torbutton/en/index.wml (c04c32e30) - tor-webwml.git

index.wml

<html>
<head>
<title>Torbutton - Quickly toggle Firefox's use of the Tor network</title>
<LINK REL="stylesheet" TYPE="text/css" HREF="gimpy.css">

function addSearchProvider(prov) {

try {
window.external.AddSearchProvider(prov);
}

catch (e) {
alert("Search plugins require Firefox 2");
return;
}
}

function addEngine(name,ext,cat,pid)
{
  if ((typeof window.sidebar == "object") && (typeof window.sidebar.addSearchEngine == "function")) {
    window.sidebar.addSearchEngine(
      "http://mycroft.mozdev.org/install.php/" + pid + "/" + name + ".src",
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  } else {
    alert("You will need a browser which supports Sherlock to install this plugin.");
  }
}

return false;
}

</script>
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<body>

<h1>Torbutton Development Branch</h1>
Current version: 1.2.0rc6 (12 Jul 2008) 
 
Authors: Scott Squires &amp; Mike Perry 
Email: squires at freehaven dot net, mikeperry (o) fscked/org 
 
Install: 
<a href="http://torbutton.torproject.org/dev/torbutton-current.xpi"
 hash="sha1:7f01c577641b6222781cd880c9825d6f50ff1cc4"
 onclick="return install(event);">Local (Javascript verified)</a> 
Past Releases: <a href="releases/">Local (non-https)</a> 
Developer Documentation: <a href="design/">Torbutton Design Document</a> and <a href="design/MozillaBrownBag.pdf">Slides (Not actively updated)</a> 
Extras:

Google search plugins for

<a href="/jsreq.html" title="Ref: 14938 (googleCA)"
 onClick="addOpenSearch('GoogleCanada','ico','General','14937','g');return false">Google CA</a>, and

<a href="/jsreq.html" title="Ref: 14938 (googleCA)"
 onClick="addOpenSearch('googleuk_web','png','General','14445','g');return false">Google UK</a>.
 

Source: You can <a href="https://tor-svn.freehaven.net/svn/torbutton/trunk/">browse the repository</a> or simply unzip the xpi.
 
Bug Reports: <a href="https://bugs.torproject.org/flyspray/index.php?tasks=all&project=5">Torproject flyspray</a> 
Documents: [ <a href="#FAQ">FAQ</a> | <a href="CHANGELOG">changelog</a> | <a href="LICENSE">license</a> | <a href="CREDITS">credits</a> ] 
<h2>About</h2>

Torbutton is a 1-click way for Firefox users to enable or disable the browser's use of <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a>. It adds a panel to the statusbar that says "Tor Enabled" (in green) or "Tor Disabled" (in red). The user may click on the panel to toggle the status. If the user (or some other extension) changes the proxy settings, the change is automatically reflected in the statusbar.

Some users may prefer a toolbar button instead of a statusbar panel. Such a button is included, and one adds it to the toolbar by right-clicking on the desired toolbar, selecting "Customize...", and then dragging the Torbutton icon onto the toolbar. There is an option in the preferences to hide the statusbar panel (Tools-&gt;Extensions, select Torbutton, and click on Preferences).


Newer Firefoxes have the ability to send DNS resolves through the socks proxy, and Torbutton will make use of this feature if it is available in your version of Firefox.

I can't click on links or hit reload after I toggle Tor! Why?

Due to <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=409737">Firefox
Bug 409737</a>, pages can still open popups and perform Javascript redirects
and history access after Tor has been toggled. These popups and redirects can
be blocked, but unfortunately they are indistinguishable from normal user
interactions with the page (such as clicking on links, opening them in new
tabs/windows, or using the history buttons), and so those are blocked as a
side effect. Once that Firefox bug is fixed, this degree of isolation will
become optional (for people who do not want to accidentally click on links and
give away information via referrers). A workaround is to right click on the
link, and open it in a new tab or window. The tab or window won't load
automatically, but you can hit enter in the URL bar, and it will begin
loading. Hitting enter in the URL bar will also reload the page without
clicking the reload button.

