a great post that was published a few years ago on Matt Traudt’s blog with some tips for people using Tor and the Tor Browser.
it also addresses common misconceptions like disabling JS and using fingerprinting tests, which unfortunately I see floating around every other day on the internet.
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Turns out, he is not talking about the kind of people I fit in. I am using Tor for more than a decade at this point, and have been a very avid I2P torrent user as well since many years. If not the same, I compare pretty well in experience in this aspect.
He is talking about the kind of people who open Panopticon for fingerprint tests and misread the fractions and decimal numbers and information there when comparing, and then scream on reddit with misinterpreted posts aimed to get awards and upvotes at the cost of sanity of many people.
deviceinfo.me is not the kind of site and data used for demonstrations he is talking about. I have a fair amount of experience to make this claim.
To expand on the attacks that are mitigated, avoidance is a better measure than mitigation. Hence the reason why I say noJS is a better policy, the next best is turning on JS manually when needed. Keeping JS on all the time is a fool’s errand if they want to go beyond standard levels of privacy and anonymity. The author himself mentions in the last line as a subtle disclaimer why it can be a choice.
You know how gait movements IRL work? Turns out, Google Recaptcha makes very good use of how you move and click with cursor on the captcha boxes. If you thought AI/ML image training was the only thing Google was making users do, now you know something new.
Firefox has a bigger userbase than Tor Browser users, and it is a pretty uncontested claim logically. Firefox has Tor Project’s code for anti fingerprinting and per site data isolation upstreamed to Firefox’s private browsing mode since the past 15-20 or so versions now.
Does that not make the argument for Firefox stronger for regular daily browsing usage, since it has an even bigger userbase? You can use uBlock Origin and you can enjoy Tor Browser’s dFPI and per site data isolation benefits in Firefox’s private browsing mode.
You missed where I said how having JS on means you are keylogged easily. Your caps lock is also detectable, just to be clear. You are also forgetting that making strings out of this keylogged stuff, and then applying stylometry analysis is a very easy and cost effective way into unmasking identities behind pseudonyms. I do this myself regularly as part of OSINT investigations. It is how I have also unmasked many sockpuppets on Lemmy, Matrix, Reddit in the past few years.
The author has a very agreeable position with me on what he speaks, but it is like how anti-imperialist viewpoints sound very correct in today’s political scenario, but every single nuance does not have to be perfect to get the idea across. He is getting the idea across here, and that is why you are arguing at length with me.
Edit: I think this explanation is lacking. I must expand on it.
First I will get out of the way elements that can be spoofed with JS on:
Now it is time to address elements which having JS on reveals. Feel free to correct me whatever is spoofed by Tor Browser.
Monitor colour depth support may not be a significant issue, as many have standard monitors.
Can you explain me how these are spoofed in Tor Browser while having JS on? I have ignored the fonts as those are spoofed, and there are no timing attack vectors in this list. The last bullet point, if you want to talk about, can be used to identify if someone used a really fast connection ISP at an unusual place and time.
Nameserver connections can be a possible issue with exit node identification, if we are to assume the OPSEC of an average journalist just downloading and using Tor Browser on any machine. If we assume relays can protect them, we have other vectors here, like…
… page scroll and mouse cursor positions, caps lock on or off, last key pressed.
Keylogging, as explained earlier, is a very cost effective way to unmask people. Telling people on top of it to feel free to use a personal Facebook account over Tor network, puts them in the mindset of typing personally identifiable messages, even becoming trackable down to how many errors a person makes and hits Backspace key. Imagine people typing messages under a pseudonym on a forum anonymously in a couple tabs besides the Facebook/Twitter tab, and writing with the same mental personality in mind.
I think this reply now feels a little more apt.
other than websites that return a score I argue that websites that return values are not of much value if you do not know how much entropy they carry (eg. are they the same for all the people on the same OS?) or how they are handled in the browser with various mitigations. it’s one thing to read a value, but it’s a whole different thing to understand if and how it can be used, leave alone against a specific tool.
everything is documented on TB’s official gitlab btw, people working on it know their stuff.
Firefox does not have the crowd that Tor Browser has, it does not have the Tor network, RFP is not enabled by default and users will make changes to their settings. even if Firefox has the larger user base there’s no argument for Firefox having a better crowd, sadly there’s no linear correlation in this case.
yes, you can harden it, but the crowd is so small that you will not defeat advanced scripts, nor you should expect to. hardened setups are also not equal as projects like arkenfox and librewolf are going to be tweaked by users post hardening (as they very much should).
this is opsec and it does not strictly apply to the tool you’re using so I don’t think it’s a valid argument for any of the points explained above.
as for the list you wrote:
“TB should cover all metrics” (I know you haven’t said it, I just didn’t know how to phrase it better lol) is not a safe assumption: not all metrics are equal, they do not all carry entropy nor they are all valuable fping methods. this brings us back to the initial part of this comment.
the rest of the stuff you discussed, like typing in the wrong tab etc, is mostly opsec and as I said I also value the added peace of mind, but it doesn’t make logins on Tor bad per-se. keyloggers are also a bit out of scope for this discussion imo.
tldr: TB covers enough metrics for most threat models even with JS on - naive scripts swallow the pill, advanced ones are defeated by the crowd, and don’t forget the network -, and the benefits of disabling JS are not that big.
ps thanks for getting back despite the lengthy comments, I added some edits for completeness on both sides of the discussion :-)