commit 0aa14b70a3a94ff06c1a0de53e55f2618c00d57b Author: Nick Mathewson <nickm@torproject.org> Date: Fri Nov 9 11:03:52 2012 -0500 Add local copy of the "top changes in tor" blogposts so we can work offline when integrating their content. --- blog/blogpost-1.txt | 49 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ blog/blogpost-2.txt | 34 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ blog/blogpost-3.txt | 23 +++++++++++++++++++++++ 3 files changed, 106 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) diff --git a/blog/blogpost-1.txt b/blog/blogpost-1.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..222c4a8 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/blogpost-1.txt @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +The main academic reference for Tor is "Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router" by Dingledine, Mathewson, and Syverson. But that paper was published back in 2004, and Tor has evolved since then. So Steven Murdoch and Nick Mathewson are currently preparing an updated version of the Tor design paper, to include new design changes and research results concerning Tor over the last 8 years. +In this series of posts, we (Steven and Nick) will try to summarize the most interesting or significant changes to Tor's design since the publication of the original paper. We're only going to cover the stuff we think is most interesting, and we'll aim to do so in an interesting way. +We think this will be a three part series. In this first part, we'll cover the evolution of Tor's directory system, and some performance improvements in Tor's circuit creation and cell scheduling logic. +1. Node discovery and the directory protocol +Since the earliest versions of Tor, we knew that node discovery would require a better implementation than we had. There are a few key issues that any anonymity network's node discovery system needs to solve. +Every client needs to be selecting nodes from the same probability distribution, or an adversary could be able to exploit differences in client knowledge. In the worst case, if an adversary can cause one client to know about an exit node that no other client uses, the adversary can know that all traffic leaving that exit is coming from the targeted client. But even in more mild cases, where (say) every client knows every node with P=90%, an adversary can use this information to attack users. +While there has been some work on quantifying these so-called "epistemic attacks," we're proceeding with the conservative assumption that clients using separate sets of nodes are likely to be partitionable from one other, and so the set of nodes used by all clients needs to be uniform. +The earliest versions of Tor solved this problem with a "Directory" object – each server generated a signed "router descriptor", and uploaded it to one of a small set (three) of "directory authorities". Each of these authorities generated a signed concatenated list of router descriptors, and served that list to clients over HTTP. +This system had several notable problems: +Clients needed to download the same descriptors over and over, whether they needed them or not. +Each client would believe whichever directory authority it had spoken to most recently: rather than providing distributed trust, each authority was fully trusted in its own right, and any one misbehaving authority could completely compromise all the clients that talked to it. +To the extent that directory authorities disagreed, they created partitions in client knowledge, which could in the worst case allow an adversary to partition clients based on which authority's directory each client had downloaded most recently. +The load on the authorities promised to grow excessive, as every client contacted every authority. +The contents of the directory were sent unencrypted, which made them trivially easy to fingerprint on the wire. +Early changes in the Version 1 Directory System +Our earliest changes focused on improving scalability rather than improving the trust model. We began by having each authority publish two documents, rather than one: a directory that contained all the router descriptors, and a "network status" document that was a list of which descriptors were up and which were down (Tor 0.0.8pre1, in Jul 2004). Clients could download the latter more frequently to avoid using down servers, and refresh the former only periodically. +We also added a caching feature in Tor 0.0.8pre1, where nodes could act as directory caches. With this feature, once a client had a directory, it no longer needed to contact the directory authorities every time it wanted to update it, but rather could contact a cache instead. +The Version 2 Directory System (deprecated) +In Tor 0.1.1.8-alpha (Oct 2005), we took our first shot at solving the trust model. Now, we had each authority sign a more complete network status statement, including a list of all the nodes that it believed should be in the network, a digest of each node's public key, and a digest of each node's router descriptor. Clients would download one of these documents signed by each authority, and then compute, based on all the documents they had, which collection of nodes represented the consensus view of all the authorities. +To get router descriptors, clients would then contact one or more caches, and ask for the descriptors they believed represented the consensus view of all the authorities. +This approach meant that a single rogue directory authority could no longer completely control any client's view of the network. Clients became more fragmented, however, since instead of falling into one of N