome then I use chrome everywhere, phone/laptop, desktop, tablet. Consistency and up to date browser is currently more important to me than my privacy.
  - NegativeK 13y ago
    If I set my mom up with Tor, she would gain zero benefit. Given that exit nodes are snooped on, she would actually be worse off. Hell, I seem to remember the Tor Bundle itself saying that you need to do more than just install it if you want actual privacy benefits. So, there is a bit more involved than running an executable.
- wilfra 13y ago
kishor_gurtu 13y ago
The TOR browsing experience is terrible and unreliable. If you're really so concerned, just pony up for a VPN.
- lotsofcows 13y ago
  VPN? Owned by whom? Which company / country can you trust? This discussion is about security and privacy, not avoiding content restrictions.
- ckozlowski 13y ago
  A VPN is not the same. A VPN will protect from a MITM attack, obscuring the resources you're accessing and the data exchanged to an observer. However, it does not anonymize you from the VPN provider, who can still disclose your information or be compelled to provide it. (you undoubtedly had to pay for that VPN with a legal name and payment information.) Tor not only protects against MITM, but obscures the requester such that if an interested party can either force information from, or controls the endpoint, they cannot discover who the requester is.* (* Provided that the requester is not divulging information in the form of cookies or other personally identifying information. If Mozilla were serious about providing native Tor functionality in Firefox, they'd no doubt provide it as part of the browser "Private" mode.) Edit: This link doesn't cover VPNs, but gives a good idea of how different services provide security at different levels. VPNs obscure the "site.com" along the route, while the location in all locations as shown as the VPN provider, and not the end user. However, because the VPN provider knows the identity of the user, it can potentially disclose this info. A Tor endpoint does not know this. https://www.eff.org/pages/tor-and-https https://www.eff.org/pages/tor-and-https
  - Sanddancer 13y ago
    Nope. I can walk down to the local (or not local) seven-11/walgreens/etc and get a disposable credit card for use in paying for my vpn provider, and provide them that I am Jake Blues and live at 1060 West Addison St, Chicago, Il.
    - 13y ago
AndrewDucker 13y ago
My only question would be whether Tor could cope with that many users all at once. Having it built in, and defaulting to On when you open a private browsing window would be nice though.
- ckozlowski 13y ago
  It would be a fantastic edition to "private" mode. Also, by being baked into the browser, it would give Mozilla a degree of control over the protocols passed. A user opting for the browser plugin instead of the standalone client would not be passing Bittorrent traffic over the network. More relays and endpoints would be needed, but I wonder how kind of support could be gathered if Tor was publicized in such a way.
lazyjones 13y ago
That might sound useful, but it would cause a lot of damage: - many users would get malware-injected web pages from shady exit nodes (they would become a much more interesting target for phishing/other malware than they are now) - it would no longer be practical for web sites to block Tor as a defence against excessive scraping, spam posts, fake reviews (currently most Tor traffic to "normal" web sites is of that kind)
- hnha 13y ago
  a) would be a great proposition for more ssl and secure dns. b) as someone who does her mindless random browsing through tor that sounds wonderful.
betawolf33 13y ago
A nice idea, but probably not a good one. The problems Tor would bring users in terms of slow connection, risk from malicious exit nodes etc. would outweigh any benefit for most people. Combine this with the fact that to gain anonmyity from Tor you'd need to (at least) disable JS and session cookies, which many ordinary users will consider to break their browsing experience, and you'll find that really all this idea would do is put a lot more load on the Tor network. That's assuming a 'default on' option. Perhaps an 'anonymous mode' version of 'private browsing' which switches the browser to a more secure configuration (like the Tor browser) and proxies through Tor would mitigate some of these problems.
- RivieraKid 13y ago
  It wouldn't be enabled by default obviously.
- slacka 13y ago
  If Mozilla added a "Tor mode", I'm sure it would be configured like the Tor Browser bundle, ie with both disable JS and session cookies disable along with all the privacy enhancements. The existing "private browsing mode" hurts the browsing experience. That's why it's optional for times when you value privacy over convenience. If you had noticed from the tweets, it appears that Mozilla has been slow to adopt Tor's patches.[1][2] Making Tor a supported feature would greatly alleviate this situation. [1] https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#firefox-patches https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#firef... [2] https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#firefox-patches https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#firef...
