[tor-talk] Users profiling through personаl banners filtering settings

unknown unknown at pgpru.com
Tue Mar 22 18:26:34 UTC 2011


Too many users dislikes of annoying web elements -- banners, popups, scripts,
strange frames. They use a tools to blocks that elements or change webpage rendering.

Traditional programs for filtering is a local proxys -- privoxy or polipo are examples with 
close relation to Tor and used actively. This programs cannot filtering SSL-content and evil site
can use mix of SSL-ed and non-SSL-ed banners, pop-ups, etc to determine a fact
of using such proxy and trying to guess personal users filtering settings.

The problem may be even worse, with or without using this proxy, even if users block
contents within a browser itself (with Firefox plugins to block banners, and scripts). Not
only sites, but "mans in the middles", adversarial clusters of evil exit nodes
can does parsing traffic and modifying web contents by injecting banners, misconfigured
cookies, incorrect frames.

Injected traffic for various sites, in different times
and seances can be the way of revealing users with personal blocking rules. Data
about blocking profiles of that users may be statistical processed and correlated.

Is it a real threat? Should Tor users stop blocking contents
selectively? Or they can use predefined and shared rules in analogy of Torbutton?


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