[HTTPS-Everywhere] Why is HTTPS-Everywhere trying to connect to 127.0.0.1:9050?

Seth David Schoen schoen at eff.org
Fri Feb 28 10:57:57 PST 2014


Dave Warren writes:

> On 2014-02-28 08:21, paulrcc at hushmail.com wrote:
> >On 02/19/2014 at 10:40 PM, "Daniel Kahn Gillmor"
> ><dkg at fifthhorseman.net> wrote:
> >
> >    On 02/19/2014 08:41 AM, paulrcc at hushmail.com wrote:
> >    > I use Firefox plugin and I detected connections to
> >    localhost:9050 when
> >    > HTTPS-Everywhere plugin is enabled. When plugin is disabled,
> >    this does
> >    > not occur. Observatory is disabled.
> >
> >    localhost:9050 is a common port for the system tor socks proxy to run
> >    on. Are you sure you didn't also do some sort of tor configuration or
> >    reconfigure your proxy settings around the same time as installing
> >    https-everywhere
> >
> >
> >No, I did no proxy configuration. I just installed Firefox with
> >HTTPS Everywhere and when the plugin is enabled my firewall
> >detects connections to 127.0.0.1:9050.
> 
> Given that HTTPS Everywhere has some internal Tor support, I wonder
> if it's simply checking to see if a typical Tor install is
> available?

Yes, this has to do with the Observatory wanting to submit cert
observations via Tor.  If the Observatory is enabled with default
settings, it looks for a Tor proxy on localhost:9050.  You should
be able to stop this (if it isn't what you want) with the HTTPS
Everywhere SSL Observatory Preferences by disabling all Observatory
reporting.

Note that if Tor isn't installed, the failed connections to port
9050 won't harm anything -- depending on your Observatory settings,
they'd just cause HTTPS Everywhere to conclude that you don't have Tor
installed and then not submit any observations to the Observatory.

You can see the details of the implementation of this functionality in

https://gitweb.torproject.org/https-everywhere.git/blob/HEAD:/src/components/ssl-observatory.js

-- 
Seth Schoen  <schoen at eff.org>
Senior Staff Technologist                       https://www.eff.org/
Electronic Frontier Foundation                  https://www.eff.org/join
815 Eddy Street, San Francisco, CA  94109       +1 415 436 9333 x107


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