Private Window with Tor always shows as Disconnected - Tor Browser works fine

Misc Private Tabs with Tor
1

Recently, Private Window with Tor only ever shows as Disconnected. It used to work fine up till a couple of weeks ago. I installed Tor Browser and it works fine, so there is no network or OS restriction on using Tor.

I am running Brave Browser Version 1.59.124 Chromium: 118.0.5993.117 (Official Build) (x86_64) on macos 14.1 Sonoma. I only noticed this after updating to macos 14, and I think there have been at least 2 updates to Brave Browser since the last time I used Private Window with Tor.

I have tried disabling then re-enabling Private Window with Tor in settings, but this has not fixed things.

2

I noticed someone else posted a similar question today (without much info - but they got a reply asking for more info - grr), so I thought I’d make my question more complete.

brave://tor-internals/ returns the following:

General Info tab

Tor version:
Tor process ID: -1
Tor Proxy URI:
Tor connection status: Disconnected
Tor initialization progress:

Logs

Completely empty

Tor Control Events

Also completely empty

I can access https://torproject.org fine from Brave.

Update : checked in my Cloudflare Zero Trust logs - they have started blocking tor.bravesoftware.com in their DNS blocking which must have changed recently. It is under the Security Threats list. I have whitelisted it, so hopefully that will resolve things soon.

Update 2 : That seems to have fixed it!

3

You have indeed found the problem. Cloudflare categorizes the tor.bravesoftware.com domain, which we use to host the tor binaries needed to make private windows with Tor work, as Anonymizer: https://radar.cloudflare.com/scan/af9c6020-ce4b-414f-80aa-a2ca3810fdfb/security

It seems like that category might be blocked by default in that service.