According to an IT security researcher, the Chromium-based, privacy-focused web browser Brave had a vulnerability that was leaking DNS requests. This was later confirmed by PortSwigger’s Director of Research, James Kettle, and CERT/CC vulnerability analyst Will Dormann.
Due to this, user activities on Tor anonymity network’s hidden servers, the Dark Web, were being exposed to their ISPs (internet service providers).
It is worth noting that as of November 2020, the Chromium-based, privacy-focused Brave Browser had over 20 million users and it also made headlines for entering the dark web with its own Tor Onion service.
Brave has a built-in feature to enable Tor’s integration with the browser to obscure a user’s web activities and offer optimum privacy and security. Tor, conversely, is also used to access .Onion sites, most of which are hosted on the Dark Web.
According to a post published by the researcher on Rumble, since DNS requests are unencrypted so any requests made to access .Onion sites via Brave to Tor were traceable, which contradicts the browser’s privacy claims.
How Brave browser Leaked Tor DNS Requests?
In Tor mode, Brave is expected to forward all the Tor proxies’ requests without sending them to any non-Tor internet services. This is a crucial step to ensure user privacy when surfing the web.
However, the bug identified in Brave’s Private Window with Tor mode caused the .onion URL (regardless of the Tor address a user wanted to visit) to be sent to the device’s configured DNS server as a standard DNS query.
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