My browser is in some weird state where nothing works right!

Try to disable Tor by clicking on the button, and then open a new window. If
that doesn't fix the issue, go to the preferences page and hit 'Restore
Defaults'. This should reset the extension and Firefox to a known good
configuration. If you can manage to reproduce whatever issue gets your
Firefox wedged, please file details at <a
href="https://bugs.torproject.org/flyspray/index.php?tasks=all&project=5">the
bug tracker</a>.

When I toggle Tor, my sites that use javascript stop working. Why?

Javascript can do things like wait until you have disabled Tor before trying
to contact its source site, thus revealing your IP address. As such, Torbutton
must disable Javascript, Meta-Refresh tags, and certain CSS behavior when Tor
state changes from the state that was used to load a given page. These features 
are re-enabled when Torbutton goes back into the state that was used to load
the page, but in some cases (particularly with Javascript and CSS) it is
sometimes not possible to fully recover from the resulting errors, and the
page is broken. Unfortunately, the only thing you can do (and still remain
safe from having your IP address leak) is to reload the page when you toggle
Tor, or just ensure you do all your work in a page before switching tor state.

When I use Tor, Firefox is no longer filling in logins/search boxes
for me. Why?

Currently, this is tied to the "Block history writes during Tor"
setting. If you have enabled that setting, all formfill functionality (both
saving and reading) is disabled. If this bothers you, you can uncheck that
option, but both history and forms will be saved. To prevent history
disclosure attacks via Non-Tor usage, it is recommended you disable Non-Tor
history reads if you allow history writing during Tor.

Which Firefox extensions should I avoid using?

This is a tough one. There are thousands of Firefox extensions: making a
complete list of ones that are bad for anonymity is near impossible. However,
here are a few examples that should get you started as to what sorts of
behavior are dangerous.

<ol>
 <li>StumbleUpon, et al</li>
 These extensions will send all sorts of information about the websites you
 visit to the stumbleupon servers, and correlate this information with a
 unique identifier. This is obviously terrible for your anonymity.
 More generally, any sort of extension that requires registration, or even
 extensions that provide information about websites you visit should be
 suspect.

<li>FoxyProxy</li>

While FoxyProxy is a nice idea in theory, in practice it is impossible to
configure securely for Tor usage without Torbutton. Like all vanilla third
party proxy plugins, the main risks are <a
href="http://www.metasploit.com/research/projects/decloak/">plugin leakage</a>
and <a href="http://ha.ckers.org/weird/CSS-history.cgi">history
disclosure</a>, followed closely by cookie theft by exit nodes and tracking by
adservers (see the <a href="design/index.html#adversary">Torbutton Adversary
Model</a> for more information). However, even with Torbutton installed in
tandem and always enabled, it is still very difficult (though not impossible)
to configure FoxyProxy securely. Since FoxyProxy's 'Patterns' mode only
applies to specific urls, and not to an entire tab, setting FoxyProxy to only
send specific sites through Tor will still allow adservers to still learn your
real IP. Worse, if those sites use offsite logging services such as Google
Analytics, you may still end up in their logs with your real IP. Malicious
exit nodes can also cooperate with sites to inject images into pages that
bypass your filters. Setting FoxyProxy to only send certain URLs via Non-Tor
is much more viable, but be very careful with the filters you allow. For
example, something as simple as allowing *google* to go via Non-Tor will still
cause you to end up in all the logs of all websites that use Google Analytics!
See <a href="http://foxyproxy.mozdev.org/faq.html#privacy-01">this
question</a> on the FoxyProxy FAQ for more information.

<li>NoScript</li>
 Torbutton currently mitigates all known anonymity issues with Javascript.
 While it may be tempting to get better security by disabling Javascript for
 certain sites, you are far better off with an all-or-nothing approach.
 NoScript is exceedingly complicated, and has many subtleties that can surprise
 even advanced users. For example, addons.mozilla.org verifies extension
 integrity via Javascript over https, but downloads them in the clear. Not 
 adding it to your whitelist effectively
 means you are pulling down unverified extensions. Worse still, using NoScript
 can actually disable protections that Torbutton itself provides via
 Javascript, yet still allow malicious exit nodes to compromise your
 anonymity via the default whitelist (which they can spoof to inject any script they want).

