stealth VS thegreatsuspender

Two years ago I decided to built my own web browser, with the underlying idea to use the internet more efficiently (and to force cache everything).

Took a while to find the architecture, but it's still an unfinished ambitious project. You can probably spend forever working on HTML and CSS fixes alone...

[1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth

From a technological point of view, TOR still has a couple of flaws which make it vulnerable to the metadata logging systems of ISPs:

- it needs a trailing non-zero buffer, randomized by the size of the payload, so that stream sizes and durations don't match

- it needs a request scattering feature, so that the requests for a specific website don't get proxied through the same nodes/paths

- it needs a failsafe browser engine, which doesn't give a flying damn about WebRTC and decides to actively drop features.

- it needs to stop monkey-patching out ("stubbing") the APIs that are compromising user privacy, and start removing those features.

I myself started a WebKit fork a while ago but eventually had to give up due to the sheer amount of work required to maintain such an engine project. I called it RetroKit [1], and I documented what kind of features in WebKit were already usable for tracking and had to be removed.

I'm sorry to be blunt here, but all that user privacy valueing electron bullshit that uses embedded chrome in the background doesn't cut it anymore. And neither does Firefox that literally goes rogue in an endless loop of requests when you block their tracking domains. The config settings in Firefox don't change shit anymore, and it will keep requesting the tracking domains. It does it also in Librefox and all the *wolf profile variants, just use a local eBPF firewall to verify. I added my non-complete opensnitch ruleset to my dotfiles for others to try out. [3]

If I would rewrite a browser engine today, I'd probably go for golang. But golang probably makes handling arbitrary network data a huge pain, so it's kinda useless for failsafe html5 parsing.

[1] https://github.com/tholian-network/retrokit

[2] (the browser using retrokit) https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth

[3] https://github.com/cookiengineer/dotfiles/tree/master/softwa...

Most of the things you mentioned are implemented in the "Browser" that I've built. It's using multicast DNS to discover neighboring running instances and it has an offline cache first mentality, which means that e.g. download streams are shared among local peers.

Global peer discovery is solved via mapping of identifiers via the reserved TLD, and via mutual TLS for identification and verification. So peers are basically pinned client certificates in your local settings.

Works for most cases, had to implement a couple of breakout tunnel protocols though, so that peer discovery works failsafe when known IPs/ASNs are blocked.

Relaying and scattering traffic works automatically, so that no correlation of IPs to scraped websites can be done by an MITM. Tunnel protocols are all generically implemented, DNS exfiltration, HTTPS smuggling, ICMP tunnels, and pwnat work already pretty failsafe.

Lots of work to be done though, and had to focus on couple other things first before I can get back to the project.

[1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth

I'm trying to go a different route with Stealth, my programmable peer-to-peer web browser that can offload and relay traffic intelligently - and with RetroKit, my WebKit fork that aims to remove all JavaScript APIs that can be used for fingerprinting and/or tracking.

I think that in order to increase privacy and - more importantly - reduce the attack surface of a Web Browser more inefficiently, there will have to be two modes of web browsing.

Regular browsing - in my opinion - should default to privacy and security first, whereas trust to web apps should be granted on a per-domain basis. This is basically what I'm doing in a crappy manner, where I have all my Browser Extensions in regular browsing mode with uBlock Origin, Cookie Autodelete and whatnot... and where I use Incognito Mode to use Web Apps.

In the future I believe that a Web Browser that's decentralized has an almost infinite amount of advantages when it comes to bypassing censorship, increasing trust and the ledging aspect of (temporary) online resources.

Currently, my idea of building a sane architecture of a Web Browser is that the Browser itself is actually a locally running peer-to-peer web scraper service, and the "frontend or GUI" is a bundled webview that's pointing to localhost:someport. Web Apps can then be used by spawning a new webview instance that's sandboxed with its profile in a temporary folder, so it cannot infect/spread across the regular profile folder that's being used for the "regular private browsing" mode.

This architecture allows all kinds of benefits, as everything can be filtered, cleaned, verified (, and shared with other peers) at the network level - whereas Browser Extensions currently cannot filter any HTTP responses because there's no API for that.

AdBlockers currently are based on a disallow-list based concept, which means the advantage is always on the advertising side, and by default nothing is filtered; and scammers/blackhats have always the advantage. Once you add it to a filter list, lots of people's machines have been compromised already. But what if AdBlockers change instead to an allow-list based concept - meaning that the Browser maintains a list of resources that are allowed to load per-domain, and the default being just text and images?

If you want to take a look at where it's at right now [1] [2], my Browser is open source; and I hope to fund development via a access fees for a peer-to-peer "Knowledge Tracker" that allows to share automations for the web with other peers, aka macros, reader-mode like extraction beacons, and other awesome treats (p2p search and recommendations are basically included in this concept).

[1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth

[2] https://github.com/tholian-network/retrokit

Note that among a sea of tracked browsers, the untrackable browser shines like a bright star.

Statistical analysis of these values over time (matched with client hints, ETags, If-Modified-Since, and IPs) will make most browsers uniquely identifiable.

If the malicious vendor is good, they even correlate the size and order of requests. Because that's unique as well and can identify TOR browsers pretty easily.

