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Hi all. I am a Tor Project Developer and work at Mozilla on this project. We appreciate everyone's enthusiasm and feedback. Our ultimate goal is a long way away

Hi all. I am a Tor Project Developer and work at Mozilla on this project. We appreciate everyone's enthusiasm and feedback. Our ultimate goal is a long way away because of the amount of work to do and the necessity to match the safety of Tor Browser in Firefox when providing a Tor mode. There's no guarantee this will happen, but I hope it will and we will keep working towards it. If anyone is interested in assisting development-wise, Firefox bugs tagged 'fingerprinting' in the whiteboard are a good place to start. You can also run Tor relays and help us improve the health of the network by working with Tor's new Relay Advocate (https://blog.torproject.org/get-help-running-your-relay-our-new-advocate https://blog.torproject.org/get-help-running-your-relay-our-...). More people being involved in spec work (especially at the W3C) and focusing on fingerprinting and privacy concerns is also very useful - it's very hard to keep eyes on all the things happening everywhere. We also appreciate users of Firefox Beta and Nightly (Nightly especially). The flags Tor features are developed behind (privacy.resistFingerprinting and privacy.firstparty.isolate) are experimental. I appreciate bug reports from users running these flags but you should expect them to break things on the web (resistFingerprinting especially; first party isolate is generally more stable and usually only has breakage on particular login forms).

eganist 8y ago
Thanks for your effort! If I can ask, how much overlap exists between your team and the team overseeing the implementation of security protocols within Firefox e.g. HSTS, CSP, etc.? It'd be neat to see Firefox drive innovation here alongside the effort to weave Tor into the browser; although I wouldn't necessarily treat Tor integration the same as I might the implementation of other security specifications, I can see how the teams working on such might overlap, hence my question.
- tomrittervg 8y ago
  The Fusion project is done by a subset of that team (+me, I happen to sit with Sandboxing due to other responsibilities).
  - dat_boi20 8y ago
    By passing this on to Mozilla and discontinuing Tor Browser, you're going to inherit the innumerable issues in their code base. Wouldn't it be easier to hard-fork and create a simple browser with minimal overhead? It doesn't have to be loaded with features. Just minimalist and private. Some anti-features that come to my attention off the top of my head: * Biometric login (as of FF60) * Dumb PR Stunts like Mr. Robot * Telemetry * Balrog (Analytics and browser fingerprinting on AmazonS3) * Social API * VR sensors * DRM * Google Chrome (large contract Mozilla has with them as they backport this into IPC) * CloudFlare DNS (Department of Homeland Security partner and Tor arch-enemy) etc...
    - jerheinze 8y ago
      > By passing this on to Mozilla and discontinuing Tor Browser, you're going to inherit the innumerable issues in their code base. What issues exactly? Tor Browser = Firefox ESR + some patches + some other stuff and tweaks. Before the release of the next ESR TB devs rebase and submit these patches to mainline Firefox, that's why you have prefs like privacy.resistFingerprinting and privacy.firstparty.isolate in mainline Firefox, see: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Tor_Uplift https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Tor_Uplift
    - tomrittervg 8y ago
      Tor Browser will exist as long as Tor feels it needs to. If the features or anti-features in FF cause them to believe Firefox does not fit their need, then we're/they're not going to discontinue it.
    - anonymfus 8y ago
      >Biometric login (as of FF60) Are you talking about Web Authentication? What is wrong with it?
    - exikyut 8y ago
      > Google Chrome (large contract Mozilla has with them as they backport this into IPC) What's this?
xoa 8y ago
>You can also run Tor relays and help us improve the health of the network by working with Tor's new Relay Advocate Since I've seen this come up before in many previous discussions of Tor I think it's worth emphasizing/clarifying up front: Tor relays are not the same as Tor exit nodes. Relays do not talk to the public internet, they serve only the full encrypted internal Tor virtual network. So they won't ever send out traffic from an IP under your control to some website or general Internet system (and in turn tie that IP in any way to spam/abuse/whatever, at least not for that reason). It's not necessarily hidden that it is acting as a relay, but the relay itself will have no knowledge of the traffic it's carrying. Plenty of people have reasonable concerns about the risks/inconveniences that might come with acting as an exit node, but on both a legal and practical level there are many more jurisdictions where merely relaying encrypted traffic between other relays isn't a problem. And it's still quite helpful, both for network speed and because purely internal Tor Hidden Services do not need any exit nodes at all.
- pricechild 8y ago
  That said, plenty of providers use the list of tor relays (which is also public) to block traffic. Sites such as https://www.dan.me.uk/dnsbl https://www.dan.me.uk/dnsbl then help people do this. That site in particular may "warn": > This DNS blacklist contains ALL tor nodes (entry, transit and exit nodes) - think carefully before choosing to use this list for blocking purposes. but anyone who doesn't understand tor simply won't understand the decision and choose ALL. Running a relay on your own address isn't sensible because of this. Nevermind an exit node.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Yes, this is a common complaint from relay operators. Running relays at home, or on work networks, is risky.
  - jandrese 8y ago
    As someone who has run a relay on my home network for years now this has never come up. At least not that I've been able to discern. I think it might be a problem if I also ran a mail server from home, but almost nobody does that anymore.
ChrisSD 8y ago
> first party isolate is generally more stable and usually only has breakage on particular login forms Are you referring to third-party login services and comment systems (such as disqus and similar)?
- jerheinze 8y ago
  > Are you referring to third-party login services and comment systems (such as disqus and similar)? See the full list of bugs of breakage when privacy.firstparty.isolate is enabled: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/FirstPartyIsolation#First_Party_Isolation_-_QA_Bugs https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/FirstPartyIsolation#First_...
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Most of those involve third-party logins. And most of the others mix domains unnecessarily, through lazy design.
fuckyouzilla 8y ago
You suck at what you do. The idea of about:config flags is ridiculous. You do nearly nothing to improve users privacy and browsers defenses against fingerprinting. You do not even have the basics (effective cookie control, user agent control, referrer control), which means your priorities are wrong and thus you will never achieve anything. Step aside.
azernik 8y ago
> Our ultimate goal is a long way away because of the amount of work to do and the necessity to match the safety of Tor Browser in Firefox when providing a Tor mode. If that doesn't pan out, do you expect the ongoing work on this project to reduce the size of the patches that the Tor Browser project needs to carry on top of the Firefox trunk?
- cpeterso 8y ago
  Yes. This Mozilla wiki page has more information about (what Mozilla calls) the "Tor Uplift": > The intention of Tor Uplift project is to land all Tor Browser patches so that Tor can directly use Firefox main trunk instead of a fork. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Tor_Uplift https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Tor_Uplift
walrus01 8y ago
Seconding the other posters who mentioned that tor relays and Tor exit nodes are two very different things. "Why you need balls of steel to run a Tor exit node": https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2009-September/019511.html https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2009-Septemb... Given the low level of technical knowledge with a great deal of US law enforcement, increasing militarization, no knock warrants, etc... Please think twice before running an exit node from your house. Do it in Colo somewhere with a small, plucky ISP owned by a first and fourth amendment absolutist.

