Night Drop 0.1.22

Tor over WebTunnel, when the network blocks it

If your network blocks Tor, Night Drop can now use a WebTunnel bridge: Tor carried inside ordinary HTTPS to a normal-looking web server. Add one under Bridges — now reachable before you create an identity, which is when you are most likely to need it. Previously the editor sat behind the home screen, which you could only reach with a working identity, which needed a working Tor bootstrap.

What this is tested against, and what it is not. It is tested against a network that blocks Tor by address, with a control confirming direct Tor could not build a single circuit; and against an intrusion-detection system carrying 52,311 public signatures, over a thousand of them for Tor, which raised nothing and saw only ordinary TLS. It has never been run from inside a country that filters this way, and public tooling is a far weaker adversary than a national firewall. One property is not disguised at all: the shape of the traffic. A connection that pulls tens of megabytes while sending very little does not look like reading a web page, however ordinary the handshake is. If being identified as a Tor user is itself dangerous where you are, do not rely on this alone.

Fixes

• Repeatedly tapping reconnect could leave the app offering to set up a new identity over an existing one. Launching is no longer re-entrant, and creating an identity now refuses to displace saved data unless the recovery screen asked for it.
• The sealed onion key now travels with the state file it unseals, so recovering a set-aside identity keeps its .onion address instead of coming back on a new one.
• A native library that fails to load reaches the error screen instead of leaving the splash on screen for ever.

Verifying

Every binary is signed with the release key and listed in SHA256SUMS, itself signed. See SECURITY.md for the full verification steps; nightdrop-signing-key.asc is attached.