Software Update: Tor Browser 11.5

Version 11.5 of Tor Browser has been released. Tor stands for The Onion Router and is a network that can be used to surf the Internet fairly anonymously. All users’ TCP traffic is routed through various Tor routers, after which it is virtually impossible for the recipient to find out who the original sender was. That information is still present within the Tor network, so that answers, of course also via the system of routers, eventually arrive at the right place. Version 11 is based on Firefox ESR 91, where version 10 was still ESR 78. The release notes for this release are as follows:

Automatic censorship detection and circumvention

We began reshaping the experience of connecting to Tor with the release of Tor Browser 10.5 last year, including the retirement of the Tor Launcher and the integration of the connection flow into the browser window. However, circumventing censorship of the Tor Network itself remained a manual and confusing process – requiring users to dive into Tor Network settings and figure out for themselves how to apply a bridge to unblock Tor. What’s more, censorship of Tor isn’t uniform – and while a certain pluggable transport or bridge configuration may work in one country, that doesn’t mean it’ll work elsewhere.

This placed the burden on censored users (who are already under significant pressure) to figure out what option to pick, resulting in a lot of trial, error and frustration in the process. In collaboration with the Anti-Censorship team at the Tor Project, we’ve sought to reduce this burden with the introduction of Connection Assist: a new feature that when required will offer to automatically apply the bridge configuration we think will work best in your location for you.

Connection Assist works by looking up and downloading an up-to-date list of country-specific options to try using your location (with your consent). It manages to do so without needing to connect to the Tor Network first by utilizing moat – the same domain-fronting tool that Tor Browser uses to request a bridge from torproject.org.

While Connection Assist has reached the milestone of its first stable release, this is only version 1.0, and your feedback will be invaluable to help us improve its user experience in future releases. Users from countries where the Tor Network may be blocked (such as Belarus, China, Russia and Turkmenistan) can test the most recent iteration of this feature by volunteering as an alpha testerand reporting your findings on the Tor forum.

Redesigned Tor Network settings

We hope that the majority of our users living under extreme censorship will be able to connect to Tor at the press of a button, thanks to Connection Assist. However we know there will always be exceptions to that, and there are many users who prefer to configure their connection manually as well.

That’s why we’ve invested time redesigning Tor Network settings too – featuring:

• A brand new name: Tor Network settings is now called Connection settings. This change is intended to clarify exactly what settings you can find within this tab.
• Connection statuses: Your last known connection status can now be found at the top of the tab, including the option to test your Internet connection without Tor, using moat, to help you untangle the source of your connection woes.
• Streamlined bridge options: Gone is the long list of fields and options. Each method to add a new bridge has been timed away into individual dialog menus, which will help support further improvements to come.
• Connection Assist: When Tor Browser’s connection to the Tor Network isn’t reachable due to suspected censorship, an additional option to select a bridge automatically becomes available.
• Brand-new bridge cards: Bridges used to be almost invisible, even when configured. Now, your saved bridges appear in a handy stack of bridge cards – including new options for sharing bridges too.

This is the anatomy of a bridge card when expanded. In addition to copying and sharing the bridge line, each bridge also comes with a unique QR code that will be readable by Tor Browser for Android (and hopefully other Tor-powered apps too) in a future release – helping facilitate the transfer of a working bridge from desktop to mobile.

When you have multiple bridges configured the cards will collapse into a stack – each of which can be expanded again with a click. And when connected, Tor Browser will let you know which bridge it’s currently using with the purple “✔ Connected” pill. To help differentiate between your bridges without needing to compare long, unfriendly bridge lines, we’ve introduced bridge-moji: a short, four emoji visualization you can use to identify the right bridge at a glance.

Lastly, help links within Connection settings now work offline. To recap – there are two types of help links in Tor Browser’s settings: those that point to support.mozilla.organd those that point to tb-manual.torproject.org (i.e. the Tor Browser Manual). However, since web-based links aren’t very useful when you’re troubleshooting connection issues with Tor Browser, the manual is now bundled in Tor Browser 11.5 and is available offline. In addition to the help links within Tor Browser’s settings, the manual can be accessed via the Application Menu > Help > Tor Browser Manual, and by entering “about:manual” into your browser’s address bar too.

HTTPS-Only Mode, by default

HTTPS-Everywhere is one of two extensions that previously came bundled in Tor Browser, and has led a long and distinguished career protecting our users by automatically upgrading their connections to HTTPS wherever possible. Now, HTTPS is actually everywhere, and all major web browsers include native support to automatically upgrade to HTTPS. Firefox – the underlying browser on which Tor Browser is based – calls this feature HTTPS Only Mode.

Starting in Tor Browser 11.5, HTTPS-Only Mode is enabled by default for desktop, and HTTPS-Everywhere will no longer be bundled with Tor Browser.

Why now? Research by Mozilla indicates that the fraction of insecure pages visited by the average users is very low – limiting the disruption caused to the user experience. Additionally, this change will help protect our users from SSL stripping attacks by malicious exit relayand strongly reduces the incentive to spin up exit relays for Man-in-the-Middle attacks in the first place.

You may or may not know that HTTPS-Everywhere also served a second purpose in Tor Browser, and was partly responsible for making SecureDrop’s human-readable onion names work. Well, SecureDrop users can rest assured that we’ve patched Tor Browser to ensure that human-readable onion names still work in HTTPS-Everywhere’s absence.

Note: Unlike desktop, Tor Browser for Android will continue to use HTTPS-Everywhere in the short term. Please see our separate update about Android below.

Improved font support

One of Tor Browser’s many fingerprinting defenses includes protection against font enumeration – whereby an adversary can fingerprint you using the fonts installed on your system. To counter this, Tor Browser ships with a standardized bundle of fonts to use instead of those installed on your system. However some writing scripts did not render correctly, while others had no font available in Tor Browser at all.

To solve this issue and expand the number of writing systems supported by Tor Browser, we’ve bundled many more fonts from the Note family in this release. Naturally, we have to find a balance between the number of fonts Tor Browser supports without increasing the size of the installer too much, which is something we’re very conscious of. So if you spot a language whose characters don’t render correctly in Tor Browser, please let us know!

Tor Browser for Android

You have no doubt noticed that the features announced above are all for desktop. So, we wanted to share a little update about where we’re at with Android:

We know that Tor Browser for Android is quite behind desktop in terms of feature parity. The Tor Project has hit a few bumps in the road over the last couple of years that have delayed our releases, and led us to reassess our roadmap for Android. Since the beginning of the year our priorities for Android have been three-fold:

Since then, Android has averaged one stable update per month, crash reports are down significantly thanks to the patch issued in phoenix#40212and downloads are working again due to the fixes in phoenix#40192 and android-components#40075. However we still have work to do to catch up with Fenix, and upgrading Tor Browser to Fenix ​​v102 will be our priority for the next few months.

We’ve also taken steps to expand the team’s capacity in order to dedicate more resources to Android, keep the application stable, and help us bring some of these features described above to Android in the future too.