possible groups based on which authority they contacted most recently, they fell into one of MN groups where N was the number of authorities and M was the number of recently valid opinions from each authority. +Around this time we also had authorities begin assigning flags to nodes, so that in addition to recording "up" or "down" for each node, authorities could also declare whether nodes were fast, stable, likely to be good guard nodes, and so forth. +All of the improvements so far were oriented toward saving bandwidth at the server side: we figured that clients had plenty of bandwidth, and we wanted to avoid overloading the authorities and caches. But if we wanted to add more directory authorities (a majority of 5 is still an uncomfortably small number), bootstrapping clients would have to fetch one more network status for every new authority. By early 2008, each status document listed 2500 relay summaries and came in around 175KB compressed, meaning you needed 875KB of status docs when starting up, and then another megabyte of descriptors after that. And we couldn't add more authorities without making the problem even worse. +Version 3: Consensus and Directory Voting +To solve the problems with the v2 directory protocol, Tor 0.2.0.3-alpha (Jul 2007) introduced a directory voting system, where the authorities themselves would exchange vote documents periodically (currently once per hour), compute a consensus document based on everyone's votes, and all sign the consensus. +Now clients only need to download a single signed consensus document periodically, and check that it is signed by a sufficiently large fraction of the authorities that the client knows about. This gives clients a uniform view of the network, makes it harder still for a small group of corrupt authorities to attack a client, and limits the number of documents they need to download. +The voting algorithm is ad hoc, and is by no means the state of the art in byzantine fault tolerance. Our approach to failures to reach a consensus (which have been mercifully infrequent) is to find what's wrong and fix it manually. +Saving bytes with microdescriptors +Now that the consensus algorithm finally matched what we had in mind when we wrote the first Tor paper, it was time to address the protocol's verbosity. +Out of all the data in a typical 1500-byte server descriptor, a client really only needs to know what ports it supports exiting to, its current RSA1024 onion key, and other information that is fully redundant with its listing in the consensus network status document. +One crucial observation is that signatures on the router descriptors themselves don't actually help clients: if there were enough hostile authorities to successfully convince the clients to use a descriptor that a router didn't actually sign, they could as easily convince the clients to use a descriptor signed with a phony identity key. +This observation let us move (in Tor 0.2.3.1-alpha, May 2011) to a design where the authorities, as part of their voting process, create an abbreviated version of each descriptor they recommend. Currently, these contain only a short summary of the router's exit policy, and the router's current onion key. Clients now download these abbreviated "microdescriptors", which cuts the information downloaded each node by about 75%. Further, because the data here change relatively infrequently, it cuts down the frequency with which clients fetch new information about each router at all. +Tunneling directory connections over Tor +In 0.1.2.5-alpha (Jan 2007), we added support by default for clients to download all directory documents over HTTP over Tor, rather than by contacting directories and caches over unencrypted HTTP. This change helps clients resist fingerprinting. +Because clients aren't using Tor for anonymity on directory connections, they build single-hop circuits. We use HTTP over a one hop Tor circuit, rather than plain old HTTPS, so that clients can use the same TLS connection both for a directory fetch and for other Tor traffic. +2. Security improvements for hidden services +Decentralized hidden-service directory system +A partly-centralized directory infrastructure makes sense for Tor nodes, since every client is supposed to be able to know about every node, but it doesn't make a great deal of sense for hidden services. +To become more censorship-resistant, we started (in Tor 0.2.0.10-alpha, Nov 2007) to instead use the Tor network itself to cache and serve hidden service descriptors. Now, instead of publishing their hidden service descriptors anonymously to a small fixed set of hidden service authorities, hidden services publish to a set of nodes whose identity keys are closest to a hash of the service's identity, the current date, and a replica number. +Improved authorization model for hidden services +We also added improved support for authentication to hidden services. Optionally, to use a hidden service, a client must know a shared key, and use this key to decrypt the part of a hidden service descriptor containing the introduction points. It later must use information in that encrypted part to authenticate to any introduction point it uses, and later to the hidden service itself. One of the main uses of authentication here is to hide presence -- only authenticated users can learn whether the hidden service is online. +3. Faster first-hop circuit establishment with CREATE_FAST +At each stage of extending a circuit to the next hop, the client carries out a Diffie-Hellman (DH) key agreement protocol with that next hop. This step provides confidentiality (and forward secrecy) of the relay cell payload as