[tor-talk] How secure is check.torproject.org?

Roger Dingledine arma at mit.edu
Sun Nov 17 22:25:49 UTC 2013


On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 10:03:34PM +0100, Sebastian G. <bastik.tor> wrote:
> Without answering any of your questions let me tell you that with the
> upcoming release of TBB 3.X, which should be in beta right now, the
> browser will no longer visit check.torproject.org

Almost true. check.tp.o will no longer be the homepage (which also gives
a usability advantage on startup -- a local homepage will mean you're
not waiting for some outside page to load, and you're not doing it while
your Tor is bootstrapping its directory information, making things seem
even slower than they will be).

But TBB in the background will still fetch
https://check.torproject.org/RecommendedTBBVersions
to decide if you need to upgrade without telling anybody your version.

But that happens asynchronously, in the background, and doesn't need to
run javascript (at least, not externally fetched javascript).

So yes, the answer is that pretty soon the check website won't be the
bottleneck that it currently is.

--Roger



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