12 ms·

Partnering with Mozilla

388 points by tete 12y ago

hadoukenio 12y ago
I'm guessing Mozilla's Tor middle relays will soon be a part of PRISM
- voltagex_ 12y ago
  Based on what info?
  - hadoukenio 12y ago
    I'm really not sure why I'm being downvoted (or even killflagged). The Mozilla Foundation is a US based organisation and has no choice in the matter if the feds come knocking for PRISM signup.
    - srean 12y ago
      Another disturbing aspect is that TOR itself is funded by the US govt. It is not so much of a contradiction. It is very likely that 3 letter agencies actively use and benefit from TOR backed services. But should the cost benefit balance tilt the other way, the money stream will probably disappear and/or its security compromised.
    - voltagex_ 12y ago
      You should assume any packets going over Tor are monitored anyway - use TLS.
- leeoniya 12y ago
  mozilla, like few other companies, has my full faith and confidence that they would pull a Lavabit and close up shop before letting something like this completely erode their users' trust.
  - hadoukenio 12y ago
    Lavabit could do it because they were a small shop (under 10 employees). Do you really think Mozilla is going to pull the pin with over 1000 employees? More likely would be that they relocate. But relocating over 1000 people would be a massive feat.
    - leeoniya 12y ago
      how they handle their moral and legal obligations to 1,000+ people is up to them and i am sure those 1,000 people will be able to get as much assistance as they need to hold them over. 1,000 people keeping their jobs is statistically insignificant to the tens (hundreds?) of millions of compromised, faithful users. i dont think it would even be a question for them if the circumstances allowed for no other options. i believe their users would fully expect them to do this. "I really wish Ladar Levison handed NSA the SSL keys so I could keep my email" -- no Lavabit user, ever.
  - hackuser 12y ago
    > mozilla, like few other companies, has my full faith that they would pull a Lavabit and close up shop before letting something like this completely erode their users' trust. That trust is an exceptional asset, a unique competitive advantage for Mozilla. None of their for-profit[1] competitors can hope to compete in that area and I think it's especially valuable now that users are becoming aware of privacy and when the behavior of the competition often is so egregious. Mozilla has a chance to solidify their brand for the long term as the IT provider users can trust. If they can do that, IMHO they have a leg up in every market. [1] I know Mozilla Corp. is for-profit, but profit is not their primary objective.
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    Hopefully they simply don't back an architecture where the only option is to pull the plug.
    - leeoniya 12y ago
      the only type of architecture that is resistant to this would have to be distributed. for anything centralized and under control of a US company, the US laws can compel them to install intercept devices. sadly, not everything can be distributed, there will be centralization somewhere.
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  PRISM operates on a completely different layer than Tor. Tor does NOTHING to protect you from PRISM, and using Tor can be much less safe than just using your direct connection. http://www.deseret-tech.com/journal/psa-tor-exposes-all-traffic-by-design-do-not-use-it-for-normal-web-browsing/ http://www.deseret-tech.com/journal/psa-tor-exposes-all-traf...
kijin 12y ago
More relays? That's great, but why not exit nodes? Mozilla certainly has the manpower and infrastructure to operate a bunch of exit nodes, and if they have any legal qualms about it, hey, they just partnered with an EFF project, right?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- synchronise 12y ago
  What I don't understand is why Tor doesn't bundle their relays with their clients and have a network that scales better naturally, like I2P, and instead relies on people hosting their own, hopefully high bandwidth, relays.
  - kijin 12y ago
    I'm guessing that hosting relays could get people in trouble in some jurisdictions, even if they're just middle relays and not exit nodes. Since the goal of Tor is to let people use the internet safely in such jurisdictions -- in fact, especially in such jurisdictions -- some might consider the loss of relay bandwidth an acceptable compromise.
  - tete 12y ago
    There are two reasons I see. Trouble in some jurisdictions. But then there is also people who want to secretly use Tor (using Bridges). If for example Chinese (or Iranian or whoever) want to secretly use Tor, which is possible with bridges then it wouldn't be good if they were in a public list. One more reason maybe is that you also want to have Tor running as a weak client, like on your smartphone. On such devices and in such networks running a relay would probably cause issues, both for you, but also for clients. You can't really compare it with Bittorrent, cause what mostly mentions in File Sharing is throughput, whereas Tor also requires low latency for example.
  - nhaehnle 12y ago
    Tor has the goal of being high bandwidth and low latency, and relays on home connections can be problematic. Many home connections have rather low upstream bandwidth, for example, so that circuits through such relays would be limited to few KB/s. The idea of having everybody be a relay is definitely tempting, but there are genuine engineering problems with it.
navyrain 12y ago
This sort of this is pretty exciting. Now that users are aware of NSA hijinks, and are familiar with the Privacy modes of their current browsers, I'd like to see Mozilla move towards a "Super Privacy" mode where they route over a built-in Tor client. Of course, the dream would be to have all Firefox clients run Tor relay nodes out of the box, backed by Mozilla-supported exit nodes.
- mccr8 12y ago
  As hackuser says elsewhere, Tor is not really a fire-and-forget security solution. My understanding is that in order to use it without compromising yourself you need to have a fairly sophisticated understanding of its limitations.
  - GigabyteCoin 12y ago
    That could easily change with the help of a well funded team like Mozilla.
    - UweSchmidt 12y ago
      A lot of internet usage is logging in to Email, FB. If you do that an attacker knows that this particular user is you. Not sure how that can be "fixed" easily. To recap the current situation: You need to run a normal browser (for convenience) for facebooking (of course running NoScript, Ghostery, RequestPolicy etc.) and the Tor browser for researching things you don't want to be associated with your identity (yet nothing that law enforcement or intelligence agencies care about).
