Tor Browser 4.5 - Everything you Need to Safely Browse the Internet

The Tor software protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location, and it lets you access sites which are blocked.

The Tor Browser lets you use Tor on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux without needing to install any software. It can run off a USB flash drive, comes with a pre-configured web browser to protect your anonymity, and is self-contained.

The 4.5 series provides significant usability, security, and privacy enhancements over the 4.0 series. Because these changes are significant, we will be delaying the automatic update of 4.0 users to the 4.5 series for one week.

On the usability front, we've improved the application launch experience for both Windows and Linux users. During install, Windows users are now given the choice to add Tor Browser to the Start Menu/Applications view, which should make it easier to find and launch. This choice is on by default, but can be disabled, and only affects the creation of shortcuts - the actual Tor Browser is still self-contained as a portable app folder. On the Linux side, users now start Tor Browser through a new wrapper that enables launching from the File Manager, the Desktop, or the Applications menu. The same wrapper can also be used from the command line.

We've also simplified the Tor menu (the green onion) and the associated configuration windows. The menu now provides information about the current Tor Circuit in use for a page, and also provides an option to request a new Tor Circuit for a site. Tor Browser is also much better at handling Tor Circuits in general: while a site remains in active use, all associated requests will continue to be performed over the same Tor Circuit. This means that sites should no longer suddenly change languages, behaviors, or log you out while you are using them.

On the security front, the most exciting news is the new Security Slider. The Security Slider provides user-friendly vulnerability surface reduction - as the security level is increased, browser features that were shown to have a high historical vulnerability count in the iSec Partners hardening study are progressively disabled. This feature is available from the Tor onion menu's "Privacy and Security Settings" choice.

Our Windows packages are now signed with a hardware signing token graciously donated by DigiCert. This means that Windows users should no longer be prompted about Tor Browser coming from an unknown source. Additionally, our automatic updates are now individually signed with an offline signing key. In both cases, these signatures can be reproducibly removed, so that builders can continue to verify that the packages they produce match the official build binaries.

The 4.5 series also features a rewrite of the obfs2, obfs3, and ScrambleSuit transports in GoLang, as well as the introduction of the new obfs4 transport. The obfs4 transport provides additional DPI and probing resistance features which prevent automated scanning for Tor bridges. As long as they are not discovered via other mechanisms, fresh obfs4 bridge addresses will work in China today. Additionally, barring new attacks, private obfs4 addresses should continue to work indefinitely.

On the privacy front, the 4.5 series improves on our pre-existing first party isolation implementation to prevent third party tracking. First party isolation provides the property that third party advertisements, "like buttons", or "mashup" content that is included on one site will at most only know about your activity on that site, and will not be able to match it to your activity while you are on any other site. In other words, with first party isolation, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ can't track you around the entire web using their infamous like buttons.

Specifically, in the 4.5 release, we now ensure that blob: URIs are scoped to the URL bar domain that created them, and the SharedWorker API has been disabled to prevent cross-site and third party communication. We also now make full use of Tor's circuit isolation to ensure that all requests for any third party content included by a site travel down the same Tor Circuit. This isolation also ensures that requests to the same third party site actually use separate Tor Circuits when the URL bar domain is different. This request isolation is enforced even when long-lived "HTTP Keep-Alive" connections are used.

We have also improved our resolution and locale fingerprinting defenses, and we now disable the device sensor and video statistics APIs.

Our default search provider has also been changed to Disconnect. Disconnect provides private Google search results to Tor users without Captchas or bans.

Here is the complete list of changes in the 4.5 series since 4.0:

Here is the list of changes since the last 4.5 alpha (4.5a5):