So last night I was updating whonix-gw and whonix-ws from the Qubes VM Manager like I always do. The gw update went fine, and the ws update went fine except I noticed some strange output.
I was in a hurry so I already closed the terminal and no longer have the exact output. It was a bad mistake, sorry. It was late and I hadn’t slept in nearly 24 hours. I just closed it and went to bed. I do still have the dpkg logs and such however.
It said something about getting something.asc… CURL: HTTP error 400 or above… something could not be authenticated… something something. I don’t remember the exact output or the exact URL.
I believe it might have been output from the tb-updater script running within dpkg, because it began with “Checking connectivity…”, “CURL: this”, “CURL: that”
It resembled the sequence of the tb-updater GUI according to the Whonix wiki page. So that’s why I think the tb-update script was running under dpkg while updating whonix-ws. But I don’t think it makes sense for tb-updater to be run in whonix-ws in the first place because /home/user/.tb is local to anon-whonix?
Anyway, some signature file couldn’t be downloaded and thus some file could not be authenticated.
Was it tb-updater telling me that the tor-browser-en_US-*.tar.xz.asc signature file couldn’t be downloaded? Or was it dpkg/apt-get telling me that the signature file for the tb-updater couldn’t be downloaded and thus the tb-updater package could not be authenticated?
Am I hosed? In either case I would hope that dpkg or tb-update would fail safely and not install the package or extract the tarball, but you can never be too sure. I’m hoping someone can reassure me and/or explain what happened and/or what to do to fix the issue (if anything - I never (intentionally) use tb-updater, I use the internal updater)
whonix-gw (Note: the clock seems to be way behind)
user@host:~$ date
Tue Nov 28 06:24:42 UTC 2017
user@host:~$ ls -l /usr/bin/update-torbrowser
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 69106 Oct 20 14:05 /usr/bin/update-torbrowser
user@host:~$ ls -la /usr/lib/tb-updater/
total 28
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 28 04:38 .
drwxr-xr-x 121 root root 20480 Nov 28 04:39 …
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 792 Oct 20 14:05 first-boot-home-population
user@host:~$ sudo apt-cache show tb-updater
Package: tb-updater
Version: 3:3.7.19-1
Architecture: all
Maintainer: Patrick Schleizer adrelanos@riseup.net
Installed-Size: 280
Depends: msgcollector, curl, psmisc, gpg-bash-lib, pv, bsdtar, sudo, init-system-helpers (>= 1.18~)
Recommends: tb-starter, anon-icon-pack, anon-shared-helper-scripts, curl-scripts
Suggests: tb-default-browser, open-link-confirmation
Homepage: GitHub - Kicksecure/tb-updater: Tor Browser Downloader - Automates download and verification of Tor Browser from The Tor Project's website. This package is produced independently of, and carries no guarantee from, The Tor Project.
Priority: optional
Section: misc
Filename: pool/main/t/tb-updater/tb-updater_3.7.19-1_all.deb
Size: 154764
SHA256: 6ead1a54ee587b05e52350dab5073b3a38a18b319cb3c07f86e29a2ea07f9a92
SHA1: fed81ae12d9cc0381cafaa6e7410a74876f13ed3
MD5sum: ca6ffefeb0ea78175345916122f58ebb
dpkg.log
…
2017-11-28 04:41:49 configure tb-updater:all 3:3.7.19-1
2017-11-28 04:41:49 status unpacked tb-updater:all 3:3.7.19-1
2017-11-28 04:41:49 status half-configured tb-updater:all 3:3.7.19-1
2017-11-28 04:42:01 status installed tb-updater:all 3:3.7.19-1
…
anon-whonix (this is with whonix-ws NOT restarted since the update last night - changes in whonix-ws are NOT reflected)
user@host:~$ date
Tue Nov 28 13:54:02 UTC 2017
user@host:~$ ls -la .tb
total 12
drwxrwxr-x 3 user user 4096 Mar 3 2017 .
drwxr-xr-x 24 user user 4096 Nov 28 13:18 …
drwxrwxr-x 3 user user 4096 Nov 27 15:50 tor-browser
user@host:~$ ls -la .tb/tor-browser/
total 16
drwxrwxr-x 3 user user 4096 Nov 27 15:50 .
drwxrwxr-x 3 user user 4096 Mar 3 2017 …
drwxr-xr-x 14 user user 4096 Nov 26 15:58 Browser
-rwx------ 1 user user 1759 Nov 27 15:50 start-tor-browser.desktop
user@host:~$ ls -la .tb/tor-browser/Browser/start-tor-browser
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user user 12692 Nov 16 12:34 .tb/tor-browser/Browser/start-tor-browser