</ol>

Which Firefox extensions do you recommend?

<ol>
 <li><a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/953">RefControl</a></li>
 Mentioned above, this extension allows more fine-grained referrer spoofing
than Torbutton currently provides. It should break less sites than Torbutton's
referrer spoofing option.
 <li><a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1474">SafeCache</a></li>
 If you use Tor excessively, and rarely disable it, you probably want to
install this extension to minimize the ability of sites to store long term
identifiers in your cache. This extension applies same origin policy to the
cache, so that elements are retrieved from the cache only if they are fetched
from a document in the same origin domain as the cached element. 
</ol>

Are there any other issues I should be concerned about?

There is currently one known unfixed security issue with Torbutton: it is
possible to unmask the javascript hooks that wrap the Date object to conceal
your timezone in Firefox 2, and the timezone masking code does not work at all
on Firefox 3. We are working with the Firefox team to fix one of <a
href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=392274">Bug 399274</a> or
<a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=419598">Bug 419598</a>
to address this. In the meantime, it is possible to set the TZ
environment variable to UTC to cause the browser to use UTC as your
timezone. Under Linux, you can add an export TZ=UTC to the
/usr/bin/firefox script, or edit your system bashrc to do the same. Under
Windows, you can set either a <a
href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310519">User or System Environment
Variable</a> for TZ via My Computer's properties. In MacOS, the situation is
<a
href="http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPRuntimeConfig/Articles/EnvironmentVars.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20002093-BCIJIJBH">a
lot more complicated</a>, unfortunately.

In addition, RSS readers such as Firefox Livemarks can perform
periodic fetches. Due to <a
href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=436250">Firefox Bug
436250</a>, there is no way to disable Livemark fetches during Tor. This can
be a problem if you have a lot of custom Livemark urls that can give away
information about your identity.

<h2>Description of Options</h2>

The development branch of Torbutton adds several new security features to
protect your anonymity from all the major threats the author is aware of. The
defaults should be fine for most people, but in case you are the tweaker type,
or if you prefer to try to outsource some options to more flexible extensions,
here is the complete list. (In an ideal world, these descriptions should all be
tooltips in the extension itself, but Firefox bugs <a
href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45375">45375</a> and <a
href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=218223">218223</a> currently
prevent this).

<ul>
 <li>Disable plugins on Tor Usage (crucial)</li>

This option is key to Tor security. Plugins perform their own networking
independent of the browser, and many plugins only partially obey even their own
proxy settings.

<li>Isolate Dynamic Content to Tor State (crucial)</li>

Another crucial option, this setting causes the plugin to disable Javascript
  on tabs that are loaded during a Tor state different than the current one,
  to prevent delayed fetches of injected URLs that contain unique identifiers,
  and to prevent meta-refresh tags from revealing your IP when you turn off
  Tor. It also prevents all fetches from tabs loaded with an opposite Tor
  state. This serves to block non-Javascript dynamic content such as CSS
  popups from revealing your IP address if you disable Tor.

<li>Hook Dangerous Javascript (crucial)</li>

This setting enables the Javascript hooking code. Javascript is injected into
pages to hook the Date object to mask your timezone, and to hook the navigator
object to mask OS and user agent properties not handled by the standard
Firefox user agent override settings.

<li>Resize window dimensions to multiples of 50px on toggle (recommended)</li>

To cut down on the amount of state available to fingerprint users uniquely, 
this pref causes windows to be resized to a multiple of 50 pixels on each
side when Tor is enabled and pages are loaded.

