<story><title>SecureDrop</title><url>https://ssl.washingtonpost.com/securedrop</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>FiloSottile</author><text>If the leaker visits this page before opening the Tor Browser from a regular browser to copy the onion url, the whole thing is as safe as SSL as there will be a trail of the SSL connection just before the visit to SecureDrop. And they don&amp;#x27;t even explain to avoid it.&lt;p&gt;OPSEC is hard.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>handsomeransoms</author><text>(Securedrop dev here) This is a really good point. Unfortunately, we&amp;#x27;re &amp;quot;as safe as SSL&amp;quot; no matter what, unless the source has a separate way to verify the .onion address on the SSL-protected page. They can use the SecureDrop directory for that (and we&amp;#x27;re working on other schemes as well), but it&amp;#x27;s not automated so only a handful of very cautious sources would likely do this.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not sure how we could explain to avoid it - where would the explanation go? Visiting that page would be just as much of a correlation, no? It&amp;#x27;s kind of a chicken and egg problem, unless the source is already using Tor.&lt;p&gt;Avoiding the &amp;quot;trail of the SSL connection&amp;quot; also suggests we should be doing something to combat website fingerprinting, which we have discussed but do not have a clear solution for yet.&lt;p&gt;Our current thinking is that just visiting the landing page is not enough to prosecute a source. We can do better, and are working on it, but it&amp;#x27;s difficult.</text></comment>
<story><title>SecureDrop</title><url>https://ssl.washingtonpost.com/securedrop</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>FiloSottile</author><text>If the leaker visits this page before opening the Tor Browser from a regular browser to copy the onion url, the whole thing is as safe as SSL as there will be a trail of the SSL connection just before the visit to SecureDrop. And they don&amp;#x27;t even explain to avoid it.&lt;p&gt;OPSEC is hard.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>glomph</author><text>Only if they visit the page just before. Seems plausible they would read about it, set it up and then drop their documents at a later date as a default behavior.&lt;p&gt;I agree it would probably be a good idea to put a warning about such a problem though.</text></comment>