[tor-talk] Tor 0.3.3.1-alpha is released!

Nick Mathewson nickm at torproject.org
Thu Jan 25 18:54:43 UTC 2018


Hi, all!

There's a new alpha Tor release!  Because it's an alpha, you should
only run it if you're ready to find more bugs than usual, and report
them on trac.torproject.org.

The source code is available from the usual place on
www.torproject.org; if you build Tor from source, why not give it a
try? And if you don't build Tor from source, packages should be ready
over the coming days, with an alpha Tor Browser release likely some
time in February.

=====

Here's what's new!

Changes in version 0.3.3.1-alpha - 2018-01-25
  Tor 0.3.3.1-alpha is the first release in the 0.3.3.x series. It adds
  several new features to Tor, including several improvements to
  bootstrapping, and support for an experimental "vanguards" feature to
  resist guard discovery attacks. This series also includes better
  support for applications that need to embed Tor or manage v3
  onion services.

  o Major features (embedding):
    - There is now a documented stable API for programs that need to
      embed Tor. See tor_api.h for full documentation and known bugs.
      Closes ticket 23684.
    - Tor now has support for restarting in the same process.
      Controllers that run Tor using the "tor_api.h" interface can now
      restart Tor after Tor has exited. This support is incomplete,
      however: we fixed crash bugs that prevented it from working at
      all, but many bugs probably remain, including a possibility of
      security issues. Implements ticket 24581.

  o Major features (IPv6, directory documents):
    - Add consensus method 27, which adds IPv6 ORPorts to the microdesc
      consensus. This information makes it easier for IPv6 clients to
      bootstrap and choose reachable entry guards. Implements 23826.
    - Add consensus method 28, which removes IPv6 ORPorts from
      microdescriptors. Now that the consensus contains IPv6 ORPorts,
      they are redundant in microdescs. This change will be used by Tor
      clients on 0.2.8.x and later. (That is to say, with all Tor
      clients having IPv6 bootstrap and guard support.) Implements 23828.
    - Expand the documentation for AuthDirHasIPv6Connectivity when it is
      set by different numbers of authorities. Fixes 23870
      on 0.2.4.1-alpha.

  o Major features (onion service v3, control port):
    - The control port now supports commands and events for v3 onion
      services. It is now possible to create ephemeral v3 services using
      ADD_ONION. Additionally, several events (HS_DESC, HS_DESC_CONTENT,
      CIRC and CIRC_MINOR) and commands (GETINFO, HSPOST, ADD_ONION and
      DEL_ONION) have been extended to support v3 onion services. Closes
      ticket 20699; implements proposal 284.

  o Major features (onion services):
    - Provide torrc options to pin the second and third hops of onion
      service circuits to a list of nodes. The option HSLayer2Guards
      pins the second hop, and the option HSLayer3Guards pins the third
      hop. These options are for use in conjunction with experiments
      with "vanguards" for preventing guard enumeration attacks. Closes
      ticket 13837.

  o Major features (rust, portability, experimental):
    - Tor now ships with an optional implementation of one of its
      smaller modules (protover.c) in the Rust programming language. To
      try it out, install a Rust build environment, and configure Tor
      with "--enable-rust --enable-cargo-online-mode". This should not
      cause any user-visible changes, but should help us gain more
      experience with Rust, and plan future Rust integration work.
      Implementation by Chelsea Komlo. Closes ticket 22840.

  o Major features (storage, configuration):
    - Users can store cached directory documents somewhere other than
      the DataDirectory by using the CacheDirectory option. Similarly,
      the storage location for relay's keys can be overridden with the
      KeyDirectory option. Closes ticket 22703.

  o Major features (v3 onion services, ipv6):
    - When v3 onion service clients send introduce cells, they now
      include the IPv6 address of the rendezvous point, if it has one.
      Current v3 onion services running 0.3.2 ignore IPv6 addresses, but
      in future Tor versions, IPv6-only v3 single onion services will be
      able to use IPv6 addresses to connect directly to the rendezvous
      point. Closes ticket 23577. Patch by Neel Chauhan.

