Entries Tagged "browsers"

Page 6 of 7

Torpark

Torpark is a free anonymous web browser. It sounds good:

A group of computer hackers and human rights workers have launched a specially-crafted version of Firefox that claims to give users complete anonymity when they surf the Web.

Dubbed “Torpark” and based on a portable version of Firefox 1.5.0.7, the browser will run from a USB drive, so it leaves no installation tracks on the PC. It protects the user’s privacy by encrypting all in- and outbound data, and also anonymizes the connection by passing all data through the TOR network, which masks the true IP address of the machine.

From the website:

Torpark is a program which allows you to surf the internet anonymously. Download Torpark and put it on a USB Flash keychain. Plug it into any internet terminal whether at home, school, work, or in public. Torpark will launch a Tor circuit connection, which creates an encrypted tunnel from your computer indirectly to a Tor exit computer, allowing you to surf the internet anonymously.

More details here.

Posted on September 28, 2006 at 6:51 AM • View Comments

New Anonymous Browser

According to Computerworld and InfoWorld, there’s a new Web browser specifically designed not to retain information.

Browzar automatically deletes Internet caches, histories, cookies and auto-complete forms. Auto-complete is the feature that anticipates the search term or Web address a user might enter by relying on information previously entered into the browser.

I know nothing else about this. If you want, download it here.

EDITED TO ADD (9/1): This browser seems to be both fake and full of adware.

Posted on September 1, 2006 at 8:23 AM • View Comments

TrackMeNot

In the wake of AOL’s publication of search data, and the New York Times article demonstrating how easy it is to figure out who did the searching, we have TrackMeNot:

TrackMeNot runs in Firefox as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN. It hides users’ actual search trails in a cloud of indistinguishable ‘ghost’ queries, making it difficult, if not impossible, to aggregate such data into accurate or identifying user profiles. TrackMeNot integrates into the Firefox ‘Tools’ menu and includes a variety of user-configurable options.

Let’s count the ways this doesn’t work.

One, it doesn’t hide your searches. If the government wants to know who’s been searching on “al Qaeda recruitment centers,” it won’t matter that you’ve made ten thousand other searches as well—you’ll be targeted.

Two, it’s too easy to spot. There are only 1,673 search terms in the program’s dictionary. Here, as a random example, are the program’s “G” words:

gag, gagged, gagging, gags, gas, gaseous, gases, gassed, gasses, gassing, gen, generate, generated, generates, generating, gens, gig, gigs, gillion, gillions, glass, glasses, glitch, glitched, glitches, glitching, glob, globed, globing, globs, glue, glues, gnarlier, gnarliest, gnarly, gobble, gobbled, gobbles, gobbling, golden, goldener, goldenest, gonk, gonked, gonking, gonks, gonzo, gopher, gophers, gorp, gorps, gotcha, gotchas, gribble, gribbles, grind, grinding, grinds, grok, grokked, grokking, groks, ground, grovel, groveled, groveling, grovelled, grovelling, grovels, grue, grues, grunge, grunges, gun, gunned, gunning, guns, guru, gurus

The program’s authors claim that this list is temporary, and that there will eventually be a TrackMeNot server with an ever-changing word list. Of course, that list can be monitored by any analysis program—as could any queries to that server.

In any case, every twelve seconds—exactly—the program picks a random pair of words and sends it to either AOL, Yahoo, MSN, or Google. My guess is that your searches contain more than two words, you don’t send them out in precise twelve-second intervals, and you favor one search engine over the others.

Three, some of the program’s searches are worse than yours. The dictionary includes:

HIV, atomic, bomb, bible, bibles, bombing, bombs, boxes, choke, choked, chokes, choking, chain, crackers, empire, evil, erotics, erotices, fingers, knobs, kicking, harier, hamster, hairs, legal, letterbomb, letterbombs, mailbomb, mailbombing, mailbombs, rapes, raping, rape, raper, rapist, virgin, warez, warezes, whack, whacked, whacker, whacking, whackers, whacks, pistols

Does anyone reall think that searches on “erotic rape,” “mailbombing bibles,” and “choking virgins” will make their legitimate searches less noteworthy?

And four, it wastes a whole lot of bandwidth. A query every twelve seconds translates into 2,400 queries a day, assuming an eight-hour workday. A typical Google response is about 25K, so we’re talking 60 megabytes of additional traffic daily. Imagine if everyone in the company used it.

