Tor 0.2.0.2-alpha is out

Roger Dingledine arma at mit.edu
Mon Jun 4 04:00:06 UTC 2007


These are the first two development snapshots for the 0.2.0.x series.

These releases provide new features for people running Tor as both a
client and a server (check out the new RelayBandwidth config options); let
Tor run as a DNS proxy; and generally move us forward on a lot of fronts.

https://tor.eff.org/download.html

Changes in version 0.2.0.2-alpha - 2007-06-02
  o Major bugfixes on 0.2.0.1-alpha:
    - Fix an assertion failure related to servers without extra-info digests.
      Resolves bugs 441 and 442.

  o Minor features (directory):
    - Support "If-Modified-Since" when answering HTTP requests for
      directories, running-routers documents, and network-status documents.
      (There's no need to support it for router descriptors, since those
      are downloaded by descriptor digest.)

  o Minor build issues:
    - Clear up some MIPSPro compiler warnings.
    - When building from a tarball on a machine that happens to have SVK
      installed, report the micro-revision as whatever version existed
      in the tarball, not as "x".


Changes in version 0.2.0.1-alpha - 2007-06-01
  o Major features, server usability:
    - New config options RelayBandwidthRate and RelayBandwidthBurst:
      a separate set of token buckets for relayed traffic. Right now
      relayed traffic is defined as answers to directory requests, and
      OR connections that don't have any local circuits on them.

  o Major features, client usability:
    - A client-side DNS proxy feature to replace the need for
      dns-proxy-tor: Just set "DNSPort 9999", and Tor will now listen
      for DNS requests on port 9999, use the Tor network to resolve them
      anonymously, and send the reply back like a regular DNS server.
      The code still only implements a subset of DNS.
    - Make PreferTunneledDirConns and TunnelDirConns work even when
      we have no cached directory info. This means Tor clients can now
      do all of their connections protected by TLS.

  o Major features, performance and efficiency:
    - Directory authorities accept and serve "extra info" documents for
      routers. These documents contain fields from router descriptors
      that aren't usually needed, and that use a lot of excess
      bandwidth. Once these fields are removed from router descriptors,
      the bandwidth savings should be about 60%. [Partially implements
      proposal 104.]
    - Servers upload extra-info documents to any authority that accepts
      them. Authorities (and caches that have been configured to download
      extra-info documents) download them as needed. [Partially implements
      proposal 104.]
    - Change the way that Tor buffers data that it is waiting to write.
      Instead of queueing data cells in an enormous ring buffer for each
      client->OR or OR->OR connection, we now queue cells on a separate
      queue for each circuit.  This lets us use less slack memory, and
      will eventually let us be smarter about prioritizing different kinds
      of traffic.
    - Use memory pools to allocate cells with better speed and memory
      efficiency, especially on platforms where malloc() is inefficient.
    - Stop reading on edge connections when their corresponding circuit
      buffers are full; start again as the circuits empty out.

  o Major features, other:
    - Add an HSAuthorityRecordStats option that hidden service authorities
      can use to track statistics of overall hidden service usage without
      logging information that would be very useful to an attacker.
    - Start work implementing multi-level keys for directory authorities:
      Add a standalone tool to generate key certificates. (Proposal 103.)

  o Security fixes:
    - Directory authorities now call routers stable if they have an
      uptime of at least 30 days, even if that's not the median uptime
      in the network. Implements proposal 107, suggested by Kevin Bauer
      and Damon McCoy.

  o Minor fixes (resource management):
    - Count the number of open sockets separately from the number
      of active connection_t objects. This will let us avoid underusing
      our allocated connection limit.
    - We no longer use socket pairs to link an edge connection to an
      anonymous directory connection or a DirPort test connection.
      Instead, we track the link internally and transfer the data
      in-process. This saves two sockets per "linked" connection (at the
      client and at the server), and avoids the nasty Windows socketpair()
      workaround.
    - Keep unused 4k and 16k buffers on free lists, rather than wasting 8k
      for every single inactive connection_t. Free items from the
      4k/16k-buffer free lists when they haven't been used for a while.

  o Minor features (build):
    - Make autoconf search for libevent, openssl, and zlib consistently.
    - Update deprecated macros in configure.in.
    - When warning about missing headers, tell the user to let us
      know if the compile succeeds anyway, so we can downgrade the
      warning.
    - Include the current subversion revision as part of the version
      string: either fetch it directly if we're in an SVN checkout, do
      some magic to guess it if we're in an SVK checkout, or use
      the last-detected version if we're building from a .tar.gz.
      Use this version consistently in log messages.

  o Minor features (logging):
    - Always prepend "Bug: " to any log message about a bug.
    - Put a platform string (e.g. "Linux i686") in the startup log
      message, so when people paste just their logs, we know if it's
      OpenBSD or Windows or what.
    - When logging memory usage, break down memory used in buffers by
      buffer type.