blahbl4hblah 13y ago
TOR (and the internet as a whole) is going to always be insecure as long as javascript is enabled. That's just the way it is. You can't execute code from an unknown source in a secure way. That's been demonstrated over and over again. HTML and CSS might be the extent of the UI that you can ship over the network...honestly, the best way to go would be to just expose the data contracts over the web and only ship DATA that can be marked as non-executable.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ebbv 13y ago
Strikes me as obvious pandering. Obviously for 99% of users Tor is more headache and overhead for no real benefit. Not to mention that most users would say "Why did my internets get so slow?" and not understand what was going on.
- rthomas6 13y ago
  I'd assume one would have to manually enable it? At least for non .onion sites.
  - BrendanEich 13y ago
    Yes, you assume correctly -- it would be competitive-browser suicide to turn on by default. Thinking either that we would do such a thing, or that I'd pander with such a non-starter (or pander at all, at my age and lack of political ambition) is just dumb. What would be smart, which we are looking at: adopting, supporting, and bundling Tor (opt-in). As I tweeted.
stfu 13y ago
This would be in my opinion the single most important development that came so far out of the NSA controversy! If they can somewhat manage to keep the user experience not complete disappointment this will be the biggest steps forward to a broader privacy adoption. All those tools such as PGP, TrueCrypt, VPNs, have completely failed to reach beyond a bunch of paranoid geeks. Mozilla has the key towards achieving a mass scale adoption. Implementing this would most likely at least double the current amount of TOR users, making this a complete nightmare for the NSA and their associates.
- Amadou 13y ago
  I agree. What Tor needs is basically the same thing that encrypted email needs - a wide-spread and dead-simple user interface. If Mozilla were to incorporate a "Tor Browsing Mode" analogous to "Private Browsing Mode" that "just worked" and didn't leak data, then Tor use would explode. Even just 0.1% of firefox's userbase would make a huge difference.
  - polymatter 13y ago
    or just incorporate Tor into the "Private Browsing Mode" so users don't need to choose between them. Need a big notice to explain that "Private Browsing Mode" is now slower, some sites won't work correctly etc. along with the current notice.
belorn 13y ago
A great imitative. Adding Tor support for private mode would only improve it, and give people a mode where searching for health issues, job advice, or any other sensitive information can be done private. Maybe not common knowledge, but if you do search queries of those types, your ads in Youtube, Google, and other areas are likely to change. Their business model is to target ads based on previous searches. If you then share the network with other family members, those ads will pop up on their screens to.
untog 13y ago
A broader issue I've thought about before now is that we might need to redefine what "incognito" mode is, now. What we have is still relevant- the always-used "gift shopping" (and the more realistic "porn mode") reasons still apply. But I worry that "incognito" implies more than it offers- after all, no-one monitoring your internet connection is going to be meaningfully affected by it. What I'd also love to see (but am a little uncertain on how to implement) is tab isolation for sessions- I don't want the Facebook like button on <x site> to read my Facebook login on my other tab. Right now I can use incognito windows and Chrome extensions to achieve that, but it's messy.
- shawnjan8 13y ago
  I use the Chrome Users feature to achieve this - one profile for home, one for work, and one for Facebook. Works a lot better then incognito mode!
  - kudu 13y ago
    I'd love to be able to have profiles/users set at the tab level.
znowi 13y ago
I love the idea. Go for it, Mozilla! If this is implemented: 1. Firefox, with its insane public reach, can substantially heighten the awareness of privacy issues. 2. Government will have to get creative to subdue a highly popular heavyweight like Mozilla. And as already mentioned, it might be the best response, as of yet, to the NSA fallout. It can potentially seriously alter the power balance between the Big Brother and us, people.
asadotzler 13y ago
TOR browsing in Firefox is a horrible experience that's so far from usable that it shouldn't be exposed to any but the most expert of of users who understand how it actually works and what benefits it brings with its great cost -- a mostly broken browser.
Chirael 13y ago
I really think Firefox should become the freedom lover's privacy browser; because it is a non-profit org, it can do what Google/Chrome can't.

