Convergence "Extra"

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Not maintained here since ~2014 and does not work with newer FIrefox versions.

If you'd like to work on it, feel free to just fork the repo (this is a fork of Moxie's Convergence project anyway).

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This is a fork of Moxie Marlinspike's Convergence tool: http://convergence.io/

Convergence is a Firefox browser addon replacing default Certificate Authority TLS authentication model with custom validation model, which is implemented by "notary" servers.

Queries to notary servers can be anonymized via simple (built-in) onion routing, list of such notaries to trust can be changed at any time and validation logic on notaries themselves is designed to be customizable to provide "trust agility" property, which current CA system lacks.

Good high-level overview of the tool and approach can be found in Moxie's "SSL And The Future Of Authenticity" talk at BlackHat USA 2011: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA

See also wikipedia page.

More details on creating and running a notary server can be found in README file in server section. client directory contains browser extension.

More-or-less up-to-date version of the built addon is available for install via AMO: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/convergence-extra/

Note on compatibility

As changes to both client (addon) and server (notary) in this fork are quite extensive at this point, old notaries (pre-fork) might not work with client from here.

Due to things like e.g. SNI usage in client it WILL see different certificate than non-SNI-using (pre-fork) notary.

Some protocol changes like passing IP address client picked to notary while shouldn't (I think) cause old notaries to return http-400, are not (and were not) tested with them and may also cause whatever behavior.

In short - just set up your own notaries using code in this fork.

Also, I don't use "bounce notaries", as all notaries I use are private anyway and there aren't any useable public ones (due to compatibility things outlined above), so that feature might be broken.

I suggest disabling it with your own notaries, as it serves no purpose in that case (nothing to anonymize with just one user), while opening notaries to be used as public to-port-4242-only proxies.

Changes from upstream

• client

  • Should work with newer firefox versions.

    • Merged fix from upstream PR #170.

    • Fixed major issue with extension hanging forever polling on connection to notary after receiving http response (bbdc538). Upstream PR #173.

    • Minor issue with displaying cached fingerprint timestamps as NaN-NaN-NaN (816c74e). Upstream PR #174.

    • Fix for breakage due to private browsing changes in firefox-20 (ffb7c7b).

    • Work with nspr/sqlite/ssl libs folded into nss on Windows with FF>=22 (see #1 for more details).

  • Updated extension metadata to avoid clashes with the original thing and/or other forks.

    This one should be named "Convergence Extra", have a bit different version schema and distinct UUIDs for components. Settings for both are shared and should be compatible.

    Should probably still be a bad idea to have more than one Convergence extension enabled.

  • Backends' "isNotaryUri" check seem to have typo bugs (c96d242), messing up results (silently with >1 notaries).

  • Bugfix in nsIWebBrowserPersist.saveURI call (b5dbb50), preventing adding notaries from URL (at least in newer ff).

  • Use SNI TLS extension for client connections. This is kinda major flaw in the original extension, as it's quite widespread yet original Convergence only saw "generic" certificate for IP both on client and server (see also corresponding notary fix).

  • Added "Exceptions" tab to options for hostname patterns that convergence should not touch.

    Useful for local networks and dynamic hostnames (e.g. "vm-X.mydomain.tld") that never validate with available notaries for some reason, where adding individual exceptions can be problematic.

    Default value is previously hardcoded list of exceptions - localhost and mozilla "aus3" addons-update host.

  • Supress unhandled non-critical JS errors here and there, mostly to keep JS console clean.

  • Send IP along with hostname (for e.g. SNI and cert validation) and port, because same name can be resolved to different hosts in case of CDNs or round-robin-dns mirrors, which can have unrelated certificates.

  • "Priority" checkbox in options dialog to always query marked notaries first (if their count is more than "subset to query" - subset is picked at random among these). Idea is to have some subset of notaries to always query, picking others at random from the rest.

  • Certificates for invalid names now can be validated - CN or SubjectAltNames are irrelevant to the client (and always being overidden) - only fingerprint and notary responses matter.

  • Handle too long (for cert subject line) hostnames by generating wildcard certificates (776728d).

