Comment by noident

I sat down on my desktop to take a closer look at how Kagi implemented this. It turns out that the privacy pass extension isn't the one implemented by CloudFlare (and rejected by Tor), but a new extension called Kagi Privacy Pass.

Ok, let's look at the source.

    curl -L https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/downloads/file/4436183/kagi_privacy_pass-1.0.2.xpi > /tmp/extension.xpi
    unzip /tmp/extension.xpi -d /tmp/extension
    cd /tmp/extension

Alright, here's some nice, clean, easy-to-read Javascript. Nice! Wait, what's that?

    // ./scripts/privacypass.js
    /*
     * Privacy Pass protocol implementation
     */
    
    import init, * as kagippjs from "./kagippjs/kagippjs.js";
    ...
    // load WASM for Privacy Pass core library
    await init();

I opened ./kagippjs/kagippjs.js and was, of course, greeted with a WASM binary.

I personally would not install unknown WASM blobs in Tor browser. Source and reproducible build, please!

Let's continue.

    // get WWW-Authenticate HTTP header value
    let origin_wwwa_value = "";
    const endpoint = onion ? ONION_WWWA_ENDPOINT : WWWA_ENDPOINT;
    try {
      const resp = await fetch(endpoint, { method: "GET", headers: { 'X-Kagi-PrivacyPass-Client': 'true' } });
      origin_wwwa_value = resp.headers.get("WWW-Authenticate");
    } catch (ex) {
      if (onion) {
        // this will signal that WWWA could not fetch via .onion
        // the extension will then try normally.
        // if the failure is due to not being on Tor, this is the right path
        // if the failure is due to being on Tor but offline, then trying to fetch from kagi.com
        //   won't deanonymise anyway, and will result in the "are you online?" error message, also the right path
        return origin_wwwa_value;
      }
      throw FETCH_FAILED_ERROR;
    }

What?? If the Onion isn't reachable, you make a request to the clearnet site? That will, in fact, deanonymize you (although I don't know if Tor browser will Torify `fetch` calls made in extensions). You don't want Tor browser making clearnet requests just because it couldn't reach the .onion! What if the request times out while it's bouncing between the 6 relays in the onion circuit? Happens all the time.

> Was there any outreach to the Tor community at all prior to releasing this feature?

Do we know what fraction of Kagi users access it through Tor?