This repository contains a modified Tor Browser 11.5.6 that can work in the docker container to facilitate the dataset crawl for website fingerprinting research. We documented the engineering details about how to hack TBB 11 as it has changed a lot compared with TBB 10. Note that the dockerized TBB should be used together with a crawler script. Therefore, we built another project called WFCraweler.
Note that this is only for research purpose.
We need to use command line tools to drive TBB 11, and we may need to change the torrc configuration and let the TBB to close the window after the loading finishes. Since the Tor Browser Bundle seems to change significantly after upgrading to version 11, our previous way to meet these needs does not work anymore, as explained as follows. (We only consider the Linux version, by the way.)
Launch TBB 11 on a Linux Computer that has a GUI and click Always connect automatically.
The Tor browser will not connect to Tor after launch automatically anymore since version 11.
Therefore, we should click this box manually.
As Tor browser will not close itself after a loading finishes, we choose to use a tampermonkey script to close the window for us.
Search and install Tampermonkey extension and load the script closeAfterLoad.js in this repository in tampermonkey.
The biggest change in TBB 11 is that it will overwrite the items in Browser/TorBrowser/Data/Tor/torrc after every launch
if this item can be found in the browser's configuration
(i.e., any setting found in the GUI or in about:config).
Therefore, to have a customized torrc,
we should take advantage of AutoConfig
that can effectively inject the required parameters into Firefox.
You need to put autoconfig.js in ./Browser/defaults/pref/.
After that, put firefox.cfg, which contains the settings in ./Browser/ and start TBB.
Now the correct settings should be populated by Tor Launcher and reflected in torrc.
For other torrc configurations that are not in about:config, you can directly add them in the torrc file.
We also pass necessary browser settings to TBB 11 here. We explain the use of these settings in firefox.cfg.
To run the modified browser, simply use the command ./Browser/start-tor-browser --verbose --headless {some url}.
On any headless server or inside the docker, simply use export MOZ_HEADLESS=1 (See Entrypoint.sh).
In this folder, type make build to build the docker image. Then use make run to launch the crawl.
Remember to check the necessary parameters in the Makefile.
The docker will execute Entrypoint.sh after launch.
Do modify it if you use your own crawler (See Line 65 in Entrypoint.sh).
Note that since TBB 11, running TBB as root is not allowed anymore. Pay attention to it if you run TBB 11 in docker containers.
We have uploaded the modified TBB version 11.5.6 to this repository so that you can directly use it. If you want to use another version, just follow the above steps.
- Thanks for the help from Hamy on how to hack firefox.
- The Makefile is based on Nate Mathews's project Tor-Browser-Crawler-Video.
Feel free to email me for any problem (jgongac at connect dot ust dot hk).