151 points by andreypopp 13y ago

The thing about that is the browser bundle they provide significantly reduces the number of variables they need to consider when making tor work to secure privacy. If everyone used it with the default firefox there would be significant problems for anonymity in terms of browser sniffing. I think a more helpful move in response to the exploit would be working towards having tor base their bundle on more up to date versions of firefox.

duaneb 13y ago
If TOR were to behave similarly to google incognito, I think it'd be fine.
- slacka 13y ago
  exactly. Why does everyone assume "Tor mode" would have the private browsing features disabled? Mozilla isn't stupid.
doublec 13y ago
The bundle available at the time included the fix. This post on June 26 says it's based on Firefox 17.0.7esr. https://blog.torproject.org/blog/new-tor-browser-bundles-and-tor-02414-alpha-packages https://blog.torproject.org/blog/new-tor-browser-bundles-and... The number of affected users must be due to not upgrading. Does the tor bundle automatically update?
- DuskStar 13y ago
  I do not believe it does, though the default homepage will alert you if you are using an outdated version of the browser bundle.

octatone2 13y ago

They may want to fix that JS heap spray exploit first in their ESR ...

blueveek 13y ago
Tracking bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=901365 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=901365 edit: seems to be already fixed in ESR 17.0.7
- riquito 13y ago
  ESR 17.0.7 dated 25 June 2013. How exploiting an old bug on an old version became a "0 day" is beyond me
  - makomk 13y ago
    It took about a day before anyone figured out what exactly the exploit was doing; I guess all the normal researchers are off at Black Hat without their usual tools.

recuter 13y ago

There's no technical support necessary mind, Tor is just another proxy you can point your browser to with one click. It is 'support' as in activism in the vain of "Know your rights" first-run messages Firefox runs, 'etc. It frustrates me when the solutions hacker types come up with either exclusively revolve around code or are not well thought out (like this suggestion).

wmeredith 13y ago
Not well thought out? This is a Tweet, not a press release. It seems to me like he's basically thinking out loud to get some discussion going.
sp332 13y ago
It's a lot more complicated. If you send cookies with session information over Tor, you've basically trashed your anonymity. https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en#warning https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en#wa...
jimktrains2 13y ago
It's also complicated because you either need to disable a lot of extensions/plugins or ensure that they don't leak across the normal internet.

Achshar 13y ago

The only reason why I am not using tor right now is because of it's barrier of entry. I can probably figure it out, but currently the effort outweighs the return.

thelukester 13y ago
Maybe I'm missing your sarcasm, you place no value in your digital privacy, or you're just completely computer illiterate. If you're capable of installing any app on your computer, you can run the tor browser. There is nothing more involved to it than downloading the tor browser bundle, running the setup file, and finally click on "Start Tor Browser.exe". My 90 year old grandmother could figure this out.
- Tloewald 13y ago
  Wow your grandmother rocks. Aside from all that, if you don't significantly modify your browsing habits, all you've now done is increase your interestingness to the NSA et al. and made your browser run slower and use more RAM.
- Achshar 13y ago
  From barrier to entry I mean the browser itself. Chrome is just more convenient and up to date. I am a web dev and if the latest html5 gig doesn't work it might be a dealbreaker for me. Now I understand I don't have to use onion browser as my primary browser, but I just don't use more than one browsers, at all. If it's chrome then I use chrome everywhere, phone/laptop, desktop, tablet. Consistency and up to date browser is currently more important to me than my privacy.
- NegativeK 13y ago
  If I set my mom up with Tor, she would gain zero benefit. Given that exit nodes are snooped on, she would actually be worse off. Hell, I seem to remember the Tor Bundle itself saying that you need to do more than just install it if you want actual privacy benefits. So, there is a bit more involved than running an executable.
wilfra 13y ago

kishor_gurtu 13y ago

The TOR browsing experience is terrible and unreliable. If you're really so concerned, just pony up for a VPN.