  o Major bugfixes (onion services, retry behavior):
    - Fix an "off by 2" error in counting rendezvous failures on the
      onion service side. While we thought we would stop the rendezvous
      attempt after one failed circuit, we were actually making three
      circuit attempts before giving up. Now switch to a default of 2,
      and allow the consensus parameter "hs_service_max_rdv_failures" to
      override. Fixes bug 24895; bugfix on 0.0.6.
    - New-style (v3) onion services now obey the "max rendezvous circuit
      attempts" logic. Previously they would make as many rendezvous
      circuit attempts as they could fit in the MAX_REND_TIMEOUT second
      window before giving up. Fixes bug 24894; bugfix on 0.3.2.1-alpha.

  o Major bugfixes (relays):
    - Fix a set of false positives where relays would consider
      connections to other relays as being client-only connections (and
      thus e.g. deserving different link padding schemes) if those
      relays fell out of the consensus briefly. Now we look only at the
      initial handshake and whether the connection authenticated as a
      relay. Fixes bug 24898; bugfix on 0.3.1.1-alpha.

  o Minor feature (IPv6):
    - Make IPv6-only clients wait for microdescs for relays, even if we
      were previously using descriptors (or were using them as a bridge)
      and have a cached descriptor for them. Implements 23827.
    - When a consensus has IPv6 ORPorts, make IPv6-only clients use
      them, rather than waiting to download microdescriptors.
      Implements 23827.

  o Minor features (cleanup):
    - Tor now deletes the CookieAuthFile and ExtORPortCookieAuthFile
      when it stops. Closes ticket 23271.

  o Minor features (defensive programming):
    - Most of the functions in Tor that free objects have been replaced
      with macros that free the objects and set the corresponding
      pointers to NULL. This change should help prevent a large class of
      dangling pointer bugs. Closes ticket 24337.
    - Where possible, the tor_free() macro now only evaluates its input
      once. Part of ticket 24337.
    - Check that microdesc ed25519 ids are non-zero in
      node_get_ed25519_id() before returning them. Implements 24001,
      patch by "aruna1234".

  o Minor features (directory authority):
    - Make the "Exit" flag assignment only depend on whether the exit
      policy allows connections to ports 80 and 443. Previously relays
      would get the Exit flag if they allowed connections to one of
      these ports and also port 6667. Resolves ticket 23637.

  o Minor features (embedding):
    - Tor can now start with a preauthenticated control connection
      created by the process that launched it. This feature is meant for
      use by programs that want to launch and manage a Tor process
      without allowing other programs to manage it as well. For more
      information, see the __OwningControllerFD option documented in
      control-spec.txt. Closes ticket 23900.
    - On most errors that would cause Tor to exit, it now tries to
      return from the tor_main() function, rather than calling the
      system exit() function. Most users won't notice a difference here,
      but it should make a significant for programs that run Tor inside
      a separate thread: they should now be able to survive Tor's exit
      conditions rather than having Tor shut down the entire process.
      Closes ticket 23848.
    - Applications that want to embed Tor can now tell Tor not to
      register any of its own POSIX signal handlers, using the
      __DisableSignalHandlers option. Closes ticket 24588.

  o Minor features (fallback directory list):
    - Avoid selecting fallbacks that change their IP addresses too
      often. Select more fallbacks by ignoring the Guard flag, and
      allowing lower cutoffs for the Running and V2Dir flags. Also allow
      a lower bandwidth, and a higher number of fallbacks per operator
      (5% of the list). Implements ticket 24785.
    - Update the fallback whitelist and blacklist based on opt-ins and
      relay changes. Closes tickets 22321, 24678, 22527, 24135,
      and 24695.

  o Minor features (fallback directory mirror configuration):
    - Add a nickname to each fallback in a C comment. This makes it
      easier for operators to find their relays, and allows stem to use
      nicknames to identify fallbacks. Implements ticket 24600.
    - Add a type and version header to the fallback directory mirror
      file. Also add a delimiter to the end of each fallback entry. This
      helps external parsers like stem and Relay Search. Implements
      ticket 24725.
    - Add an extrainfo cache flag for each fallback in a C comment. This
      allows stem to use fallbacks to fetch extra-info documents, rather
      than using authorities. Implements ticket 22759.
    - Add the generateFallbackDirLine.py script for automatically
      generating fallback directory mirror lines from relay fingerprints.
      No more typos! Add the lookupFallbackDirContact.py script for
      automatically looking up operator contact info from relay
      fingerprints. Implements ticket 24706, patch by teor and atagar.
    - Reject any fallback directory mirror that serves an expired
      consensus. Implements ticket 20942, patch by "minik".
    - Remove commas and equals signs from external string inputs to the
      fallback list. This avoids format confusion attacks. Implements
      ticket 24726.
    - Remove the "weight=10" line from fallback directory mirror
      entries. Ticket 24681 will maintain the current fallback weights
      by changing Tor's default fallback weight to 10. Implements
      ticket 24679.
    - Stop logging excessive information about fallback netblocks.
      Implements ticket 24791.

