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  • #25305
Closed (moved) (moved)
Open
Created Feb 20, 2018 by adrelanos@adrelanos

Tor Browser refuses to start / XDG_CONFIG_DIRS environment variable segfaults Tor Browser

More than 6 entries (each entry is devices by a colon) will segfault Tor Browser. Here is a simplified minimal example that shows how to trigger this bug.

Happening with both, Tor Browser 7.5 and 8.0a1 on Debian stretch.

segfaults:

XDG_CONFIG_DIRS=x:x:x:x:x:x:x ./start-tor-browser.desktop --debug

./Browser/start-tor-browser: line 370: 3249 Segmentation fault TOR_CONTROL_PASSWD=${TOR_CONTROL_PASSWD} ./firefox --class "Tor Browser" -profile TorBrowser/Data/Browser/profile.default "${@}" < /dev/null

working:

XDG_CONFIG_DIRS=x:x:x:x:x:x ./start-tor-browser.desktop --debug

This is to show that the existence or content of the folder is unrelated here.

Relevance:

Of course nobody uses XDG_CONFIG_DIRS=x:x:x:x:x:x as their XDG_CONFIG_DIRS.

Real world example that is failing is in Whonix, where settings are pre-configured. Whonix is using:

XDG_CONFIG_DIRS=/usr/share/torbrowser-default-browser/:/usr/share/security-misc/:/usr/share/kde-apper-no-autoupdate/:/usr/share/anon-ws-kde-startmenu/:/usr/share/anon-apps-config/:/usr/share/open-link-confirmation/:/etc/xdg

That segfaults Tor Browser.

firefox-esr (from Debian stretch) does not have this issue.

#21804 (moved) was a similar issue where a long XDG_CONFIG_DIRS environment variable resulted in Tor Browser refusing to start.

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