date: 2021-07-30 13:20:47
categories: privacy
firstPublishDate: 2021-07-30 13:20:47
Opensnitch is an application level firewall, it shows connections made by applications and helps protecting privacy. It is clone of Littesnitch for macOS (paid app, there is a free alternative
that has about the same features).
It allows monitoring and blocking unnecessary or suspicious connections by creating firewall rules in the GUI. I use it to monitor firefox and change my configuration.
I don't use chrome in general but according to this article
, it also makes unwanted connections.
Download the prebuilt deb packages: daemon and GUI
https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch/releases
https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch/releases
Then run:
dpkg -i opensnitch_1.4.0.rc-1_amd64.deb dpkg -i python3-opensnitch-ui_1.4.0.rc-1_all.deb apt-get -f install opensnitch-ui
Opensnitch gave me a list of domains firefox is connecting to and I went to check how these domains are used and decided whether I want to block them.
Then I changed my firefox configuration ('about:config') like this:
Mozilla has a page showing
how to stop firefox making automatic connections
.
I block the OCSP servers because I browse to reliable and trustworthy websites and I think it is privacy invasion. I wish there was an alternative solution with the certificate validity checks done in the client.