      - MrJagil 12y ago
        "A lot of internet usage is logging in to Email, FB. If you do that an attacker knows that this particular user is you. Not sure how that can be "fixed" easily." When data is inputted to a HTML-form an alert could pop up. "Disclosing your login details may compromise your privacy" At least that would educate users, similarly as the warning text on Chromes New Tab incognito page.
hackuser 12y ago
One major challenge: Using Tor, end users can easily and unintentionally compromise their confidentiality by disclosing information explicitly (e.g., their email logon) or implicitly (habits, browser fingerprints, and other identifiers); it takes discipline to remain anonymous on Tor and even technically skilled hidden service operators, with reason to be paranoid about illegal businesses, fail to do it. Also, leaked documents say that use of security services, including VPNs and I think Tor also, causes the data to be retained by the NSA for future decryption. How can Mozilla and their partners provide confidentiality in a way that increases end-user security, rather than attracting further scrutiny or, far worse, providing dangerously false assurances? The answer cannot depend on end users understanding the technology or subtle tradeoffs; the vast majority will never understand. One thought: Route all Firefox users through Tor relays by default, creating some security-through-obscurity. There are problems with that, of course, including the blacklisting of Tor relays from many sites.
- kijin 12y ago
  The Tor Browser Bundle already comes with a bunch of hacks to make users more difficult to track. I suppose they could improve on that until you're no longer identifiable on something like EFF's Panopticlick [1] or Samy Kamkar's Evercookie [2]. For example, isolate each tab, nuke all tracking cookies by default, clear all local storage at a regular interval, access different sites using different circuits, and only allow JS to access a minimum of information about the system. Even better, expose fake, generic, but slightly varying lists of system fonts, plugins, and other information. (Fake information is better than disallowing access altogether, because the latter looks too suspicious.) Of course, none of this will keep you anonymous if you log into Facebook using Tor... but at least the browser could make it extremely difficult for anyone to find out that the person who is visiting unrelated-website.com is the same person who just logged into Facebook. Automatically switching circuits when you visit a new site would probably do wonders in this regard, though I'm not sure how well Tor can handle that. [1] https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/ [2] http://samy.pl/evercookie/ http://samy.pl/evercookie/
  - schoen 12y ago
grumpo 12y ago
Hm. I'm thinking Mozilla may be a modern day NRA. The point of the right to bear arms is to protect the people from a government engaging in tyranny. The point of TOR is ideally the same. Maybe it's time to classify encryption as a weapon again.
- Retric 12y ago
  Considering TOR was paid for by the US government I think your concerns might be misplaced. That or TOR is a massive Honneypot and .... NO CARRIER
  - vilhelm_s 12y ago
    Several of the rifles that individuals in the US can own were also developed by the US government!
    - cookiecaper 12y ago
      The difference, of course, being that guns are much less complicated than anonymity software, and that only the gun designs are from the military, not necessarily the manufacturer, distributor, retailer, or anyone else that ever actually touched your physical weapon. The Tor project is still governed by a lab that takes government funding, and that can bias its decisions because it creates misaligned incentives. I'm not a tinfoil guy re: Tor, but you have to admit that the purchase of a government-designed gun is a lot easier to validate for reasonable safety than Tor.
- meowface 12y ago
  That's sort of true, except guns are used to assault while anonymity is used to defend.
  - girvo 12y ago
    Anonymity can be used to assault, too.
okasaki 12y ago
We need adblock and noscript in Firefox, not tor.
- teddyh 12y ago
  But then Google would stop giving Mozilla money.
- nnethercote 12y ago
  Tracking Protection is coming! http://monica-at-mozilla.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/tracking-protection-in-firefox.html http://monica-at-mozilla.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/tracking-pr...
tempestn 12y ago
This is great. Even if not all changes in the Tor Browser fork are appropriate to be merged back into Firefox (and certainly not all will be), for every one that they can merge, it both makes Firefox more secure and frees up Tor developers from maintaining those differences. Sounds like a win all around.
kbart 12y ago
"Mozilla will help address this by hosting high-capacity Tor middle relays" Mozzila has my trust (at least for now), but concentrating large part of Tor infrastructure in a single point inside USA jurisdiction does not seem like a good and future proof idea.
- torthrw 12y ago
  Won't these high capacity middle relays eventually become fast guards (and because of the new flag assignment process, possibly both guards and exit relays simultaneously) or can the directory authorities restrict flag assignments even if the relay is eligible? By "can" I mean "should they" I suppose?
Tepix 12y ago
"Mozilla is an industry leader in developing features to support the user’s desire for increased privacy online" Is that why they enable 3rd party cookies by default and hide the option to block them? (Unlike Apple's Safari)
- valarauca1 12y ago
  Looks very hidden https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-third-party-cookies https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-third-party-coo... Also that's not hidden that's under options. No digging around in about:config
  - Tepix 12y ago
    Yes, it's hidden indeed. You don't get to see the checkbox to disable it until you change a select box "Firefox will: [Remember history]" It's totally unintuitive to look for the 3rd party cookies options there. I know because it took me a while to find it. And I don't think it should be required to look at the documentation to do something as trivial as blocking 3rd party cookies.