it is passed on by intermediate hops. Originally Tor also carried out DH with the first hop, even though there was already a DH exchange as part of the TLS handshake. DH is quite computationally expensive for both ends, so Tor 0.1.1.10-alpha (Dec 2005) onwards skipped the DH exchange on the first hop by sending a CREATE_FAST (as opposed to a standard CREATE) cell, which generates key material simply by hashing random numbers sent by the client and server. +4. Cell queueing and scheduling +The original Tor design left the fine-grained handling of incoming cells unspecified: every circuit's cells were to be decrypted and delivered in order, but nodes were free to choose which circuits to handle in any order they pleased. +Early versions of Tor also punted on the question: they handled cells in the order they were received on incoming OR connections, encrypting/decrypting them and handing them off immediately to the next node on the circuit, or to the appropriate exit or entry connection. This approach, however, frequently created huge output buffers where quiet circuits couldn't get a cell in edgewise. +Instead, Tor currently places incoming cells on a per-circuit queue associated with each circuit. Rather than filling all output buffers to capacity, Tor instead fills them up with cells on a near just-in-time basis. +When we first implemented these cell queues in 0.2.0.1-alpha (Jun 2007), we chose which cells to deliver by rotating the circuits in a round-robin approach. In Tor 0.2.2.7-alpha (Jan 2010), we began to instead favor the circuits on each connection that had been quiet recently, so that a circuit with small, infrequent amounts of cells will get better latency than a circuit being used for a bulk transfer. (Specifically, when we are about to put a cell on an outgoing connection, we choose the circuit which has sent the lowest total exponentially-decaying number of cells so far. Currently, each cell has a 30-second half-life.) +In Part 2 we will look at changes to how Tor selects paths and the new anti-censorship measures. diff --git a/blog/blogpost-2.txt b/blog/blogpost-2.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..eb9c416 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/blogpost-2.txt @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +This is part 2 of Nick Mathewson and Steven Murdoch's series on what has changed in Tor's design since the original design paper in 2004. Part one is back over here. +In this installment, we cover changes in how we pick and use nodes in our circuits, and general anticensorship features. +5. Guard nodes +We assume, based on a fairly large body of research, that if an attacker controls or monitors the first hop and last hop of a circuit, then the attacker can de-anonymize the user by correlating timing and volume information. Many of the security improvements to path selection discussed in this post concentrate on reducing the probability that an attacker can be in this position, but no reasonably efficient proposal can eliminate the possibility. +Therefore, each time a user creates a circuit, there is a small chance that the circuit will be compromised. However, most users create a large number of Tor circuits, so with the original path selection algorithm, these small chances would build up into a potentially large chance that at least one of their circuits will be compromised. +To help improve this situation, in Tor 0.1.1.2-alpha, the guard node feature was implemented (initially called "helper nodes", invented by Wright, Adler, Levine, and Shields and proposed for use in Tor by Øverlier and Syverson). In Tor 0.1.1.11-alpha it was enabled by default. Now, the Tor client picks a few Tor nodes as its "guards", and uses one of them as the first hop for all circuits (as long as those nodes remain operational). +This doesn't affect the probability that the first circuit is compromised, but it does mean that if the guard nodes chosen by a user are not attacker-controlled all their future circuits will be safe. On the other hand, users who choose attacker-controlled guards will have about M/N of their circuits compromised, where M is the amount of attacker-controlled network resource and N is the total network resource. Without guard nodes every circuit has a (M/N)2 probability of being compromised. +Essentially, the guard node approach recognises that some circuits are going to be compromised, but it's better to increase your probability of having no compromised circuits at the expense of also increasing the proportion of your circuits that will be compromised if any of them are. This is because compromising a fraction of a user's circuits—sometimes even just one—can be enough to compromise a user's anonymity. For users who have good guard nodes, the situation is much better, and for users with bad guard nodes the situation is not much worse than before. +6. Bridges, censorship resistance, and pluggable transports +While Tor was originally designed as an anonymous communication system, more and more users need to circumvent censorship rather than to just preserve their privacy. The two goals are closely linked – to prevent a censor from blocking access to certain websites, it is necessary to hide where a user is connecting to. Also, many censored Internet users live in repressive regimes which might punish people who access banned websites, so here anonymity is also of critical importance. +However, anonymity is not enough. Censors can't block access to certain websites browsed over Tor, but it was easy for censors to block access to the whole of the Tor network in the original design. This is because there were