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Tor Project and Mozilla Making It Harder for Malware to Unmask Users

posted by janrinok on Friday October 14 2016, @12:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the removing-another-weak-link dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Big change is coming "with the support of 'Unix domain sockets', and some other tweaks. A Unix domain socket is basically a way for two programs on the same computer to talk to each other without using an underlying network protocol. With that, the Firefox half of the Tor Browser should no longer need network access, Barnes continued.

"That means that you could run it in a sandbox with no network access (only a Unix domain socket to the proxy), and it would still work fine. And then, even if the Firefox half of Tor Browser were compromised, it wouldn't be able to make a network connection to de-anonymize the user," he said.

This project is a collaboration between the Tor Project and Mozilla, according to Barnes. He said it started when the Tor Project did some work on adding Unix domain socket capabilities to the Tor proxy and browser. After that, Mozilla added a general capability to Firefox allowing it to talk to proxies over Unix domain sockets. And now, the Tor Browser team is working on putting this general capability into the Tor Browser, and Mozilla is helping to fix any bugs that come up, Barnes said."

https://motherboard.vice.com/read/tor-project-and-mozilla-making-it-harder-for-malware-to-unmask-users

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2016, @04:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2016, @04:36PM (#414354)

    Agreed, I wouldn't have thought to make Mozilla not need network access.

  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday October 14 2016, @06:38PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Friday October 14 2016, @06:38PM (#414401)

    Now, if we could only make Outlook not need neither network nor system access, we'd cut down on a lot of crapware.

  • (Score: 2) by termigator on Friday October 14 2016, @08:04PM

    by termigator (4271) on Friday October 14 2016, @08:04PM (#414431)

    IIRC, NCSA Mosaic had the ability to communicate with via a unix domain socket. I wrote a script that would send commands to the browser. Cannot remember the details and if you could render content, but the idea is not new. I think the problem is that such IPC mechanism is *nix-based, so if trying to support other OSes, it does not work.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 15 2016, @02:09AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 15 2016, @02:09AM (#414499)

      No, but most OSes have support for named pipes. Seems to me that similar security could be carried out by using those instead of UDS.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 15 2016, @10:23AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 15 2016, @10:23AM (#414571)

      I stopped reading at "other OSes"...