[tor-reports] October 2015 Report for the Tor Browser Team

[Mike Perry]

In October, the Tor Browser team focused on preparing three releases
that were released in early November. For the first time since we can
remember, the whole month of October passed without actually requiring
an emergency release, and no Firefox releases were scheduled during this
month either!

The releases that we prepared for the beginning of November feature a
fix to prevent Tor Browser from transmitting referers for .onion
domains[1], remove some old Torbutton code and convert it to
patches[2,3], and a few fingerprinting fixes[4,5]. We will describe
these releases in more detail in the November report, to maintain our
tradition of focusing on reporting on improvements when they are
actually shipped.

We also spent a lot of effort working on ASAN-based hardening for Tor
Browser[6], and we prepared a signing machine and created Apple
developer accounts in preparation for finally solving the Mac OS
Gatekeeper installation issue[7].

The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in October can be
seen using the TorBrowserTeam201510 tag on our bug tracker[8].


In November, we will be working on finally solving the Gatekeeper issue,
as mentioned. We are hopeful that this will be easy once we have the
certificate, however it is possible that changes in the Mac OS signing
mechanisms will still necessitate changes to our package layout[9].

Additionally, we will be working to review the new Mozilla APIs for
addons[10], so that we may suggest and plan for the transition to the
multiprocess architecture and associated sandboxing that will arrive for
us in Firefox 45-ESR in March.

The full list of tickets the Tor Browser team plans to work on in
November can be seen with the TorBrowserTeam201511 tag on our bug
tracker[10].


1. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9623
2. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/16620
3. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17351
4. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17207
5. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17220
6. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/10599
7. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6540
8. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~TorBrowserTeam201510
9. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13252
10. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~TorBrowserTeam201511

-- 
Mike Perry
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