Hello!

Tor 0.4.5.6 is now signed and uploaded to https://dist.torproject.org/ . It's officially a stable release now!

Below is a list of the changes since 0.4.5.5-rc. For a list of all the changes since 0.4.4.7, see the ReleaseNotes file.

Official announcements will follow after the website has updated.

Changes in version 0.4.5.6 - 2021-02-15 The Tor 0.4.5.x release series is dedicated to the memory of Karsten Loesing (1979-2020), Tor developer, cypherpunk, husband, and father. Karsten is best known for creating the Tor metrics portal and leading the metrics team, but he was involved in Tor from the early days. For example, while he was still a student he invented and implemented the v2 onion service directory design, and he also served as an ambassador to the many German researchers working in the anonymity field. We loved him and respected him for his patience, his consistency, and his welcoming approach to growing our community.

This release series introduces significant improvements in relay IPv6 address discovery, a new "MetricsPort" mechanism for relay operators to measure performance, LTTng support, build system improvements to help when using Tor as a static library, and significant bugfixes related to Windows relay performance. It also includes numerous smaller features and bugfixes.

Below are the changes since 0.4.4.4-rc. For a complete list of changes since 0.4.4.7, see the ReleaseNotes file.

o Major bugfixes (IPv6, relay): - Fix a bug that prevented a relay from publishing its descriptor if an auto-discovered IPv6 that was found unreachable. Fixes bug 40279; bugfix on 0.4.5.1-alpha.

o Minor features (protocol versions): - Stop claiming to support the "DirCache=1" subprotocol version. Technically, we stopped supporting this subprotocol back in 0.4.5.1-alpha, but we needed to wait for the authorities to stop listing it as "required" before we could drop it from the list. Closes ticket 40221.

o Minor bugfixes (logging): - Avoid a spurious log message about missing subprotocol versions, when the consensus that we're reading from is older than the current release. Previously we had made this message nonfatal, but in practice, it is never relevant when the consensus is older than the current release. Fixes bug 40281; bugfix on 0.4.0.1-alpha.

o Minor bugfixes (metrics port): - Fix a bug warning when a metrics port socket was unexpectedly closed. Fixes bug 40257; bugfix on 0.4.5.1-alpha

o Minor bugfixes (relay): - Allow relays to have a RFC1918 address if PublishServerDescriptor is set to 0 and AssumeReachable is set to 1. This is to support the use case of a bridge on a local network, exposed via a pluggable transport. Fixes bug 40208; bugfix on 0.4.5.1-alpha.

o Minor bugfixes (relay, config): - Fix a problem in the removal of duplicate ORPorts from the internal port list when loading the config file. We were removing the wrong ports, breaking valid torrc uses cases for multiple ORPorts of the same address family. Fixes bug 40289; bugfix on 0.4.5.1-alpha.

cheers,