Web Browsers: Chrome, Tor Browser 12.0.7, Tails, and More
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Another cluster of potentially malicious Chrome extensions
That extension wasn’t alone. I kept finding similar extensions until I had a list of 109 extensions, installed by more than 62 million users in total. While most of these extensions didn’t seem to contain malicious code (yet?), almost all of them requested excessive privileges under false pretenses. The names are often confusingly similar to established products. All of these extensions are clearly meant for dubious monetization.
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Self-hosting the Tor Project users forum
A year and a half ago, we launched the Tor Project users forum, a new discussion platform based on Discourse, allowing us to continue to grow the Tor community and experiment new ways to gather feedback and provide support.
Today, we're happy to announce the forum will soon migrate from the free cloud hosting graciously provided by the team behind Discourse to the Tor Project's own server infrastructure.
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New Release: Tor Browser 12.0.7
Tor Browser 12.0.7 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.
This release updates Firefox to 102.12.0esr, including bug fixes, stability improvements and important security updates. We also backported the Android-specific security updates from Firefox 114.
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Improving Tails for human rights defenders in Latin America
Between 2021 and 2023 Tails, Tor, and the Guardian Project partnered to organize training and usability tests in Ecuador, Mexico, and Brazil. Our goals were to:
Promote our digital security tools and train human rights defenders in the Global South.
Learn from their experiences and needs to help us prioritize future work.
Improve the usability of our tools based on their feedback.
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[Repeat] RIPE 86 bites — QUIC and active network management
While 90% of the volume of traffic is encrypted, the majority of this traffic is TLS session payload encryption layered above a TCP substrate. This implies that the outer IP wrapper and the TCP control parameters are still exposed to the network. The two communicating parties are still exposed in the IP address header, and while one end of the network transaction might be a shared CDN service point, the Server Name Indication (SNI) in TLS setup is still passed over the network in the clear, so the service point being accessed by the user is still exposed.
So, while the exact nature of the transaction is opaque to the network observer, the metadata of the transaction, including the service name and port, the client IP address, the time of day, session profile and duration, is still available to the network observer.