<li>Disable Updates During Tor (recommended)</li>

Under Firefox 2, many extension authors did not update their extensions from 
SSL-enabled websites. It is possible for malicious Tor nodes to hijack these extensions and replace them with malicious ones, or add malicious code to 
existing extensions. Since Firefox 3 now enforces encrypted and/or
authenticated updates, this setting is no longer as important as it once
was (though updates do leak information about which extensions you have, it is
fairly infrequent).

<li>Disable Search Suggestions during Tor (optional)</li>

This optional setting governs if you get Google search suggestions during Tor
usage. Since no cookie is transmitted during search suggestions, this is a
relatively benign behavior.

<li>Block Tor/Non-Tor access to network from file:// urls (recommended)</li>

These settings prevent local html documents from transmitting local files to
arbitrary websites <a href="http://www.gnucitizen.org/blog/content-disposition-hacking/">under Firefox 2</a>. Since exit nodes can insert headers that
force the browser to save arbitrary pages locally (and also inject script into
arbitrary html files you save to disk via Tor), it is probably a good idea to
leave this setting on.

<li>Close all Non-Tor/Tor windows and tabs on toggle (optional)</li>

These two settings allow you to obtain a greater degree of assurance that
after you toggle out of Tor, the pages are really gone and can't perform any
extra network activity. Currently, there is no known way that pages can still
perform activity after toggle, but these options exist as a backup measure
just in case a flaw is discovered. They can also serve as a handy 'Boss
Button' feature for clearing all Tor browsing off your screen in a hurry.

<li>Isolate access to history navigation to Tor state (crucial)</li>

This setting prevents both Javascript and accidental user clicks from causing
the session history to load pages that were fetched in a different Tor state
than the current one. Since this can be used to correlate Tor and Non-Tor
activity and thus determine your IP address, it is marked as a crucial 
setting.

<li>Block History Reads during Tor (crucial)</li>

Based on code contributed by <a href="http://www.collinjackson.com/">Collin
 Jackson</a>, when enabled and Tor is enabled, this setting prevents the
rendering engine from knowing if certain links were visited. This mechanism
defeats all document-based history disclosure attacks, including CSS-only
attacks.

<li>Block History Reads during Non-Tor (recommended)</li>

This setting accomplishes the same but for your Non-Tor activity.

<li>Block History Writes during Tor (recommended)</li>

This setting prevents the rendering engine from recording visited URLs, and
also disables download manager history. Note that if you allow writing of Tor history,
it is recommended that you disable non-Tor history reads, since malicious
websites you visit without Tor can query your history for .onion sites and
other history recorded during Tor usage (such as Google queries).

<li>Block History Writes during Non-Tor (optional)</li>

This setting also disables recording any history information during Non-Tor
usage.

<li>Clear History During Tor Toggle (optional)</li>

This is an alternate setting to use instead of (or in addition to) blocking
history reads or writes.

<li>Block Password+Form saving during Tor/Non-Tor</li>

These options govern if the browser writes your passwords and search
  submissions to disk for the given state.

<li>Block Tor disk cache and clear all cache on Tor Toggle</li>

Since the browser cache can be leveraged to store unique identifiers, cache
must not persist across Tor sessions. This option keeps the memory cache active
during Tor usage for performance, but blocks disk access for caching.

<li>Block disk and memory cache during Tor</li>

This setting entirely blocks the cache during Tor, but preserves it for
Non-Tor usage.

<li>Clear Cookies on Tor Toggle</li>

Fully clears all cookies on Tor toggle.
 
 <li>Store Non-Tor cookies in a protected jar</li>

This option stores your persistent Non-Tor cookies in a special cookie jar
 file, in case you wish to preserve some cookies. Based on code contributed
 by <a href="http://www.collinjackson.com/">Collin Jackson</a>. It is
 compatible with third party extensions that you use to manage your Non-Tor
 cookies. Your Tor cookies will be cleared on toggle, of course.

<li>Store both Non-Tor and Tor cookies in a protected jar (dangerous)</li>

This option stores your persistent Tor and Non-Tor cookies 
  separate cookie jar files. Note that it is a bad idea to keep Tor
  cookies around for any length of time, as they can be retrieved by exit
  nodes that inject spoofed forms into plaintext pages you fetch.

