Clarify the privacy implication of setting a locale
Originally created by @sajolida on #17532 (Redmine)
Question raised in https://lists.autistici.org/message/20200103.094500.22ffbd74.en.html
Answered in https://lists.autistici.org/message/20200228.074212.684e7e99.en.html
First, most, if not all, exploited applications have access to
locale configuration.
Wrt. network fingerprinting:
- We have to assume that some applications may expose the system’s
locale configuration as part of their network activity.
- For Tor Browser and Thunderbird, our configuration tries to avoid
this (best effort) but it’s impossible to prove we did not
miss anything.
Wrt. local storage:
- If an adversary can read the content of the persistent storage,
I’m
pretty sure that the locale configuration can be easily inferred
from that.
- If/once we allow persisting the locale in cleartext on the system
partition, this information will be available to an adversary
who seizes the Tails device.