Tor controller GUI (tor-control-panel)

Development
141

A little difficult to explain.

I had the misfortune to update whonix-gateway-18 by accident. I cannot afford it until TCP is merged (this is not a request).

The result is rather unexpected.

After purging ACW (because of privleap conflict), building and installing the package from kicksecure, sdwdate-gui crash on a strict_config_parser module not found.

I compared kicksecure and arraybolt3 packages. arraybolt3 is 9 commits behind kicksecure, but strict_config_parser is not there. After forking, building and installing arraybolt3 version, it works like a charm.

Conclusion: ???

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142

Kicksecure, Whonix branch should in almost all cases be considered the development head.

arraybolt3 didnā€™t sign up to keep any branches up-to-date in personal branches.

I highly recommend using dummy-dependency.

sudo dummy-dependency --yes --purge anon-connection-wizard

That way you can purge packages without meta package removal issues.

143

strict_config_parser is part of helper-scripts in Kicksecureā€™s trixie-developers repository. Maybe your helper-scripts is older?

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144

Yes, but why were they not updated ? I had to use apt install -ā€“reinstall to get the ante last version (3:48.2-1). The latest version is 3:48.4-1. Probably not merged yet.

145

48.2-1 has it strict_config_parser see
helper-scripts/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/strict_config_parser at 48.2-1 Ā· Kicksecure/helper-scripts Ā· GitHub

I donā€™t think thereā€™s diff relevant to strict_config_parser. To check:

git diff 48.2-1 48.4-1

Potentially Broken APT?

systemcheck - Security Check Application would point that out. Does it show any errors?

systemcheck

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146

Yes, it works now with sdwdate-gui installed by apt . Good news.

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147

A small batch of commits.

https://github.com/troubadoour/tor-control-panel/commit/280992637d6411a7c8382d44f4ed3bdc2deea3a8

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148

add exception to signal NEWNYM

Edit.

While processing the newnym signal, the button is grayed, and is enabled back after itā€™s completed. You can check that when custom bridges are used, it takes more time.

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149

This one might be a little radical.

While trying a solution to avoid tor_config_sane, I discovered that it depends on helper-scripts, which is called in anon-gw-anonymizer-config/tor-config-sane.

That looks like tor a tortuous way to write a pseudo torrc when /usr/local/etc/torrc.d/40_tor_control_panel.conf is missing.

The way around: in both TCP and ACW, we write a proper torrc template (including DisableNetwork 0) at the very start of of the applications. This is five lines of code. Thus it is transparent to the user and we can remove the redundant if torrc_path_exists in the whole package (firstly, i was astonished by their number).

I cannot see any security issue with this solution, but you are better judges than me.

Trying to rationalize code. tor-config_sane depends on helper-scripts

150

tor-config-sane has a lot more functionality than writing 1 configuration file. These are stable bash scripts which arenā€™t easily rewritten in python without introducing new bugs.

repair-torrc makes sure /etc/tor/torrc file and /etc/torrc.d /usr/local/etc/torrc.d exists, creates missing configuration files and fixes existing configuration files if these lack %include lines. Itā€™s also fixing file permissions and file ownership.

If you want to make TCP work with non-Whonix, whatā€™s the plan for adding an %include line to /etc/tor/torrc?

These scripts shouldnā€™t be trashed for the sake of rewriting them in python.

Instead, if it sounds useful, and if your goal is non-Whonix supportā€¦

  • Could you move these scripts to TCP;
  • Use different file paths (not including helper-scripts);
  • Rename them if needed;
  • Make them compatible with non-Whonix;
  • Then call these scripts from python?

If TCP gained non-Whonix support, that would be cool, because then it would gain Kicksecure support.

If bash sounds too complicated, we would probably be able to do this.

TCP at the moment has a lot of GUI dependencies. So it would not be ideal for a CLI / server version. But I think we would be able to deal with this on the packaging level. The single 1 source code repository TCP could generate 2 packages. 1 packages which shipping all files (including scripts such as tor-config-sane and repair-torrc) (tor-control-panel-files) and 1 package (tor-control-panel) shipping no files but Depends: tor-control-panel-files and all GUI dependencies.

Btw Whonix doesnā€™t use DisableNetwork 1 anymore by default. (Connect to public Tor network by default / avoid Anon Connection Wizard (ACW) popup at first boot)

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