[community] Cygwin dirmngr and Tor Browser for Windows

[Dave Rolek]

Your inquiry is probably more appropriate for the tor-talk mailing list
or IRC (channel #tor), but I'll answer it instead of directing you
there. (Just keep that in mind for the future!) :)

On 2018-06-30 04:22, john doe wrote:
> I got as far as finding a way to get it working by starting "Tor
> Browser\Browser\TorBrowser\Tor\tor.exe" then  dirmngr is working
> through Tor.
> Strangely, if I click "Tor Browser\Start Tor Browser" it does not
> work; dirmngr failed at the following step:
> 
> $ dirmngr --homedir ~/try --use-tor -vvv --debug-all --server
> 
> [snip]
> 
> It looks like dirmngr can't connect to tor when tor is started by
> doing "Tor Browser\Browser\firefox.exe".
> 
> Given the above I have some questions:
> 1)  Any idea why dirmngr can't connect to Tor when started the usual way?
> 2)  What are the difference between starting "tor.exe" and "firefox.exe"?

I haven't directly confirmed what you asked, but my guess is the way
that dirmngr has implemented the --use-tor option.

In my experience, dirmngr's tor integration still* isn't very great. I
would still be worried about various leaks with it. (I haven't looked
into it in depth.)

* I can't actually speak to recent developments; this is just my
impression from the past.

Anyway, to the technical part...

A glance through the manual didn't show any option to configure the tor
integration beyond --use-tor, so dirmngr probably hardcodes port 9050 as
the Socks proxy that it uses.

tor when run (without specific config) will default to SocksPort 9050.
That's probably what happens when you run tor.exe directly.

However, Tor Browser launches tor with SocksPort 9150. So this
difference probably explains why dirmngr won't work over tor in that
case.

(It is possible to change Tor Browser's config to use port 9050 instead,
but I personally wouldn't recommend that.)

I hope that helps!

Best,
Dave