  o Minor features (directory system):
    - New config option V2AuthoritativeDirectory that all directory
      authorities should set. This will let future authorities choose
      not to serve V2 directory information.
    - Directory authorities allow multiple router descriptors and/or extra
      info documents to be uploaded in a single go.  This will make
      implementing proposal 104 simpler.

  o Minor features (controller):
    - Add a new config option __DisablePredictedCircuits designed for
      use by the controller, when we don't want Tor to build any circuits
      preemptively.
    - Let the controller specify HOP=%d as an argument to ATTACHSTREAM,
      so we can exit from the middle of the circuit.
    - Implement "getinfo status/circuit-established".
    - Implement "getinfo status/version/..." so a controller can tell
      whether the current version is recommended, and whether any versions
      are good, and how many authorities agree. (Patch from shibz.)

  o Minor features (hidden services):
    - Allow multiple HiddenServeicePort directives with the same virtual
      port; when they occur, the user is sent round-robin to one
      of the target ports chosen at random.  Partially fixes bug 393 by
      adding limited ad-hoc round-robining.

  o Minor features (other):
    - More unit tests.
    - Add a new AutomapHostsOnResolve option: when it is enabled, any
      resolve request for hosts matching a given pattern causes Tor to
      generate an internal virtual address mapping for that host.  This
      allows DNSPort to work sensibly with hidden service users.  By
      default, .exit and .onion addresses are remapped; the list of
      patterns can be reconfigured with AutomapHostsSuffixes.
    - Add an "-F" option to tor-resolve to force a resolve for a .onion
      address. Thanks to the AutomapHostsOnResolve option, this is no
      longer a completely silly thing to do.
    - If Tor is invoked from something that isn't a shell (e.g. Vidalia),
      now we expand "-f ~/.tor/torrc" correctly. Suggested by Matt Edman.
    - Treat "2gb" when given in torrc for a bandwidth as meaning 2gb,
      minus 1 byte: the actual maximum declared bandwidth.

  o Removed features:
    - Removed support for the old binary "version 0" controller protocol.
      This has been deprecated since 0.1.1, and warnings have been issued
      since 0.1.2.  When we encounter a v0 control message, we now send
      back an error and close the connection.
    - Remove the old "dns worker" server DNS code: it hasn't been default
      since 0.1.2.2-alpha, and all the servers seem to be using the new
      eventdns code.

  o Minor bugfixes (portability):
    - Even though Windows is equally happy with / and \ as path separators,
      try to use \ consistently on Windows and / consistently on Unix: it
      makes the log messages nicer.
    - Correctly report platform name on Windows 95 OSR2 and Windows 98 SE.

  o Minor bugfixes (directory):
    - Correctly enforce that elements of directory objects do not appear
      more often than they are allowed to appear.
    - When we are reporting the DirServer line we just parsed, we were
      logging the second stanza of the key fingerprint, not the first.

  o Minor bugfixes (logging):
    - When we hit an EOF on a log (probably because we're shutting down),
      don't try to remove the log from the list: just mark it as
      unusable.  (Bulletproofs against bug 222.)

  o Minor bugfixes (other):
    - In the exitlist script, only consider the most recently published
      server descriptor for each server. Also, when the user requests
      a list of servers that _reject_ connections to a given address,
      explicitly exclude the IPs that also have servers that accept
      connections to that address. (Resolves bug 405.)
    - Stop allowing hibernating servers to be "stable" or "fast".
    - On Windows, we were preventing other processes from reading
      cached-routers while Tor was running.  (Reported by janbar)
    - Make the NodeFamilies config option work. (Reported by
      lodger -- it has never actually worked, even though we added it
      in Oct 2004.)
    - Check return values from pthread_mutex functions.
    - Don't save non-general-purpose router descriptors to the disk cache,
      because we have no way of remembering what their purpose was when
      we restart.
    - Add even more asserts to hunt down bug 417.
    - Build without verbose warnings even on (not-yet-released) gcc 4.2.

  o Minor bugfixes (controller):
    - Make 'getinfo fingerprint' return a 551 error if we're not a
      server, so we match what the control spec claims we do. Reported
      by daejees.
    - Fix a typo in an error message when extendcircuit fails that
      caused us to not follow the \r\n-based delimiter protocol. Reported
      by daejees.

  o Code simplifications and refactoring:
    - Stop passing around circuit_t and crypt_path_t pointers that are
      implicit in other procedure arguments.
    - Drop the old code to choke directory connections when the
      corresponding OR connections got full: thanks to the cell queue
      feature, OR conns don't get full any more.
    - Make dns_resolve() handle attaching connections to circuits
      properly, so the caller doesn't have to.
    - Rename wants_to_read and wants_to_write to read/write_blocked_on_bw.
    - Keep the connection array as a dynamic smartlist_t, rather than as
      a fixed-sized array. This is important, as the number of connections
      is becoming increasingly decoupled from the number of sockets.

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