[tor-dev] Feasibility of using a Tor Browser plugin as a PT component?

[Zack Weinberg]

On 02/22/2014 08:54 PM, Ximin Luo wrote:
> On 22/02/14 04:08, David Fifield wrote:
>> 2. Run a second browser, apart from Tor Browser, that receives
>> commands from a client PT program and makes the HTTPS requests it
>> is commanded to.
> 
> You might want to look at MozRepl. More summary here:
> 
> https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-November/005833.html
>
>  I told gsathya about this and he had a brief look during NYC and
> thought it was potentially feasible, but AFAIK we haven't done a
> complete analysis of this yet.

I have been working on this for a related project (with slightly
different goals -- I need to drive TBB itself from automation).
Unfortunately, MozRepl does *not* AFAICT expose any machine-friendly
interface, just the telnet interface geared for humans.  So I forked it
and have been hacking up a strictly machine-oriented interface, here:
https://github.com/zackw/firefox-puppeteer  It's not even close to done,
and the current design sketch (see the README) is extremely focused on
my particular needs (e.g. use of ZeroMQ as wire protocol), but I'd be
delighted to make it useful for more people than just me (especially if
that comes with coding assistance ;-)

On the larger topic, looping network traffic back through the same
process that originated it strikes me as asking for deadlocks, so I'd be
inclined to go with (2) over (3) if it were me coding it.  That said, in
Firefox, extensions do have the ability to override the normal proxy
settings, although it's a bit awkward (there doesn't appear to be a way
to say "do _this HTTP request_ with no proxy", only "ignore what the
prefs say if this function says so, for any URL"; but I could have
missed something).

zw

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