Background

It is becoming increasingly difficult to trust the privacy properties of software and services we rely on to use the Internet. Governments, companies, groups and individuals may be surveilling us without our knowledge. This is particularly troubling when such surveillance is done by governments under statutes that provide limited court oversight and almost no room for public scrutiny.

As a result of laws in the US and elsewhere, prudent users must interact with Internet services knowing that despite how much any cloud-service company wants to protect privacy, at the end of the day most big companies must comply with the law. The government can legally access user data in ways that might violate the privacy expectations of law-abiding users. Worse, the government may force service operators to enable surveillance (something that seems to have happened in the Lavabit case).

Worst of all, the government can do all of this without users ever finding out about it, due to gag orders.

Implications for Browsers

This creates a significant predicament for privacy and security on the Open Web. Every major browser today is distributed by an organization within reach of surveillance laws. As the Lavabit case suggests, the government may request that browser vendors secretly inject surveillance code into the browsers they distribute to users. We have no information that any browser vendor has ever received such a directive. However, if that were to happen, the public would likely not find out due to gag orders.

The unfortunate consequence is that software vendors — including browser vendors — must not be blindly trusted. Not because such vendors don’t want to protect user privacy. Rather, because a law might force vendors to secretly violate their own principles and do things they don’t want to do.

Why Mozilla is different

Mozilla has one critical advantage over all other browser vendors. Our products are truly open source. Internet Explorer is fully closed-source, and while the rendering engines WebKit and Blink (chromium) are open-source, the Safari and Chrome browsers that use them are not fully open-source. Both contain significant fractions of closed-source code.

Mozilla Firefox in contrast is 100% open source [1]. As Anthony Jones from our New Zealand office pointed out the other month, security researchers can use this fact to verify the executable bits contained in the browsers Mozilla is distributing, by building Firefox from source and comparing the built bits with our official distribution.

This will be the most effective on platforms where we already use open-source compilers to produce the executable, to avoid compiler-level attacks as shown in 1984 by Ken Thompson.

Call to Action

To ensure that no one can inject undetected surveillance code into Firefox, security researchers and organizations should:

regularly audit Mozilla source and verified builds by all effective means;

establish automated systems to verify official Mozilla builds from source; and

raise an alert if the verified bits differ from official bits.

In the best case, we will establish such a verification system at a global scale, with participants from many different geographic regions and political and strategic interests and affiliations.

Security is never “done” — it is a process, not a final rest-state. No silver bullets. All methods have limits. However, open-source auditability cleanly beats the lack of ability to audit source vs. binary.

Through international collaboration of independent entities we can give users the confidence that Firefox cannot be subverted without the world noticing, and offer a browser that verifiably meets users’ privacy expectations.

See bug 885777 to track our work on verifiable builds.

End-to-End Trust

Beyond this first step, can we use such audited browsers as trust anchors, to authenticate fully-audited open-source Internet services? This seems possible in theory. No one has built such a system to our knowledge, but we welcome precedent citations and experience reports, and encourage researchers to collaborate with us.

Brendan Eich, CTO and SVP Engineering, Mozilla

Andreas Gal, VP Mobile and R&D, Mozilla

[1] Firefox on Linux is the best case, because the C/C++ compiler, runtime libraries, and OS kernel are all free and open source software. Note that even on Linux, certain hardware-vendor-supplied system software, e.g., OpenGL drivers, may be closed source.