Tor highlights from HOPE

General Tor and Anonymity Talk
1

Latest Tor highlights from HOPE:

Tor Browser for Android will be released soon. It should have feature parity with the desktop version.

Onion Browser for the iDRM platform is under development but can never support all the same features as other platforms because of restrictions.

Orbot as a library for other mobile apps to take advantage of it.

Netflow padding in progress.

Onion Services v2 will be completely deprecated within the next two years.

Some parts of Tor being ported over to Rust.

Tor Browser sandboxing will come back but will likely be a collaborative effort between them and Mozilla this time.

3 Likes
2

Will there be packages for arm*, too?

1 Like
3

They didn’t mention that but I think its worth bringing it up and putting it on their radar.

https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2018-August/013379.html

4

https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tbb-dev/2018-August/000899.html

@Algernon would you be up for running debug/attempt builds of TBB for ARM to help them pinpoint how much work is left?

5

I actually already gave it a try, however, a problem (for me) is this Add option to download everything needed for the build (#23401) · Issues · Legacy / Trac · GitLab. There is no easy workaround. Either it gets fixed or I need to do some changes for my general build setup and I don’t know if and how soon this would happen.
While I’d love to see an arm64 package in general, there is also the question how much sense it would make for Whonix. One of the selling points is hiding hardware serials and I don’t think the arm sbc world is really ready for virtualization. Also running it bare metal on the rpi is probably going to be slow. I’m maybe going to test it with firefox and see how it behaves.

6

Its good you tried it so at this point letting them know its a blocker on the ML would be a good thing. Sometimes bugs are forgotten with time compared to more urgent matters.

EDIT:
Got reply. Seems the TBB build infrastructure is not tooled for arm and its quite a big effort, never mind.

I’m reading success stories with KVM on RPi3 so there is always the option to run a virtualized setup on an x86 alternative. Also RPi3 performance is literally 10x better than the first RPi generation and hopefully it keeps improving so that its a daily driver for basic desktop tasks.