a handful of directory authorities which users needed to connect to before they could discover the addresses of Tor nodes, and indeed some censors blocked the directory authorities. Even if users could discover the current list of Tor nodes, censors also blocked the IP addresses of all Tor nodes too. +Therefore, the Tor censorship resistance design introduced bridges – special Tor nodes which were not published in the directory, and could be used as entry points to the network (both for downloading the directory and also for building circuits). Users need to find out about these somehow, so the bridge authority collects the IP addresses and gives them out via email, on the web, and via personal contacts, so as to make it difficult for the censor to enumerate them all. +That's not enough to provide censorship resistance though. Preventing the censor from knowing all the IP addresses they need to block to block access to the Tor network will be enough to defeat some censors. But others have the capability to block not only by IP address but also by content (deep packet inspection). Some censors have tried to do this already and Tor has, in response, gradually changed its TLS handshake to better imitate web browsers. +Impersonating web browsers is difficult, and even if Tor perfectly impersonated one, some censors could just block encrypted web browsing (like Iran did, for some time). So it would be better if Tor could impersonate multiple protocols. Even better would be if other people could contribute to this goal, rather than the Tor developers being a bottleneck. This is the motivation of the pluggable transports design which allows Tor to manage an external program which transforms Tor traffic into some hard-to-fingerprint obfuscation. +7. Changes and complexities in our path selection algorithms +The original Tor paper never specified how clients should pick which nodes to use when constructing a circuit through the network. This question has proven unexpectedly complex. +Weighting node selection by bandwidth +The simplest possible approach to path construction, which we used in the earliest versions of Tor, is simply to pick uniformly at random from all advertised nodes that could be used for a given position in the path. But this approach creates terrible bandwidth bottlenecks: a server that would allow 10x as many bytes per second as another would still get the same number of circuits constructed through it. +Therefore, Tor 0.0.8rc1 started to have clients weight their choice of nodes by servers' advertised bandwidths, so that a server with 10x as much bandwidth would get 10x as many circuits, and therefore (probabilistically) 10x as much of the traffic. +(In the original paper, we imagined that we might take Morphmix's approach, and divide nodes into "bandwidth classes", such that clients would choose only from among nodes having at least the same approximate bandwidth as the clients. This may be a good design for peer-to-peer anonymity networks, but it doesn't seem to work for the Tor network: the most useful high-capacity nodes have more capacity than nearly any typical client.) +Later, it proved that weighting by bandwidth was also suboptimal, because of nonuniformity in path selection rules. Consider that if node A is suitable for use at any point in a circuit, but node B is suitable only as the middle node, then node A will be considered for use three times as often as B. If the two nodes have equal bandwidth, node A will be chosen three times as often, leading to it being overloaded in comparison with B. So eventually, in Tor 0.2.2.10-alpha, we moved to a more sophisticated approach, where nodes are chosen proportionally to their bandwidth, as weighted by an algorithm to optimize load-balancing between nodes of different capabilities. +Bandwidth authorities +Of course, once you choose nodes with unequal probability, you open the possibility of an attacker trying to see a disproportionate number of circuits -- not by running an extra-high number of nodes -- but by claiming to have a very large bandwidth. +For a while, we tried to limit the impact of this attack by limiting the maximum bandwidth that a client would believe, so that a single rogue node couldn't just claim to have infinite bandwidth. +In 0.2.1.17-rc, clients switched from using bandwidth values advertised by nodes themselves to using values published in the network status consensus document. A subset of the authorities measure and vote on nodes' observed bandwidth, to prevent misbehaving nodes from claiming (intentionally or accidentally) to have too much capacity. +Avoiding duplicate families in a single circuit +As mentioned above, if the first and last node in a circuit are controlled by an adversary, they can use traffic correlation attacks to notice that the traffic entering the network at the first hop matches traffic leaving the circuit at the last hop, and thereby trace a client's activity with high probability. Research on preventing this attack has not yet come up with any affordable, effective defense suitable for use in a low-latency anonymity network. Therefore, the most promising mitigation strategies seem to involve lowering the attacker's chances of controlling both ends of a circuit. +To this end, clients do not use any two nodes in a circuit whose IP addresses are in the same /16 – when we designed the network, it was marginally more difficult to acquire a large number of disparate addresses than it was to get a large number of concentrated addresses. (Roger and Nick may have been influenced by their undergraduacy at MIT, where their dormitory occupied the entirety of 