lotsofcows 13y ago
VPN? Owned by whom? Which company / country can you trust? This discussion is about security and privacy, not avoiding content restrictions.
ckozlowski 13y ago
A VPN is not the same. A VPN will protect from a MITM attack, obscuring the resources you're accessing and the data exchanged to an observer. However, it does not anonymize you from the VPN provider, who can still disclose your information or be compelled to provide it. (you undoubtedly had to pay for that VPN with a legal name and payment information.) Tor not only protects against MITM, but obscures the requester such that if an interested party can either force information from, or controls the endpoint, they cannot discover who the requester is.* (* Provided that the requester is not divulging information in the form of cookies or other personally identifying information. If Mozilla were serious about providing native Tor functionality in Firefox, they'd no doubt provide it as part of the browser "Private" mode.) Edit: This link doesn't cover VPNs, but gives a good idea of how different services provide security at different levels. VPNs obscure the "site.com" along the route, while the location in all locations as shown as the VPN provider, and not the end user. However, because the VPN provider knows the identity of the user, it can potentially disclose this info. A Tor endpoint does not know this. https://www.eff.org/pages/tor-and-https https://www.eff.org/pages/tor-and-https
- Sanddancer 13y ago
  Nope. I can walk down to the local (or not local) seven-11/walgreens/etc and get a disposable credit card for use in paying for my vpn provider, and provide them that I am Jake Blues and live at 1060 West Addison St, Chicago, Il.
  - 13y ago

AndrewDucker 13y ago

My only question would be whether Tor could cope with that many users all at once. Having it built in, and defaulting to On when you open a private browsing window would be nice though.

ckozlowski 13y ago
It would be a fantastic edition to "private" mode. Also, by being baked into the browser, it would give Mozilla a degree of control over the protocols passed. A user opting for the browser plugin instead of the standalone client would not be passing Bittorrent traffic over the network. More relays and endpoints would be needed, but I wonder how kind of support could be gathered if Tor was publicized in such a way.

lazyjones 13y ago

That might sound useful, but it would cause a lot of damage: - many users would get malware-injected web pages from shady exit nodes (they would become a much more interesting target for phishing/other malware than they are now) - it would no longer be practical for web sites to block Tor as a defence against excessive scraping, spam posts, fake reviews (currently most Tor traffic to "normal" web sites is of that kind)

hnha 13y ago
a) would be a great proposition for more ssl and secure dns. b) as someone who does her mindless random browsing through tor that sounds wonderful.

betawolf33 13y ago

A nice idea, but probably not a good one. The problems Tor would bring users in terms of slow connection, risk from malicious exit nodes etc. would outweigh any benefit for most people. Combine this with the fact that to gain anonmyity from Tor you'd need to (at least) disable JS and session cookies, which many ordinary users will consider to break their browsing experience, and you'll find that really all this idea would do is put a lot more load on the Tor network. That's assuming a 'default on' option. Perhaps an 'anonymous mode' version of 'private browsing' which switches the browser to a more secure configuration (like the Tor browser) and proxies through Tor would mitigate some of these problems.

RivieraKid 13y ago
It wouldn't be enabled by default obviously.
slacka 13y ago
If Mozilla added a "Tor mode", I'm sure it would be configured like the Tor Browser bundle, ie with both disable JS and session cookies disable along with all the privacy enhancements. The existing "private browsing mode" hurts the browsing experience. That's why it's optional for times when you value privacy over convenience. If you had noticed from the tweets, it appears that Mozilla has been slow to adopt Tor's patches.[1][2] Making Tor a supported feature would greatly alleviate this situation. [1] https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#firefox-patches https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#firef... [2] https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#firefox-patches https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#firef...