388 points by tete 12y ago

hadoukenio 12y ago

I'm guessing Mozilla's Tor middle relays will soon be a part of PRISM

voltagex_ 12y ago
Based on what info?
- hadoukenio 12y ago
  I'm really not sure why I'm being downvoted (or even killflagged). The Mozilla Foundation is a US based organisation and has no choice in the matter if the feds come knocking for PRISM signup.
  - srean 12y ago
    Another disturbing aspect is that TOR itself is funded by the US govt. It is not so much of a contradiction. It is very likely that 3 letter agencies actively use and benefit from TOR backed services. But should the cost benefit balance tilt the other way, the money stream will probably disappear and/or its security compromised.
  - voltagex_ 12y ago
    You should assume any packets going over Tor are monitored anyway - use TLS.
leeoniya 12y ago
mozilla, like few other companies, has my full faith and confidence that they would pull a Lavabit and close up shop before letting something like this completely erode their users' trust.
- hadoukenio 12y ago
  Lavabit could do it because they were a small shop (under 10 employees). Do you really think Mozilla is going to pull the pin with over 1000 employees? More likely would be that they relocate. But relocating over 1000 people would be a massive feat.
  - leeoniya 12y ago
    how they handle their moral and legal obligations to 1,000+ people is up to them and i am sure those 1,000 people will be able to get as much assistance as they need to hold them over. 1,000 people keeping their jobs is statistically insignificant to the tens (hundreds?) of millions of compromised, faithful users. i dont think it would even be a question for them if the circumstances allowed for no other options. i believe their users would fully expect them to do this. "I really wish Ladar Levison handed NSA the SSL keys so I could keep my email" -- no Lavabit user, ever.
- hackuser 12y ago
  > mozilla, like few other companies, has my full faith that they would pull a Lavabit and close up shop before letting something like this completely erode their users' trust. That trust is an exceptional asset, a unique competitive advantage for Mozilla. None of their for-profit[1] competitors can hope to compete in that area and I think it's especially valuable now that users are becoming aware of privacy and when the behavior of the competition often is so egregious. Mozilla has a chance to solidify their brand for the long term as the IT provider users can trust. If they can do that, IMHO they have a leg up in every market. [1] I know Mozilla Corp. is for-profit, but profit is not their primary objective.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  Hopefully they simply don't back an architecture where the only option is to pull the plug.
  - leeoniya 12y ago
    the only type of architecture that is resistant to this would have to be distributed. for anything centralized and under control of a US company, the US laws can compel them to install intercept devices. sadly, not everything can be distributed, there will be centralization somewhere.
cookiecaper 12y ago
PRISM operates on a completely different layer than Tor. Tor does NOTHING to protect you from PRISM, and using Tor can be much less safe than just using your direct connection. http://www.deseret-tech.com/journal/psa-tor-exposes-all-traffic-by-design-do-not-use-it-for-normal-web-browsing/ http://www.deseret-tech.com/journal/psa-tor-exposes-all-traf...