I suppose this kind of thing would stop someone who has a paper printout of your searches and is looking through them manually, but it’s not going to hamper computer analysis very much. Or anyone who isn’t lazy. But it wouldn’t be hard for a computer profiling program to ignore these searches.

As one commentator put it:

Imagine a cop pulls you over for speeding. As he approaches, you realize you left your wallet at home. Without your driver’s license, you could be in a lot of trouble. When he approaches, you roll down your window and shout. “Hello Officer! I don’t have insurance on this vehicle! This car is stolen! I have weed in my glovebox! I don’t have my driver’s license! I just hit an old lady minutes ago! I’ve been running stop lights all morning! I have a dead body in my trunk! This car doesn’t pass the emissions tests! I’m not allowed to drive because I am under house arrest! My gas tank runs on the blood of children!” You stop to catch a breath, confident you have supplied so much information to the cop that you can’t possibly be caught for not having your license now.

Yes, data mining is a signal-to-noise problem. But artificial noise like this isn’t going to help much. If I were going to improve on this idea, I would make the plugin watch the user’s search patterns. I would make it send queries only to the search engines the user does, only when he is actually online doing things. I would randomize the timing. (There’s a comment to that effect in the code, so presumably this will be fixed in a later version of the program.) And I would make it monitor the web pages the user looks at, and send queries based on keywords it finds on those pages. And I would make it send queries in the form the user tends to use, whether it be single words, pairs of words, or whatever.

But honestly, I don’t know that I would use it even then. The way serious people protect their web-searching privacy is through anonymization. Use Tor for serious web anonymization. Or Black Box Search for simple anonymous searching (here’s a Greasemonkey extension that does that automatically.) And set your browser to delete search engine cookies regularly.

Posted on August 23, 2006 at 6:53 AM • View Comments

A Month of Browser Bugs

To kick off his new Browser Fun blog, H.D. Moore began with “A Month of Browser Bugs”:

This blog will serve as a dumping ground for browser-based security research and vulnerability disclosure. To kick off this blog, we are announcing the Month of Browser Bugs (MoBB), where we will publish a new browser hack, every day, for the entire month of July. The hacks we publish are carefully chosen to demonstrate a concept without disclosing a direct path to remote code execution. Enjoy!

Thirty-one days, and thirty-one hacks later, the blog lists exploits against all the major browsers:

  • Internet Explorer: 25
  • Mozilla: 2
  • Safari: 2
  • Opera: 1
  • Konqueror: 1

My guess is that he could have gone on for another month without any problem, and possibly could produce a new browser bug a day indefinitely.

The moral here isn’t that IE is less secure than the other browsers, although I certainly believe that. The moral is that coding standards are so bad that security flaws are this common.

Eric Rescorla argues that it’s a waste of time to find and fix new security holes, because so many of them still remain and the software’s security isn’t improved. I think he has a point. (Note: this is not to say that it’s a waste of time to fix the security holes found and publicly exploited by the bad guys. The question Eric tries to answer is whether or not it is worth it for the security community to find new security holes.)

Another commentary is here.

Posted on August 3, 2006 at 1:53 PM • View Comments

Firefox 2.0 to Contain Anti-Phishing Features

This is a good idea.

The built anti-phishing capability warns users when they come across Web forgeries, and offers to return the user to his or her home page. Meanwhile, microsummaries are regularly updated summaries of Web pages, small enough to fit in the space available to a bookmark label, but large enough to provide more useful information about pages than static page titles, and are regularly updated as new information becomes available.

Posted on July 21, 2006 at 12:55 PM • View Comments

Firefox Bug Causes Relationship to Break Up

A couple—living together, I assume—and engaged to be married, shared a computer. He used Firefox to visit a bunch of dating sites, being smart enough not to have the browser save his password. But Firefox did save the names of the sites it was told never to save the password for. She happened to stumble on this list. The details are left to the imagination, but they broke up.

Most bug reports aren’t this colorful.

Posted on March 27, 2006 at 7:53 AM • View Comments

The New Internet Explorer

I’m just starting to read about the new security features in Internet Explorer 7. So far, I like what I am reading.

IE 7 requires that all browser windows display an address bar. This helps foil attackers that operate by popping up new windows masquerading as pages on a legitimate site, when in fact the site is fraudulent. By requiring an address bar, users will immediately see the true URL of the displayed page, making these types of attacks more obvious. If you think you’re looking at www.microsoft.com, but the browser address bar says www.illhackyou.net, you ought to be suspicious.

