[community] Cygwin dirmngr and Tor Browser for Windows

[john doe]

Hi Dave, inline posting.

On 6/30/2018 6:09 PM, Dave Rolek wrote:
> Your inquiry is probably more appropriate for the tor-talk mailing list
> or IRC (channel #tor), but I'll answer it instead of directing you
> there. (Just keep that in mind for the future!) :)
> 

Duly noted; should I move to tor-talk?! :)

> On 2018-06-30 04:22, john doe wrote:
>> I got as far as finding a way to get it working by starting "Tor
>> Browser\Browser\TorBrowser\Tor\tor.exe" then  dirmngr is working
>> through Tor.
>> Strangely, if I click "Tor Browser\Start Tor Browser" it does not
>> work; dirmngr failed at the following step:
>>
>> $ dirmngr --homedir ~/try --use-tor -vvv --debug-all --server
>>
>> [snip]
>>
>> It looks like dirmngr can't connect to tor when tor is started by
>> doing "Tor Browser\Browser\firefox.exe".
>>
>> Given the above I have some questions:
>> 1)  Any idea why dirmngr can't connect to Tor when started the usual way?
>> 2)  What are the difference between starting "tor.exe" and "firefox.exe"?
> 
> I haven't directly confirmed what you asked, but my guess is the way
> that dirmngr has implemented the --use-tor option.
> 
> In my experience, dirmngr's tor integration still* isn't very great. I
> would still be worried about various leaks with it. (I haven't looked
> into it in depth.)
> 
> * I can't actually speak to recent developments; this is just my
> impression from the past.
> 

Ok -- How would you interact with a key server (gpg 2.1 requires dirmngr 
to do that)?

> Anyway, to the technical part...
> 
> A glance through the manual didn't show any option to configure the tor
> integration beyond --use-tor, so dirmngr probably hardcodes port 9050 as
> the Socks proxy that it uses.
> 
> tor when run (without specific config) will default to SocksPort 9050.
> That's probably what happens when you run tor.exe directly.
> 
> However, Tor Browser launches tor with SocksPort 9150. So this
> difference probably explains why dirmngr won't work over tor in that
> case.
> 

According to someone onthe the gnupg-user mailing list:

https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-users/2018-June/060736.html

dirmngr should do that.

> (It is possible to change Tor Browser's config to use port 9050 instead,
> but I personally wouldn't recommend that.)
> 

yeah, I don't want to change anything because gpg2/dirmngr is not the 
primary usage of Tor Browser!

> I hope that helps!
> 

Your explanations help very much, thanks.
Can I connect to tor through command line to get a better pickture of 
what's going on or how can I get the logs?

-- 
John Doe