I finally got round to looking into this matter properly. The inability to use 
dotfiles persistence with the Tor Browser is, quite predictably, an Apparmor 
issue. tor-browser's access to the filesystem is (quite wisely) restricted to a 
couple of essential directories, and thus obviously cannot read from 
/lib/live... which the 'dotfiles' symlinks target.

Symlinks themselves within profile.default work fine, as long as their target 
is in a location TB is permitted to read from, such as ~/Tor Browser .

At this point three solutions come to mind:

1. A documentation-only approach, allowing a power user to hardcode his desired 
Torbutton setting with a workaround. The dotfiles persistence approach could 
still work, albeit in a rather hacky way, such as automatically running a bash 
script to create ~/.tor-browser/profile.default/prefs.js as the amnesia user 
logs in.

2. Modifying the TBB's Apparmor profile to allow access to a single additional 
directory: 
/lib/live/mount/persistence/TailsData_unlocked/dotfiles/.tor-browser/profile.default/preferences
 . This would allow a user to use dotfile persistence with the browser. But 
could it introduce a security issue?

3. Adding a prefs.js to the squashfs build, thus changing Tails' default 
Torbutton setting at boot from Low to High. This was briefly discussed (in a 
roundabout way) back in 2015 (Redmine, topic #10481), but a few key developers 
were not a fan of the concept at the time.

Founders, developers,contributors... let me know what you think :)

Synthe

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