On 2015-03-16 14:24, Stephen R Guglielmo wrote:
On Mon, 16 Mar 2015 11:48:34 +0100 "Lars Edman @ LinuxSuSE"lars.edman@bredband.net wrote:
I found they today absolutely discouraged from the use of such a "system installation" when using tor as a client. When it came to using tor as a node/relay or running a server they referred the question to you.
Do you consider this kind of installation insecure?
This is generally considered insecure. There are a few things that the TBB does that a default Firefox configuration routed through a SOCKS proxy (Tor) doesn't do.
For example, the TBB has NoScript (blocks JavaScript), HTTPSEverywhere (forces HTTPS on sites that support it), and the TBB also deletes cookies, history, and other data upon closing. And I'm sure there are a few other things that they wrap into the bundle (DNS leaks too); I don't follow TBB development closely enough to know the specific details.
These are all security issues. Javascript can be used to uniquely identify a machine and get your real IP address. If you use HTTP, in theory, a Tor exit relay can sniff your login credentials. Files on disk, such as history, cached website files, cookies, can all be used to identify the sites you visit if your computer were to be inspected.
Note, however, that while these are all potential security issues, they're not all issues that apply to every situation. If your safety or livelihood depend on privacy or anonymity, obviously you need to be paranoid, and TBB is definitely the wise choice.
However, if you just use Tor to surf geographically restricted websites, or to offer you moderate privacy from a snoopy ISP (hotel or public wifi hotspot access) and don't mind the stray request leaking, the proxy level application may well be sufficient, especially since you can configure applications to use system-wide proxy settings, giving you a one-click on-and-off switch.
I suspect both uses are common use cases, and just using SOCKS proxies may well be good enough for some users, but if you value safety, security, privacy and anonymity, TBB is a much stronger solution.