[tor-reports] August 2016 Report for the Tor Browser Team

[Georg Koppen]

Hi,

In August the Tor Browser team made four releases: Tor Browser 6.0.3[1],
6.0.4[2], 6.5a2[3] and 6.5a2-hardened[4].

Tor Browser 6.0.3 contained an update of Firefox to 45.3.0esr which
fixed among others serious security and privacy related issues reported
by users in our bug tracker[5][6]. The follow-up release, 6.0.4, fixed
an annoying usability bug: users got told they should update their
Firefox[7]. The reason for this was an extension that got installed by
Mozilla into Tor Browser. We overlooked this mechanism while doing our
preparation for switching to ESR45. Thanks to Mozilla for helping us
to resolve this issue on their side quickly.

Highlights in our alpha releases (6.5a2 and 6.5a2-hardened) were
selfrando's appearance in the hardened series[8] and progress in our
Torbutton patch conversion[9] and fingerprinting defenses[10].

Apart from the above mentioned releases we mainly worked on SponsorU
related tickets and helped Mozilla upstreaming our patches. The full
list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in August is accessible
using the TorBrowserTeam201608 tag in our bug tracker[11].

For September we plan to release Tor Browser 6.0.5, 6.5a3 and
6.5a3-hardened which will be based on Firefox 45.4.0esr and we aim at
focusing on the remaining SponsorU tasks[12].The full list of tickets on
our radar for this month can be seen with the TorBrowserTeam201609 tag
in our bug tracker[13].

Georg

[1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-603-released
[2] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-604-released
[3] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-65a2-released
[4] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-65a2-hardened-released
[5] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19515
[6] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18513
[7] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19890
[8] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17406
[9] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19273
[10] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/8725
[11]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~TorBrowserTeam201608
[12]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~TorBrowserTeam201609&sponsor=SponsorU&order=priority
[13]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~TorBrowserTeam201609


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