  o Minor features (forward-compatibility):
    - If a relay supports some link authentication protocol that we do
      not recognize, then include that relay's ed25519 key when telling
      other relays to extend to it. Previously, we treated future
      versions as if they were too old to support ed25519 link
      authentication. Closes ticket 20895.

  o Minor features (heartbeat):
    - Add onion service information to our heartbeat logs, displaying
      stats about the activity of configured onion services. Closes
      ticket 24896.

  o Minor features (instrumentation, development):
    - Add the MainloopStats option to allow developers to get
      instrumentation information from the main event loop via the
      heartbeat messages. We hope to use this to improve Tor's behavior
      when it's trying to sleep. Closes ticket 24605.

  o Minor features (log messages):
    - Improve a warning message that happens when we fail to re-parse an
      old router because of an expired certificate. Closes ticket 20020.
    - Make the log more quantitative when we hit MaxMemInQueues
      threshold exposing some values. Closes ticket 24501.

  o Minor features (logging, android):
    - Added support for the Android logging subsystem. Closes
      ticket 24362.

  o Minor features (performance):
    - Support predictive circuit building for onion service circuits
      with multiple layers of guards. Closes ticket 23101.
    - Use stdatomic.h where available, rather than mutexes, to implement
      atomic_counter_t. Closes ticket 23953.

  o Minor features (performance, 32-bit):
    - Improve performance on 32-bit systems by avoiding 64-bit division
      when calculating the timestamp in milliseconds for channel padding
      computations. Implements ticket 24613.
    - Improve performance on 32-bit systems by avoiding 64-bit division
      when timestamping cells and buffer chunks for OOM calculations.
      Implements ticket 24374.

  o Minor features (performance, OSX, iOS):
    - Use the mach_approximate_time() function (when available) to
      implement coarse monotonic time. Having a coarse time function
      should avoid a large number of system calls, and improve
      performance slightly, especially under load. Closes ticket 24427.

  o Minor features (performance, windows):
    - Improve performance on Windows Vista and Windows 7 by adjusting
      TCP send window size according to the recommendation from
      SIO_IDEAL_SEND_BACKLOG_QUERY. Closes ticket 22798. Patch
      from Vort.

  o Minor features (relay):
    - Implement an option, ReducedExitPolicy, to allow an Tor exit relay
      operator to use a more reasonable ("reduced") exit policy, rather
      than the default one. If you want to run an exit node without
      thinking too hard about which ports to allow, this one is for you.
      Closes ticket 13605. Patch from Neel Chauhan.

  o Minor features (testing, debugging, embedding):
    - For development purposes, Tor now has a mode in which it runs for
      a few seconds, then stops, and starts again without exiting the
      process. This mode is meant to help us debug various issues with
      ticket 23847. To use this feature, compile with
      --enable-restart-debugging, and set the TOR_DEBUG_RESTART
      environment variable. This is expected to crash a lot, and is
      really meant for developers only. It will likely be removed in a
      future release. Implements ticket 24583.

  o Minor bugfix (network IPv6 test):
    - Tor's test scripts now check if "ping -6 ::1" works when the user
      runs "make test-network-all". Fixes bug 24677; bugfix on
      0.2.9.3-alpha. Patch by "ffmancera".

  o Minor bugfixes (build, rust):
    - Fix output of autoconf checks to display success messages for Rust
      dependencies and a suitable rustc compiler version. Fixes bug
      24612; bugfix on 0.3.1.3-alpha.
    - When building with Rust on OSX, link against libresolv, to work
      around the issue at https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/46797.
      Fixes bug 24652; bugfix on 0.3.1.1-alpha.
    - Don't pass the --quiet option to cargo: it seems to suppress some
      errors, which is not what we want to do when building. Fixes bug
      24518; bugfix on 0.3.1.7.
    - Build correctly when building from outside Tor's source tree with
      the TOR_RUST_DEPENDENCIES option set. Fixes bug 22768; bugfix
      on 0.3.1.7.