It's like saying "I can't be tracked, because I use Linux". Guess what, as long as nobody in your town uses Linux, you are the most trackable person.

I decided to go with the "behave as the statistical norm expects you to behave" and created my browser/scraper [1] and forked WebKit into a webview [2] that doesn't support anything that can be used for tracking; with the idea that those tracking features can be shimmed and faked.

I personally think this is the only way to be untrackable these days. Because let's be honest, nobody uses Firefox with ETP in my town anymore :(

WebKit was a good start of this because at least some of the features were implemented behind compiler flags...whereas all other browsers and engines can't be built without say, WebRTC support, or say, without Audio Worklets which are for themselves enough to be uniquely identified.

[1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth

[2] https://github.com/tholian-network/retrokit

(both WIP)

Currently my primary motivation factor is my own Browser Stealth that I'm building; and due to lack of alternatives.

I'm building a peer to peer Browser network that relies on trust ratios/factor in order to find out the seed/leech ratio of sharing content, producing content etc.

The problem I'm currently trying to solve is that I had the idea to have a vendor profile that contains the necessary information for IP ranges (ASN, organization, region, country, ISP/NAT etc) so that the discovery service for that doesn't have to do this.

It's like the basic idea of an offline "map of the internet" that should be an approximation of who does what in which amount of data (e.g. data center IPs aren't trustworthy or same ISP-NATed IP could be censored the same when it comes to blocked websites etc).

At this point it's a big experiment and I'm not sure whether I'm fundamentally wrong about this as I don't have any data to back it up.

If you're curious, it's part of the Stealth Browser I'm building [1] and [2]

[1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth

[2] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth-vendor

> Does anyone here have a feasible way to solve this?

Current solutions like TOR, I2P, VPNs and/or mobile proxy services are just a matter of time and legality until they come obsolete.

TOR and I2P are worth a shit if everybody knows it was a TOR exit node, and cloudflare shows you tracking captchas anyways.

Same for VPNs and mobile proxies, most are known due to their static IP ranges. Note that most mobile proxy services actually use malware installed on smartphones, so technically you're helping the blackhats by using them, and technically if the federal agencies find out you are probably in some lawsuits filed as an anonymous party that helped them DDoS a victim party.

I am convinced that the only way to solve this is by simply not downloading the website from its origin. The origin tracks you, so don't talk to them. Talk to your peers and receive a ledged copy of it instead.

The only problem is that this contradicts all that came after Web 2.0, because every website _wants_ unique identities for every person visiting them; including ETag-based tracking mechanisms of CDNs.

I think it's not possible with supporting Web Browser APIs the same way in JavaScript (as of now, due to fetch and XHR and how WebSockets are abused for HDCP/DRM to prevent caching), but I think that a static website delivering network with a trustless cryptography based peer-to-peer end-to-end encrypted statistically-correct cache is certainly feasible. I believe that because that's exactly what I'm building for the last two years [1].

[1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth

Happened in (2021)[https://github.com/greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender/issues/1...], and then a few others have forked the extension and tried to revive it, only to eventually sell to nefarious owners or sell user data themselves

I went to github and downloaded the last known "good version, installed it manually."

You want someone to die for disabling a potentially malicious extension that is unmantained since 2020?

Also if you want to read up on the removal of the app and the malware issues this post goes over it as well as other recovery options

Similar code projects have had issues like this before, like the open source Great Suspender.

What can happen after a project changes hands - https://github.com/greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender/issues/1263

Better link https://github.com/greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender/issues/1...

> TLDR: The old maintainer appears to have sold the extension to parties unknown, who have malicious intent to exploit the users of this extension in advertising fraud, tracking, and more. In v7.1.8 of the extension (published to the web store but NOT to GitHub), arbitrary code was executed from a remote server, which appeared to be used to commit a variety of tracking and fraud actions. After Microsoft removed it from Edge for malware, v7.1.9 was created without this code: that has been the code distributed by the web store since November, and it does not appear to load the compromised script. However, the malicious maintainer remains in control, however, and can introduce an update at any time. It further appears that, while v7.1.9 was what was listed on the store, those who had the hostile v7.1.8 installed did NOT automatically receive the malware-removing update, and continued running the hostile code until Google force-disabled the extension.

For what it is worth, you may have heard of the Great Suspender incident (https://github.com/greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender/issues/1263). It was used by millions, and was also open source on GitHub, but it could still end up becoming malicious.

Long ass comment: That is not true for the most part. While the increased amount of individuals working of an OSS project may lead to better vulnerability detection according to both parties of the closed-source/proprietary debate, it doesn't lead to a massively more secure software overall. Not all reviewers have the similar experience or expertise and, because of it, not everyone will be able to review, identify or patch any flaws or vulnerability of a specific software since it may require other skills beyond just basic programming skills such as network or cryptographic skills. [1] Some even suggested that the large number of users contributing to the project can lead people "into a false sense of security." [2] Overall, some papers conclude that being an open source software or a proprietary software isn't an important factor for security and suggest considering other factors, such as the particular vendor/maintainer that controls the entire process. [3] After all, what if the maintainer decides to sabotage their own code? What if the project was sold to another maintainer for its own shaddy needs?

If you're referring to The Great Suspender, that extension was bought by an advertising company earlier this year. I'm using the last good version (github) though.