I use Opera, and have long used the address bar to “check” on URLs. This is an excellent idea. So is this:

In early November, a bunch of Web browser developers got together and started fleshing out standards for address bar coloring, which can cue users to secured connections. Under the proposal laid out by IE 7 team member Rob Franco, even sites that use a standard SSL certificate will display a standard white address bar. Sites that use a stronger, as yet undetermined level of protection will use a green bar.

I like easy visual indications about what’s going on. And I really like that SSL is generic white, because it really doesn’t prove that you’re communicating with the site you think you’re communicating with. This feature helps with that, though:

Franco also said that when navigating to an SSL-protected site, the IE 7 address bar will display the business name and certification authority’s name in the address bar.

Some of the security measures in IE7 weaken the integration between the browser and the operating system:

People using Windows Vista beta 2 will find a new feature called Protected Mode, which renders IE 7 unable to modify system files and settings. This essentially breaks down part of the integration between IE and Windows itself.

Think of it is as a wall between IE and the rest of the operating system. No, the code won’t be perfect, and yes, there’ll be ways found to circumvent this security, but this is an important and long-overdue feature.

The majority of IE’s notorious security flaws stem from its pervasive integration with Windows. That is a feature no other Web browser offers—and an ability that Vista’s Protected Mode intends to mitigate. IE 7 obviously won’t remove all of that tight integration. Lacking deep architectural changes, the effort has focused instead on hardening or eliminating potential vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, this approach requires Microsoft to anticipate everything that could go wrong and block it in advance—hardly a surefire way to secure a browser.

That last sentence is about the general Internet attitude to allow everything that is not explicitly denied, rather than deny everything that is not explicitly allowed.

Also, you’ll have to wait until Vista to use it:

…this capability will not be available in Windows XP because it’s woven directly into Windows Vista itself.

There are also some good changes under the hood:

IE 7 does eliminate a great deal of legacy code that dates back to the IE 4 days, which is a welcome development.

And:

Microsoft has rewritten a good bit of IE 7’s core code to help combat attacks that rely on malformed URLs (that typically cause a buffer overflow). It now funnels all URL processing through a single function (thus reducing the amount of code that “looks” at URLs).

All good stuff, but I agree with this conclusion:

IE 7 offers several new security features, but it’s hardly a given that the situation will improve. There has already been a set of security updates for IE 7 beta 1 released for both Windows Vista and Windows XP computers. Security vulnerabilities in a beta product shouldn’t be alarming (IE 7 is hardly what you’d consider “finished” at this point), but it may be a sign that the product’s architecture and design still have fundamental security issues.

I’m not switching from Opera yet, and my second choice is still Firefox. But the masses still use IE, and our security depends in part on those masses keeping their computers worm-free and bot-free.

NOTE: Here’s some info on how to get your own copy of Internet Explorer 7 beta 2.

Posted on February 9, 2006 at 3:37 PM • View Comments

Petnames

Interesting paper:

Zooko’s Triangle argues that names cannot be global, secure, and memorable, all at the same time. Domain names are an example: they are global, and memorable, but as the rapid rise of phishing demonstrates, they are not secure.

Though no single name can have all three properties, the petname system does indeed embody all three properties. Informal experiments with petname-like systems suggest that petnames can be both intuitive and effective. Experimental implementations already exist for simple extensions to existing browsers that could alleviate (possibly dramatically) the problems with phishing. As phishers gain sophistication, it seems compelling to experiment with petname systems as part of the solution.

Posted on February 8, 2006 at 11:25 AM • View Comments

Internet Explorer Sucks

This study is from August, but I missed it. The researchers tracked three browsers (MSIE, Firefox, Opera) in 2004 and counted which days they were “known unsafe.” Their definition of “known unsafe”: a remotely exploitable security vulnerability had been publicly announced and no patch was yet available.

MSIE was 98% unsafe. There were only 7 days in 2004 without an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole.

Firefox was 15% unsafe. There were 56 days with an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole. 30 of those days were a Mac hole that only affected Mac users. Windows Firefox was 7% unsafe.

Opera was 17% unsafe: 65 days. That number is accidentally a little better than it should be, as two of the upatched periods happened to overlap.

This underestimates the risk, because it doesn’t count vulnerabilities known to the bad guys but not publicly disclosed (and it’s foolish to think that such things don’t exist). So the “98% unsafe” figure for MSIE is generous, and the situation might be even worse.

Wow.

Posted on December 26, 2005 at 6:27 AM • View Comments

1 … 4 5 6 7

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.