Mozilla Demands FBI Hand Over Details About Tor Browser Vulnerability

Mozilla is demanding in a lawsuit that the FBI be obliged to hand over the details of a Tor Browser leak to the software developer. The Tor Browser is based on Firefox and Mozilla wants to remove the vulnerability for fear of abuse.

It’s not clear whether the vulnerability is really in the Firefox portion of Tor Browser, but if it is, the FBI must provide information about it, Mozilla claims in a request to Washington’s district court. Mozilla believes that the government should do this before the leak becomes known to others and can be exploited.

The judge has ruled that lawyers in the case must be given details about the leak, which the FBI declined without explanation, except that it would be “harmful.” Mozilla now points out that the party that can actually fix the vulnerability was not part of that decision.

Mozilla emphasizes not taking sides in the case but choosing “the hundreds of millions of users who will benefit from the disclosure”. The case concerns a child porn site, Playpen, of which more than a thousand users could be located due to the vulnerability in the Tor Browser.

Tor stands for The Onion Router and is a network that can be used to surf the Internet fairly anonymously. All users’ tcp traffic is routed through various Tor routers, after which it is virtually impossible for the recipient to trace who the original sender was.