kijin 12y ago

More relays? That's great, but why not exit nodes? Mozilla certainly has the manpower and infrastructure to operate a bunch of exit nodes, and if they have any legal qualms about it, hey, they just partnered with an EFF project, right?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
synchronise 12y ago
What I don't understand is why Tor doesn't bundle their relays with their clients and have a network that scales better naturally, like I2P, and instead relies on people hosting their own, hopefully high bandwidth, relays.
- kijin 12y ago
  I'm guessing that hosting relays could get people in trouble in some jurisdictions, even if they're just middle relays and not exit nodes. Since the goal of Tor is to let people use the internet safely in such jurisdictions -- in fact, especially in such jurisdictions -- some might consider the loss of relay bandwidth an acceptable compromise.
- tete 12y ago
  There are two reasons I see. Trouble in some jurisdictions. But then there is also people who want to secretly use Tor (using Bridges). If for example Chinese (or Iranian or whoever) want to secretly use Tor, which is possible with bridges then it wouldn't be good if they were in a public list. One more reason maybe is that you also want to have Tor running as a weak client, like on your smartphone. On such devices and in such networks running a relay would probably cause issues, both for you, but also for clients. You can't really compare it with Bittorrent, cause what mostly mentions in File Sharing is throughput, whereas Tor also requires low latency for example.
- nhaehnle 12y ago
  Tor has the goal of being high bandwidth and low latency, and relays on home connections can be problematic. Many home connections have rather low upstream bandwidth, for example, so that circuits through such relays would be limited to few KB/s. The idea of having everybody be a relay is definitely tempting, but there are genuine engineering problems with it.

navyrain 12y ago

This sort of this is pretty exciting. Now that users are aware of NSA hijinks, and are familiar with the Privacy modes of their current browsers, I'd like to see Mozilla move towards a "Super Privacy" mode where they route over a built-in Tor client. Of course, the dream would be to have all Firefox clients run Tor relay nodes out of the box, backed by Mozilla-supported exit nodes.

mccr8 12y ago
As hackuser says elsewhere, Tor is not really a fire-and-forget security solution. My understanding is that in order to use it without compromising yourself you need to have a fairly sophisticated understanding of its limitations.
- GigabyteCoin 12y ago
  That could easily change with the help of a well funded team like Mozilla.
  - UweSchmidt 12y ago
    A lot of internet usage is logging in to Email, FB. If you do that an attacker knows that this particular user is you. Not sure how that can be "fixed" easily. To recap the current situation: You need to run a normal browser (for convenience) for facebooking (of course running NoScript, Ghostery, RequestPolicy etc.) and the Tor browser for researching things you don't want to be associated with your identity (yet nothing that law enforcement or intelligence agencies care about).
    - MrJagil 12y ago
      "A lot of internet usage is logging in to Email, FB. If you do that an attacker knows that this particular user is you. Not sure how that can be "fixed" easily." When data is inputted to a HTML-form an alert could pop up. "Disclosing your login details may compromise your privacy" At least that would educate users, similarly as the warning text on Chromes New Tab incognito page.

hackuser 12y ago

One major challenge: Using Tor, end users can easily and unintentionally compromise their confidentiality by disclosing information explicitly (e.g., their email logon) or implicitly (habits, browser fingerprints, and other identifiers); it takes discipline to remain anonymous on Tor and even technically skilled hidden service operators, with reason to be paranoid about illegal businesses, fail to do it. Also, leaked documents say that use of security services, including VPNs and I think Tor also, causes the data to be retained by the NSA for future decryption. How can Mozilla and their partners provide confidentiality in a way that increases end-user security, rather than attracting further scrutiny or, far worse, providing dangerously false assurances? The answer cannot depend on end users understanding the technology or subtle tradeoffs; the vast majority will never understand. One thought: Route all Firefox users through Tor relays by default, creating some security-through-obscurity. There are problems with that, of course, including the blacklisting of Tor relays from many sites.

