Brave fixed DNS leaks on onion addresses

The Tor feature included in the Brave web browser allows users to access .onion dark web domains within Brave private browser windows without having to install Tor as separate software.

The Tor feature was added in June 2018, and allowed Brave users to have increased privacy while browsing the web, allowing them to access .onion versions of legitimate websites such as Facebook, Wikipedia and major news portals.

However, in a published research on this week, an anonymous security researcher claims to have found that Brave's Tor feature sends queries for .onion domains to public Internet DNS resolvers rather than Tor nodes.

The researcher's findings were initially challenged, but several prominent security researchers were able to replicate his findings, including James Kettle, PortSwigger Web Security Research Director, and Will Dormann, a vulnerability analyst for the CERT / CC team.

The risks of this DNS leak are significant, as any leaks create traces in the log files of DNS servers for Tor traffic of browser users Brave.

Although this may not be in some Western countries with healthy democracies, using Brave to browse Tor sites from countries with oppressive regimes can be a big problem for some of the browser's users.

Brave Software today announced an official fix on Twitter. The patch has already been released in the Brave Nightly version, and will soon be upgraded to the stable version probably in the next Brave browser update.

Its source was identified as a component of Brave's internal ad blocking, which used DNS queries to discover websites attempting to circumvent ad blocking capabilities. But the developers had forgotten to exclude .onion domains from these checks.

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Written by giorgos

George still wonders what he's doing here ...

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