<li>Manage My Own Cookies (dangerous)</li>

This setting allows you to manage your own cookies with an alternate
extension, such as <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/82">CookieCuller</a>. Note that this is particularly dangerous,
since malicious exit nodes can spoof document elements that appear to be from
sites you have preserved cookies for (and can then do things like fetch your
entire gmail inbox, even if you were not using gmail or visiting any google
pages at the time!).
 
 <li>Do not write Tor/Non-Tor cookies to disk</li>

These settings prevent Firefox from writing any cookies to disk during the
  corresponding Tor state. If cookie jars are enabled, those jars will
  exist in memory only, and will be cleared when Firefox exits.

<li>Disable DOM Storage during Tor usage (crucial)</li>

Firefox has recently added the ability to store additional state and
 identifiers in persistent tables, called <a
 href="http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/DOM:Storage">DOM Storage</a>.
 Obviously this can compromise your anonymity if stored content can be
 fetched across Tor-state.

<li>Clear HTTP auth sessions (recommended)</li>

HTTP authentication credentials can be probed by exit nodes and used to both confirm that you visit a certain site that uses HTTP auth, and also impersonate you on this site.

<li>Clear cookies on Tor/Non-Tor shutdown</li>

These settings install a shutdown handler to clear cookies on Tor
and/or Non-Tor browser shutdown. It is independent of your Clear Private Data
settings, and does in fact clear the corresponding cookie jars.

<li>Prevent session store from saving Tor-loaded tabs (recommended)</li>

This option augments the session store to prevent it from writing out
  Tor-loaded tabs to disk. Unfortunately, this also disables your ability to 
  undo closed tabs. The reason why this setting is recommended is because
  after a session crash, your browser will be in an undefined Tor state, and
  can potentially load a bunch of Tor tabs without Tor. The following option
  is another alternative to protect against this.

<li>On normal startup, set state to: Tor, Non-Tor, Shutdown State</li>

This setting allows you to choose which Tor state you want the browser to
  start in normally: Tor, Non-Tor, or whatever state the browser shut down in.

<li>On crash recovery or session restored startup, restore via: Tor, Non-Tor</li>

When Firefox crashes, the Tor state upon restart usually is completely
  random, and depending on your choice for the above option, may load 
  a bunch of tabs in the wrong state. This setting allows you to choose
  which state the crashed session should always be restored in to.

<li>Prevent session store from saving Non-Tor/Tor-loaded tabs</li>
 
 These two settings allow you to control what the Firefox Session Store
 writes to disk. Since the session store state is used to automatically
 load websites after a crash or upgrade, it is advisable not to allow
 Tor tabs to be written to disk, or they may get loaded in Non-Tor
 after a crash (or the reverse, depending upon the crash recovery setting, 
 of course).
 
 <li>Set user agent during Tor usage (crucial)</li>

User agent masking is done with the idea of making all Tor users appear
uniform. A recent Firefox 2.0.0.4 Windows build was chosen to mimic for this
string and supporting navigator.* properties, and this version will remain the
same for all TorButton versions until such time as specific incompatibility
issues are demonstrated. Uniformity of this value is obviously very important
to anonymity. Note that for this option to have full effectiveness, the user
must also allow Hook Dangerous Javascript ensure that the navigator.*
properties are reset correctly.  The browser does not set some of them via the
exposed user agent override preferences.

<li>Spoof US English Browser</li>

This option causes Firefox to send http headers as if it were an English
browser. Useful for internationalized users.

<li>Don't send referrer during Tor Usage</li>

This option disables the referrer header, preventing sites from determining
where you came from to visit them. This can break some sites, however. <a
href="http://www.digg.com">Digg</a> in particular seemed to be broken by this.
A more streamlined, less intrusive version of this option should be available
eventually. In the meantime, <a
href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/953">RefControl</a> can
provide this functionality via a default option of Forge.
</ul>

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