18.244.0.0/16.) This approach is imperfect, but possibly better than nothing. +To allow honest node operators to run more than one server without inadvertently giving themselves the chance to see more traffic than they should, we also allow nodes to declare themselves to be members of the same "family", such that a client won't use two nodes in the same family in the same circuit. (Clients only believe mutual family declarations, so that an adversary can't capture routes by having his nodes claim unilaterally to be in a family with every node the adversary doesn't control.) +8. Stream isolation +Building a circuit is fairly expensive (in terms of computation and bandwidth) for the network, and the setup takes time, so the Tor client tries to re-use existing circuits if possible, by sending multiple TCP streams down them. Streams which share a circuit are linkable, because the exit node can tell that they have the same circuit ID. If the user sends some information on one stream which gives their identity away, the other streams on the same circuit will be de-anonymized. +To reduce the risk of this occurring, Tor will not re-use a circuit which the client first used more than 10 minutes ago. Users can also use their Tor controller to send the "NEWNYM" signal, preventing any old circuits being used for new streams. As long as users don't mix anonymous and non-anoymous tasks at the same time, this form of circuit re-use is probably a good tradeoff. +However, Manils et al. discovered that some Tor users simultaneously ran BitTorrent over the same Tor client as they did web browsing. Running BitTorrent over Tor is a bad idea because the network can't handle the load, and because BitTorrent packets include the user's real IP address in the payload, so it isn't anonymous. But running BitTorrent while doing anonymous web browsing is an especially bad idea. An exit node can find the user's IP address in the BitTorrent payload then trivially de-anonymize all streams sharing the circuit. +Running BitTorrent over Tor is still strongly discouraged, but this paper did illustrate some potential problems with circuit reuse so proposal 171 was written, and implemented in Tor 0.2.3.3-alpha, to help isolate streams which shouldn't share the same circuit. By default streams which were initiated by different clients, which came from SOCKS connections with different authentication credentials, or which came to a different SOCKS port on the Tor client, are separated. In this way, a user can isolate applications by either setting up multiple SOCKS ports on Tor and using one per application, or by setting up a single SOCKS port but using different username/passwords for each application. Tor can also be configured to isolate streams based on destination address and/or port. diff --git a/blog/blogpost-3.txt b/blog/blogpost-3.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b76a840 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/blogpost-3.txt @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +In this third and final installment of Nick Mathewson and Steven Murdoch's blog series (previously part 1 and part 2) we discuss how Tor has made its traffic harder to fingerprint, as well as usability and security improvements to how users interact with Tor. +9. Link protocol TLS, renegotiation +Tor's original (version 1) TLS handshake was fairly straightforward. The client said that it supported a sensible set of cryptographic algorithms and parameters (ciphersuites, in TLS terminology) and the server selected one. If one side wanted to prove to the other that it was a Tor node, it would send a two-element certificate chain signed by the key published in the Tor directory. +This approach met all the security properties envisaged at the time the 2004 design paper was written, but Tor's increasing use in censorship resistance changed the requirements – Tor's protocol signature also had to look like that of HTTPS web traffic, to prevent censors using deep-packet-inspection to detect and block Tor. +It turned out that Tor's original design looked very different from HTTPS. Firstly, web browsers offer a wide range of ciphersuites which Tor cannot use, such as those using RC4 (due to the narrow security margins) and RSA key exchange (due to lack of forward secrecy). Secondly, in HTTPS web traffic, the client seldom offers a certificate, and the server usually offers a one-element certificate chain, whereas in Tor node-to-node communication both sides offer a two-element certificate chain. +Therefore proposal 124, later superseded by proposal 130, tried to resolve the situation and the resulting version 2 connection protocol was implemented in Tor 0.2.0.20-rc. Here, the client presents a large selection of ciphersuites (including some it doesn't actually support), selected to appear similar to that of a web browser. The server then chooses one which is suitable for use in Tor, but if the server chooses one which is not adequately secure, the client will pull down the connection. +To make the certificate part of the handshake look closer to HTTPS, the client sends no certificate, and the server sends a one-element dummy certificate chain. The certificate offered by the server is designed to not contain distinctive strings which could be used for blocking (version 1 certificates used "Tor" or "TOR" as the organization name). Once the handshake is complete, Tor then restarts the handshake (via TLS renegotiation), but now encrypted under the keys established in the first handshake, and sends the two-element certificate chains as before. +This improves the situation for anti-blocking considerably, although