[Pkg-anonymity-tools] Bug#797339: Bug#797339: torbrowser-launcher: assumes a hard-coded (and insecure) SOCKS port

[intrigeri]

Hi,

Michael Gold wrote (29 Aug 2015 16:55:28 GMT) :
> It is inappropriate to assume Tor is running on this port, as any local
> user could be running a service there (Debian bug #797335), possibly to
> interfere with torbrowser-launcher.

Note that torbrowser-launcher Depends: tor, so this is correct if, and
only if, the system administrator has disabled the tor service, or
configured it to not listen on the default SOCKS port.

I agree the current "little-t-tor + Tor using applications" situation
is sub-optimal from a security and UX point-of-view, e.g. torsocks and
Torbirdy are also impacted (and, transitively, anything that uses
torsocks).

Now, I don't think that filing bugs against all packages that assume
a Tor SOCKS port on 9050 will help much: that's not the place where
the root cause of this problem will be addressed, as said packages
have no means to guess that the system Tor's configuration has been
tweaked. And in the current state of things, that's simply the best
they can do (unless perhaps an unprivileged user can learn what UID
opened a port locally, and check if it's `debian-tor'?). I see that
you've also reported bug #797341, so I'm glad you are also working on
solving the core problem :)

> torbrowser-launcher should allow the user to select an alternate TCP or
> Unix-domain SOCKS address, and shouldn't connect to an unprivileged one
> without confirmation.

Given 1. the design goals of torbrowser-launcher (that is: working
out-of-the-box for non-technical users, AIUI); 2. the current state of
things as described above; and 3. the fact that in practice this is
a problem only if the system administrator tweaked torrc in a way that
ignores #2, I beg to disagree that this would be a good solution to
the (real) problem we have here.

Now, *if* the quick fix I'm suggesting above works (checking who
opened the SOCKs port before connecting to it), then it could be an
acceptable temporary fix for users who get torbrowser-launcher from
their distro.

Cheers,
-- 
intrigeri