kijin 12y ago
The Tor Browser Bundle already comes with a bunch of hacks to make users more difficult to track. I suppose they could improve on that until you're no longer identifiable on something like EFF's Panopticlick [1] or Samy Kamkar's Evercookie [2]. For example, isolate each tab, nuke all tracking cookies by default, clear all local storage at a regular interval, access different sites using different circuits, and only allow JS to access a minimum of information about the system. Even better, expose fake, generic, but slightly varying lists of system fonts, plugins, and other information. (Fake information is better than disallowing access altogether, because the latter looks too suspicious.) Of course, none of this will keep you anonymous if you log into Facebook using Tor... but at least the browser could make it extremely difficult for anyone to find out that the person who is visiting unrelated-website.com is the same person who just logged into Facebook. Automatically switching circuits when you visit a new site would probably do wonders in this regard, though I'm not sure how well Tor can handle that. [1] https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/ [2] http://samy.pl/evercookie/ http://samy.pl/evercookie/
- schoen 12y ago

grumpo 12y ago

Hm. I'm thinking Mozilla may be a modern day NRA. The point of the right to bear arms is to protect the people from a government engaging in tyranny. The point of TOR is ideally the same. Maybe it's time to classify encryption as a weapon again.

Retric 12y ago
Considering TOR was paid for by the US government I think your concerns might be misplaced. That or TOR is a massive Honneypot and .... NO CARRIER
- vilhelm_s 12y ago
  Several of the rifles that individuals in the US can own were also developed by the US government!
  - cookiecaper 12y ago
    The difference, of course, being that guns are much less complicated than anonymity software, and that only the gun designs are from the military, not necessarily the manufacturer, distributor, retailer, or anyone else that ever actually touched your physical weapon. The Tor project is still governed by a lab that takes government funding, and that can bias its decisions because it creates misaligned incentives. I'm not a tinfoil guy re: Tor, but you have to admit that the purchase of a government-designed gun is a lot easier to validate for reasonable safety than Tor.
meowface 12y ago
That's sort of true, except guns are used to assault while anonymity is used to defend.
- girvo 12y ago
  Anonymity can be used to assault, too.

okasaki 12y ago

We need adblock and noscript in Firefox, not tor.

teddyh 12y ago
But then Google would stop giving Mozilla money.
nnethercote 12y ago
Tracking Protection is coming! http://monica-at-mozilla.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/tracking-protection-in-firefox.html http://monica-at-mozilla.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/tracking-pr...

tempestn 12y ago

This is great. Even if not all changes in the Tor Browser fork are appropriate to be merged back into Firefox (and certainly not all will be), for every one that they can merge, it both makes Firefox more secure and frees up Tor developers from maintaining those differences. Sounds like a win all around.

kbart 12y ago

"Mozilla will help address this by hosting high-capacity Tor middle relays" Mozzila has my trust (at least for now), but concentrating large part of Tor infrastructure in a single point inside USA jurisdiction does not seem like a good and future proof idea.

torthrw 12y ago
Won't these high capacity middle relays eventually become fast guards (and because of the new flag assignment process, possibly both guards and exit relays simultaneously) or can the directory authorities restrict flag assignments even if the relay is eligible? By "can" I mean "should they" I suppose?

Tepix 12y ago

"Mozilla is an industry leader in developing features to support the user’s desire for increased privacy online" Is that why they enable 3rd party cookies by default and hide the option to block them? (Unlike Apple's Safari)

valarauca1 12y ago
Looks very hidden https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-third-party-cookies https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-third-party-coo... Also that's not hidden that's under options. No digging around in about:config
- Tepix 12y ago
  Yes, it's hidden indeed. You don't get to see the checkbox to disable it until you change a select box "Firefox will: [Remember history]" It's totally unintuitive to look for the 3rd party cookies options there. I know because it took me a while to find it. And I don't think it should be required to look at the documentation to do something as trivial as blocking 3rd party cookies.