Tor is wildly popular among activists who seek to anonymize their online activities. The browser helps them conceal their online footprints but it is fairly inconvenient to use Tor. To make things easier for Tor users, a new set of tools collectively called ‘Tortilla’ have been devised.
Tor, which is a brief form of The Onion Router, is a very widely-used internet traffic anonymizing network. As useful as Tor is, using it can be quite a hassle at times. To change this, Jason Geffner, who is a security researcher at Black Hat 2013 and is the inventor of Tortilla, has now come up with a set of tools called ‘Tortilla.’
When asked what prompted him to develop Tortilla, Geffner stated, “People couldn’t easily anonymize their Internet traffic. This opens a whole realm of opportunities for them.”
One of the key problems that Tortilla resolves is the ‘Firefox issue.’ The Firefox issue is essentially that the browser contains numerous vulnerabilities – and since Tor runs on Firefox only, this exposes the anonymizing network to security vulnerabilities in turn.
Tortilla solves this problem by allowing the use of Tor with virtual machines. While Tortilla is especially helpful for security researchers who rely on Tor, the improvements will also be immensely beneficial for privacy-conscious users who have to rely on Tor to avoid leaving any online traces. Especially with the increased cognizance of the importance of privacy rights among the users, Tortilla is a good step forth in the direction of better online privacy rights.
Courtesy: CNET
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