more could still be done. In particular, the fact that renegotiation is occurring is not hidden from an observer because the type of TLS messages (known as records) is not encrypted in TLS, and renegotiation records are of a different type from data records. Therefore version 3 of the connection protocol, described in proposal 176 and implemented in Tor 0.2.3.6-alpha, moves the second stage of the handshake into data records, binding the inner to the outer handshake through sharing some key material. +10. Rise and fall of .exit +In Tor 0.0.9rc5, Tor had the .exit feature added. Here, if the user requested domain.nickname.exit then Tor would make a connection to domain using the Tor node called nickname as the last hop (if possible). This was a convenient feature for exploring how the Internet looked from different locations, but it also raised some security concerns. +In particular, a malicious website could embed an image with a .exit hostname, forcing the Tor client to select an attacker-controlled exit node. Then, if the user also chooses an attacker-controlled entry node the circuit could be de-anonymized. This strategy increases the probability of a successful attack from about (M/N)2 to M/N (where M is the amount of attacker-controlled network resource and N is the total network resource). +Therefore, in Tor 0.2.2.1-alpha, .exit notation was disabled by default. In Tor 0.2.3.17-beta an exception was made, allowing .exit notation when it is specified in the configuration file or by a controller. These sources are assumed to be safe, and by combining the .exit notation with the MapAddress option it is possible for the client to always contact some domain names via a particular exit node. This is useful when a service is running on the same machine as a Tor node, as then the user can choose for circuits to never leave the Tor network. +11. Controller protocol +Tor has always had a minimalist user interface – it can be configured on the command line or a configuration file and sends output to a log file. This is fine for advanced users, but most users will prefer a GUI. Building a GUI into Tor would be difficult, and would force certain choices (e.g. GUI toolkit) to be made which might not suit all users and all platforms. Therefore the approach taken by Tor in 0.0.9pre5 is to build an interface for other programs – the control protocol – to communicate with the Tor daemon, extracting information to display on the GUI and changing the Tor configuration based on user actions. +The control protocol has also proven useful to researchers experimenting with Tor. Initially the functionality exposed in the control protocol was simply that exposed by the configuration file and log files. Providing status information in a specified and machine-readable format made the task of monitoring and controlling Tor easier. Later, functionality was added to the control protocol which should not be exposed to ordinary Tor users but is useful to researchers, such as allowing controllers to arbitrarily control the path selection process (added in 0.1.0.1-rc). +In 0.1.1.1-alpha the protocol was changed to version 1, which used ASCII rather than binary commands to make it easier to write and debug controllers as well as allow advanced users to telnet into the control port and manually type commands. +12. Torbutton +The 2004 design paper stated that Tor explicitly did not make any attempt to scrub application data which might contain identifying information. By adopting the near universal SOCKS protocol, almost any application could send its traffic over Tor, but there was no guarantee it would be safe to do so. This is in contrast to the the predecessors to Tor from the Onion Routing project which required an "application proxy" to be written for each protocol carried by Tor. These proxies greatly increased the cost for supporting each additional application. +Still, there was clear need for a place to perform the protocol scrubbing, and so Tor recommended that Privoxy take the place of an application proxy for HTTP. However, the disadvantages of this approach gradually became clear, in particular Privoxy could not inspect or modify HTTPS traffic and so malicious websites could send their tracking code over HTTPS and avoid scrubbing. +Therefore, more and more of the scrubbing was performed by a Firefox add-on, Torbutton, which also could turn Tor on and off – hence the name. Torbutton had full access to content regardless of whether it was HTTP or HTTPS and could also disable features of Firefox which were bad for privacy. A proxy was still needed though, because Firefox's SOCKS support handled high-latency connections badly, so the lighter-weight Polipo was adopted instead. +13. Tor Browser Bundle +Now to use Tor, most users would need to download and install Tor, Firefox, Torbutton and Polipo, probably along with a GUI controller such as Vidalia. This was inconvenient, especially for customers of Internet cafes who could not install software on the computer they were using. So the Tor Browser Bundle was created which included all this software, pre-configured to be run from a USB drive. +This was far easier to use than the previous way to install Tor, and eventually became the default. It had the added advantage that we could modify the browser to include patches which made Polipo unnecessary and to fix some privacy problems which could not be solved from within a Firefox add-on. It was also safer for users because now Torbutton could not be disabled, meaning that the user had different web browsers for anonymous and non-anonymous browsing and were less likely to muddle up the two.