blahbl4hblah 13y ago

TOR (and the internet as a whole) is going to always be insecure as long as javascript is enabled. That's just the way it is. You can't execute code from an unknown source in a secure way. That's been demonstrated over and over again. HTML and CSS might be the extent of the UI that you can ship over the network...honestly, the best way to go would be to just expose the data contracts over the web and only ship DATA that can be marked as non-executable.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

ebbv 13y ago

Strikes me as obvious pandering. Obviously for 99% of users Tor is more headache and overhead for no real benefit. Not to mention that most users would say "Why did my internets get so slow?" and not understand what was going on.

rthomas6 13y ago
I'd assume one would have to manually enable it? At least for non .onion sites.
- BrendanEich 13y ago
  Yes, you assume correctly -- it would be competitive-browser suicide to turn on by default. Thinking either that we would do such a thing, or that I'd pander with such a non-starter (or pander at all, at my age and lack of political ambition) is just dumb. What would be smart, which we are looking at: adopting, supporting, and bundling Tor (opt-in). As I tweeted.

stfu 13y ago

This would be in my opinion the single most important development that came so far out of the NSA controversy! If they can somewhat manage to keep the user experience not complete disappointment this will be the biggest steps forward to a broader privacy adoption. All those tools such as PGP, TrueCrypt, VPNs, have completely failed to reach beyond a bunch of paranoid geeks. Mozilla has the key towards achieving a mass scale adoption. Implementing this would most likely at least double the current amount of TOR users, making this a complete nightmare for the NSA and their associates.

Amadou 13y ago
I agree. What Tor needs is basically the same thing that encrypted email needs - a wide-spread and dead-simple user interface. If Mozilla were to incorporate a "Tor Browsing Mode" analogous to "Private Browsing Mode" that "just worked" and didn't leak data, then Tor use would explode. Even just 0.1% of firefox's userbase would make a huge difference.
- polymatter 13y ago
  or just incorporate Tor into the "Private Browsing Mode" so users don't need to choose between them. Need a big notice to explain that "Private Browsing Mode" is now slower, some sites won't work correctly etc. along with the current notice.

belorn 13y ago

A great imitative. Adding Tor support for private mode would only improve it, and give people a mode where searching for health issues, job advice, or any other sensitive information can be done private. Maybe not common knowledge, but if you do search queries of those types, your ads in Youtube, Google, and other areas are likely to change. Their business model is to target ads based on previous searches. If you then share the network with other family members, those ads will pop up on their screens to.

untog 13y ago

A broader issue I've thought about before now is that we might need to redefine what "incognito" mode is, now. What we have is still relevant- the always-used "gift shopping" (and the more realistic "porn mode") reasons still apply. But I worry that "incognito" implies more than it offers- after all, no-one monitoring your internet connection is going to be meaningfully affected by it. What I'd also love to see (but am a little uncertain on how to implement) is tab isolation for sessions- I don't want the Facebook like button on <x site> to read my Facebook login on my other tab. Right now I can use incognito windows and Chrome extensions to achieve that, but it's messy.

shawnjan8 13y ago
I use the Chrome Users feature to achieve this - one profile for home, one for work, and one for Facebook. Works a lot better then incognito mode!
- kudu 13y ago
  I'd love to be able to have profiles/users set at the tab level.

znowi 13y ago

I love the idea. Go for it, Mozilla! If this is implemented: 1. Firefox, with its insane public reach, can substantially heighten the awareness of privacy issues. 2. Government will have to get creative to subdue a highly popular heavyweight like Mozilla. And as already mentioned, it might be the best response, as of yet, to the NSA fallout. It can potentially seriously alter the power balance between the Big Brother and us, people.

asadotzler 13y ago

TOR browsing in Firefox is a horrible experience that's so far from usable that it shouldn't be exposed to any but the most expert of of users who understand how it actually works and what benefits it brings with its great cost -- a mostly broken browser.

Chirael 13y ago

I really think Firefox should become the freedom lover's privacy browser; because it is a non-profit org, it can do what Google/Chrome can't.