#28678: Tor on windows needs to be installed and operated insecurely in user home directory --------------------+------------------------------ Reporter: db | Owner: (none) Type: defect | Status: new Priority: Medium | Component: Applications Version: | Severity: Major Keywords: | Actual Points: Parent ID: | Points: Reviewer: | Sponsor: --------------------+------------------------------ On Windows platforms, it appears that Tor needs to be installed in a user's home directory. Executable files that need network access should be installed in %PROGRAMFILES%. Why? Files in a user directory are more likely to be infected, malware, etc. On secure unix systems, for example, it is not uncommon for there to be no allowed executables in $HOME.
Can you install into %PROGRAMFILES%? You can install tor there, yes, but it does not function. The browser, firefox.exe, complains with: "Tor Browser does not have permission to access the profile. Please adjust your file system permissions and try again." In https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17929, the advice given is to re-install Tor and the problem will go away. I'm sorry but every time I remove and re-install Tor I get the above error message. If I start it like this: "C:\Program Files\Tor Browser\Browser\firefox.exe" /profile %APPDATA%/tor/profile If I didn't know better, the contents of "Tor Browser\Browser\TorBrowser\Data\Browser\profile.default" need to be in %APPDATA%/tor/profile. But that's not enough. For some reason firefox wants to create this file: %PROGRAMFILES%\Tor Browser\Browser\TorBrowser\Tor\torrcc-defaults Curiously, the "Process Monitor" (sysinternals) reports a number of "Buffer Overflow" results for calls to "QueryAllInformationFile" from firefox.exe. Anyway... The above "torcc-defaults" file is not created by the installer, it needs to be created manually as follows: 1) create "torcc"file in %APPDATA%\tor 2) copy content to it from https://github.com/jessfraz/dockerfiles/blob/master/tor- proxy/torrc.default 3) copy "torcc" file to "%PROGRAMFILES%\Tor Browser\Browser\TorBrowser\Tor" 4) rename "torcc" to "torcc-defaults" -- Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/28678> Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/> The Tor Project: anonymity online
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