FAQ

How does the extension work?

Privacy Pass is a browser extension written in JavaScript using the Chrome extension developer kit. This includes making use of the webRequest, webNavigation, cookie and tab frameworks. Privacy Pass can use triggers in HTTP responses (such as presence of headers) or via presence of HTML tags to initiate the signing and redemption procedures.

Which cryptographic library is used?

Privacy Pass uses the Stanford JavaScript Cryptography Library (SJCL) for performing cryptographic operations. For elliptic-curve operations, Privacy Pass uses the NIST P-256 curve.

Is the protocol provably secure?

We have written a paper that will be presented at the PETS 2018 symposium in Barcelona. In the paper we prove that the protocol satisfies the properties of unlinkability (essentially showing that no signed tokens can be linked to future redemptions) and one-more-token-security (proving that the client cannot forge valid signatures on unsigned tokens). There may be other desirable properties that we can prove about the protocol, but these two properties represent the cornerstone goals of our design and can be proven using standard discrete-log-based assumptions. We also provide more details on how the DLEQ proof mechanism is explicitly used to counter certain methods of deanonymization.

For more details on these results, read the paper here.

Is Privacy Pass completely finished?

No, we regard Privacy Pass and the protocol we use as being beta releases currently and still under active development. There are still features that have not been completely implemented in the extension such as DLEQ proof verification. We hope to be able to introduce these features and thus a complete implementation of the extension in the near future. In the meantime, if you notice anything wrong at all then we would love for you to get in touch or contribute using the links below.

What does Privacy Pass change about my browser experience?

Privacy Pass only stores data relating the tokens that are used creating ‘passes’. Privacy Pass may also make changes to outgoing requests if a situation is deemed to instantiate either the signing or redemption phase of our protocol.

What overheads do I incur from using Privacy Pass?

In preliminary tests on consumer hardware, our extension takes ~1.1 seconds to generate blinded tokens to be signed by the server and ~1.9 seconds to parse the signed tokens and verify the DLEQ proof. Creating a pass that can be used to redeem signed tokens takes <40ms.

In terms of request sizes, Privacy Pass adds ~2kb of data to client requests for tokens to be signed and ~0.4kb for requests to redeem a pass. The server signing response includes ~17kb additional data.

Who currently supports Privacy Pass?

Privacy Pass is currently supported by Cloudflare to help reduce the number of CAPTCHAs that need to be solved by honest users. The privacy-preserving aspect of Privacy Pass means that users can redeem tokens instead of solving more CAPTCHAs without compromising their anonymity.

I want to contribute to Privacy Pass, what should I do?

Feel free to open a pull request on our GitHub repository. This also applies to our server implementation.

I want to support Privacy Pass, what should I do?

Great! the server that we have written is open-sourced under the BSD-3 license. You can use this implementation or one of your own creation to construct a compatible server for the Privacy Pass extension. If the extension needs to be adapted to include support for your new server then get in contact with the Privacy Pass team or submit a PR yourself, as above.

I have found a bug in the protocol and/or implementation, what should I do?

Feel free to contact any member of the Privacy Pass team and they should be able to help. Otherwise open a PR as above, or create an issue in the GitHub issue tracker.