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Critical Tor Flaw Leaks Users’ Real IP Address

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday November 07 2017, @06:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the tor-springs-a-leak dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

TorMoil, as the flaw has been dubbed by its discoverer, is triggered when users click on links that begin with file:// rather than the more common https:// and http:// address prefixes. When the Tor browser for macOS and Linux is in the process of opening such an address, "the operating system may directly connect to the remote host, bypassing Tor Browser," according to a brief blog post published Tuesday by We Are Segment, the security firm that privately reported the bug to Tor developers.

On Friday, members of the Tor Project issued a temporary work-around that plugs that IP leak. Until the final fix is in place, updated versions of the browser may not behave properly when navigating to file:// addresses. They said both the Windows versions of Tor, Tails, and the sandboxed Tor browser that's in alpha testing aren't vulnerable.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/critical-tor-flaw-leaks-users-real-ip-address-update-now/

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 08 2017, @06:06AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 08 2017, @06:06AM (#593972)

    If you find a bug because of testing you simply got lucky. The only way to get ALL the bugs is mathematical proof. But that tends to be very complex and expensive. And Firefox is a massive amount of code, probably not an optimal choice for security. Having said that I use the tor browser daily. It's simply the best hope out there. Much better than ISP logging everything or trusting some random VPN not to do the same.