eganist 8y ago

Thanks for your effort! If I can ask, how much overlap exists between your team and the team overseeing the implementation of security protocols within Firefox e.g. HSTS, CSP, etc.? It'd be neat to see Firefox drive innovation here alongside the effort to weave Tor into the browser; although I wouldn't necessarily treat Tor integration the same as I might the implementation of other security specifications, I can see how the teams working on such might overlap, hence my question.

tomrittervg 8y ago
The Fusion project is done by a subset of that team (+me, I happen to sit with Sandboxing due to other responsibilities).
- dat_boi20 8y ago
  By passing this on to Mozilla and discontinuing Tor Browser, you're going to inherit the innumerable issues in their code base. Wouldn't it be easier to hard-fork and create a simple browser with minimal overhead? It doesn't have to be loaded with features. Just minimalist and private. Some anti-features that come to my attention off the top of my head: * Biometric login (as of FF60) * Dumb PR Stunts like Mr. Robot * Telemetry * Balrog (Analytics and browser fingerprinting on AmazonS3) * Social API * VR sensors * DRM * Google Chrome (large contract Mozilla has with them as they backport this into IPC) * CloudFlare DNS (Department of Homeland Security partner and Tor arch-enemy) etc...
  - jerheinze 8y ago
    > By passing this on to Mozilla and discontinuing Tor Browser, you're going to inherit the innumerable issues in their code base. What issues exactly? Tor Browser = Firefox ESR + some patches + some other stuff and tweaks. Before the release of the next ESR TB devs rebase and submit these patches to mainline Firefox, that's why you have prefs like privacy.resistFingerprinting and privacy.firstparty.isolate in mainline Firefox, see: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Tor_Uplift https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Tor_Uplift
  - tomrittervg 8y ago
    Tor Browser will exist as long as Tor feels it needs to. If the features or anti-features in FF cause them to believe Firefox does not fit their need, then we're/they're not going to discontinue it.
  - anonymfus 8y ago
    >Biometric login (as of FF60) Are you talking about Web Authentication? What is wrong with it?
  - exikyut 8y ago
    > Google Chrome (large contract Mozilla has with them as they backport this into IPC) What's this?

