[tor-reports] January 2017 Report for the Tor Browser Team

[Georg Koppen]

Hi!

In January we made three releases, Tor Browser 6.5[1], 7.0a1[2], and
7.0a1-hardened[3].

Tor Browser 6.5 is the first stable realease in the 6.5 series and
contains a lot of our work done over the last months. Apart from
updating core components (like Firefox to 45.7.0esr and tor to 0.2.9.9)
we improved Tor Browser both in the security,
linkability/fingerprinting, and usability area. For a detailed
description of the major changes and an overview of all the differences
to the 6.0 series see our blog post accouncing the 6.5 release[1].

Besides updating Firefox to 45.7.0esr the alpha and hardened releases
contain tor 0.3.0.2-alpha and a number of smaller bug fixes. Linux users
are for the first time able to use the snowflake pluggable transport[4].
The alpha series comes with updated sandbox versions
(sandboxed-tor-browser 0.0.3 and improved seatbelt profiles for macOS)
fixing regressions and issues found after the last alpha release.

We continued rebasing our patches for Firefox ESR 52[5] and have a
branch ready for review. We further investigated upcoming build issues
with a Tor Browser based on ESR 52[6][7], and continued our work on
making our build system more robust and faster[8]. Furthermore, we
worked on fixing regressions found with the Tor Browser 6.5 release. All
issues on our radar in that regard can be found with the
tbb-6.5-regression tag in our bug tracker[9].

The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in January is
accessible using the TorBrowserTeam201701 tag in our bug tracker[10].

For February no releases are planned and we'll concentrate on getting
our build and ESR52 transition issues resolved. We plan to start fixing
and adapting features that are new in the upcoming ESR series and not
compatible with our requirements. Furthermore, addressing the major
regressions that came with Tor Browser 6.5 and starting with our
Panopticlick-like instance for fingerprinting testing[11] is on our
agenda as well.

All tickets on our radar for this month can be seen with the
TorBrowserTeam201702 tag in our bug tracker[12].

Georg

[1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-65-released
[2] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-70a1-released
[3] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-70a1-hardened-released
[4] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/20735
[5] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/20680
[6] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21240
[7] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21328
[8] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17379
[9]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~tbb-6.5-regression
[10]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~TorBrowserTeam201701
[11] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6119
[12]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~TorBrowserTeam201702

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