  • More organized, prefixed and disableable (per-source, if necessary) logging. Can be enabled by setting "convergence.logging.enabled" to "true" in about:config or by changing "print_all: null" to "true" in Logger.js.

  • TODO: Cache fingerprnts for (hostname, port, ip) tuples, not just (hostname, port), because of cdn's and round-robin-dns mirrors - server-side as well, though there can be several signatures for one hostname there.

  • TODO: Certificates for IPs don't seem to be checked via notaries at all, so don't have "verificationDetails" comment and never validate with convergence.

  • TODO: "Allowed as bounce notary" checkbox in notaries' list to block local notaries from acting as such, for instance.

  • TODO: Make hardcoded check timeouts configurable.

    So that plugin won't hang on bogus notaries any longer than necessary with a specific connection latency in mind.

  • TODO: Make caching timeouts configurable.

    Caching for longer period might be desirable, especially for exceptions, which ideally would have their own timeout, which can maybe also be configurable when creating each exception, to be less annoying in some cases.

  • TODO: CLI tool to work with ff xml config - decode, maybe alter it, and to run queries for random sites via notaries defined there.

    Can also be implemented as XPCOM commandline component, but that might be a bad idea due to unnecessary dep on firefox/xulrunner.

  • TODO: Replace js-ctypes with XPCOM where possible.

    These interfaces seem to be way more safe, stable and maintained.

    Also might need to check on security hooks there and if there's simplier way to override ff cert checks instead of full-blown content proxy.

  • TODO: At least some failures in the extension can be made more informative

    • i.e. ctypes load fail can force-disable addon and issue a dialog box telling user why, not just result in broken interfaces.

  • TODO: Merge tack branch if/when there will be something real to test it on.

  • TODO: Add bootstrap.js to load extension after installation without requiring browser restart.

  • TODO: Use Log.jsm for logging, if available.

  • TODO: Store all the xml and sqlite stuff in special "extension-store" place.

  • TODO: Update for compatibility with ff-32 and beyond that (especially e10s "pid for tab" thing).

  • TODO: Migrate to JPM addon SDK, node deps instead of custom modules.

• server

  • Has simplier (implementation/maintenance-wise) argparse-based CLI.

  • Renders basic info about the node on GET requests from e.g. browsers (based on upstream PR #120).

  • Does not implement any daemonization - can be done either naively from shell, with os-specific "start-stop-daemon" in init-scripts or proper init like upstart or systemd.

  • Allows more stuff to be configurable.

  • Verifier backends can be installed as a "convergence.verifier" entry points.

  • "perspective" verifier has "verify_ca" option (disabled by default) to also perform OpenSSL verification of the server certificate chain, allowing to combine network perspectives with an old-style CA-list verification (and whatever other backends).

  • Enable TLS SNI in "perspective" verifier during handshake, so that host can return appropriate cert for a hostname.

    It is done in a hackish way at the very first
    Context.set_info_callback() callback invocation.
    
    For a more proper way see [twisted #5374](http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/5374)
    (still unresolved at the moment of writing).
    

  • Can be configured from YAML file, including python logging module configuration.

  • Pass IP address to verifiers along with hostname, if provided (see corresponding send feature in client for rationale).

  • Batch same-target requests arriving at the same time (lot of static content from subdomain, for instance), returning same response to all of them, instead of running a separate check (and e.g. connection) for each one of them.

  • "bind" option for perspective verifier to use for special routing - e.g. through some tunnel or tor/i2p network.

  • TODO: With perspectives + ca_check, if newer Twisted is detected, use its new service_identity verifier, check if new cryptography-based (py module) pyopenssl has less hacky way to use SNI.

  • TODO: Add option to serve bundle for browsers at some URL.

  • TODO: Statistics on queries.

• packaging

  • TODO: Build script for windows (bat or cmd).

  • TODO: Update this (and maybe add one to /client) doc with simple debug steps - i.e. how to enable logging (about:config), were to expect it (jsconsole with +1 thing enabled, otherwise terminal or "-console" opt).