xoa 8y ago

>You can also run Tor relays and help us improve the health of the network by working with Tor's new Relay Advocate Since I've seen this come up before in many previous discussions of Tor I think it's worth emphasizing/clarifying up front: Tor relays are not the same as Tor exit nodes. Relays do not talk to the public internet, they serve only the full encrypted internal Tor virtual network. So they won't ever send out traffic from an IP under your control to some website or general Internet system (and in turn tie that IP in any way to spam/abuse/whatever, at least not for that reason). It's not necessarily hidden that it is acting as a relay, but the relay itself will have no knowledge of the traffic it's carrying. Plenty of people have reasonable concerns about the risks/inconveniences that might come with acting as an exit node, but on both a legal and practical level there are many more jurisdictions where merely relaying encrypted traffic between other relays isn't a problem. And it's still quite helpful, both for network speed and because purely internal Tor Hidden Services do not need any exit nodes at all.

pricechild 8y ago
That said, plenty of providers use the list of tor relays (which is also public) to block traffic. Sites such as https://www.dan.me.uk/dnsbl https://www.dan.me.uk/dnsbl then help people do this. That site in particular may "warn": > This DNS blacklist contains ALL tor nodes (entry, transit and exit nodes) - think carefully before choosing to use this list for blocking purposes. but anyone who doesn't understand tor simply won't understand the decision and choose ALL. Running a relay on your own address isn't sensible because of this. Nevermind an exit node.
- mirimir 8y ago
  Yes, this is a common complaint from relay operators. Running relays at home, or on work networks, is risky.
- jandrese 8y ago
  As someone who has run a relay on my home network for years now this has never come up. At least not that I've been able to discern. I think it might be a problem if I also ran a mail server from home, but almost nobody does that anymore.

ChrisSD 8y ago

> first party isolate is generally more stable and usually only has breakage on particular login forms Are you referring to third-party login services and comment systems (such as disqus and similar)?

jerheinze 8y ago
> Are you referring to third-party login services and comment systems (such as disqus and similar)? See the full list of bugs of breakage when privacy.firstparty.isolate is enabled: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/FirstPartyIsolation#First_Party_Isolation_-_QA_Bugs https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/FirstPartyIsolation#First_...
- mirimir 8y ago
  Most of those involve third-party logins. And most of the others mix domains unnecessarily, through lazy design.

fuckyouzilla 8y ago

You suck at what you do. The idea of about:config flags is ridiculous. You do nearly nothing to improve users privacy and browsers defenses against fingerprinting. You do not even have the basics (effective cookie control, user agent control, referrer control), which means your priorities are wrong and thus you will never achieve anything. Step aside.

azernik 8y ago

> Our ultimate goal is a long way away because of the amount of work to do and the necessity to match the safety of Tor Browser in Firefox when providing a Tor mode. If that doesn't pan out, do you expect the ongoing work on this project to reduce the size of the patches that the Tor Browser project needs to carry on top of the Firefox trunk?

cpeterso 8y ago
Yes. This Mozilla wiki page has more information about (what Mozilla calls) the "Tor Uplift": > The intention of Tor Uplift project is to land all Tor Browser patches so that Tor can directly use Firefox main trunk instead of a fork. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Tor_Uplift https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Tor_Uplift

walrus01 8y ago

Seconding the other posters who mentioned that tor relays and Tor exit nodes are two very different things. "Why you need balls of steel to run a Tor exit node": https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2009-September/019511.html https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2009-Septemb... Given the low level of technical knowledge with a great deal of US law enforcement, increasing militarization, no knock warrants, etc... Please think twice before running an exit node from your house. Do it in Colo somewhere with a small, plucky ISP owned by a first and fourth amendment absolutist.