Mozilla wants to integrate more for Tor into Firefox

May 9, 2019 11:03 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla positions privacy at the core of its Firefox browser, and the company wants to continue investments in this area on the long term.

In the report covering the research grants for the first half of the year, Mozilla discusses the privacy and security improvements that it wants to make happen in Firefox.

One of the priorities, Mozilla says, is to “integrate more of TOR in Firefox,” as the company wants to enhance privacy with what it calls a Super Private Browsing (SPB) for users.

Mozilla already has a program to bring Tor features to Firefox. Called Tor Uplift, this effort helped implement fingerprinting protection in the browser, and as per GHacks, Mozilla could further enhance it for the creation of the aforementioned SPB mode too.

Tor Browser itself also runs on the Firefox ESR version, providing users with privacy options that aren’t available, or at least not yet, in Mozilla’s browser.

The challenges

But as Mozilla itself puts it, implementing more of Tor in Firefox browser isn’t necessarily an easy project, and the purpose of the research grant is to help deal with the challenges such an idea could bring.

“Enabling a large number of additional users to make use of the Tor network requires solving for inefficiencies currently present in Tor so as to make the protocol optimal to deploy at scale. Academic research is just getting started with regards to investigating alternative protocol architectures and route selection protocols, such as Tor-over-QUIC, employing DTLS, and Walking Onions,” Mozilla says.

Needless to say, this is something that Mozilla is only considering in the long-term and not a feature that is currently under development. The research grants offered by the company are specifically supposed to help pursue such ideas, albeit it goes without saying that not every little project comes to fruition.