  o Minor bugfixes (directory authorities, IPv6):
    - When creating a routerstatus (vote) from a routerinfo (descriptor),
      set the IPv6 address to the unspecified IPv6 address, and
      explicitly initialize the port to zero. Fixes bug 24488; bugfix
      on 0.2.4.1-alpha.

  o Minor bugfixes (fallback directory mirrors):
    - Make updateFallbackDirs.py search harder for python. (Some OSs
      don't put it in /usr/bin.) Fixes bug 24708; bugfix
      on 0.2.8.1-alpha.

  o Minor bugfixes (hibernation, bandwidth accounting, shutdown):
    - When hibernating, close connections normally and allow them to
      flush. Fixes bug 23571; bugfix on 0.2.4.7-alpha. Also fixes
      bug 7267.
    - Do not attempt to launch self-reachability tests when entering
      hibernation. Fixes a case of bug 12062; bugfix on 0.0.9pre5.
    - Resolve several bugs related to descriptor fetching on bridge
      clients with bandwidth accounting enabled. (This combination is
      not recommended!) Fixes a case of bug 12062; bugfix
      on 0.2.0.3-alpha.
    - When hibernating, do not attempt to launch DNS checks. Fixes a
      case of bug 12062; bugfix on 0.1.2.2-alpha.
    - When hibernating, do not try to upload or download descriptors.
      Fixes a case of bug 12062; bugfix on 0.0.9pre5.

  o Minor bugfixes (IPv6, bridges):
    - Tor now always sets IPv6 preferences for bridges. Fixes bug 24573;
      bugfix on 0.2.8.2-alpha.
    - Tor now sets IPv6 address in the routerstatus as well as in the
      router descriptors when updating addresses for a bridge. Closes
      ticket 24572; bugfix on 0.2.4.5-alpha. Patch by "ffmancera".

  o Minor bugfixes (linux seccomp2 sandbox):
    - When running with the sandbox enabled, reload configuration files
      correctly even when %include was used. Previously we would crash.
      Fixes bug 22605; bugfix on 0.3.1. Patch from Daniel Pinto.

  o Minor bugfixes (memory leaks):
    - Avoid possible at-exit memory leaks related to use of Libevent's
      event_base_once() function. (This function tends to leak memory if
      the event_base is closed before the event fires.) Fixes bug 24584;
      bugfix on 0.2.8.1-alpha.
    - Fix a harmless memory leak in tor-resolve. Fixes bug 24582; bugfix
      on 0.2.1.1-alpha.

  o Minor bugfixes (OSX):
    - Don't exit the Tor process if setrlimit() fails to change the file
      limit (which can happen sometimes on some versions of OSX). Fixes
      bug 21074; bugfix on 0.0.9pre5.

  o Minor bugfixes (performance, fragile-hardening):
    - Improve the performance of our consensus-diff application code
      when Tor is built with the --enable-fragile-hardening option set.
      Fixes bug 24826; bugfix on 0.3.1.1-alpha.

  o Minor bugfixes (performance, timeouts):
    - Consider circuits for timeout as soon as they complete a hop. This
      is more accurate than applying the timeout in
      circuit_expire_building() because that function is only called
      once per second, which is now too slow for typical timeouts on the
      current network. Fixes bug 23114; bugfix on 0.2.2.2-alpha.
    - Use onion service circuits (and other circuits longer than 3 hops)
      to calculate a circuit build timeout. Previously, Tor only
      calculated its build timeout based on circuits that planned to be
      exactly 3 hops long. With this change, we include measurements
      from all circuits at the point where they complete their third
      hop. Fixes bug 23100; bugfix on 0.2.2.2-alpha.

  o Minor bugfixes (testing):
    - Give out Exit flags in bootstrapping networks. Fixes bug 24137;
      bugfix on 0.2.3.1-alpha.
    - Fix a memory leak in the scheduler/loop_kist unit test. Fixes bug
      25005; bugfix on 0.3.2.7-rc.

  o Code simplification and refactoring:
    - Remove /usr/athena from search path in configure.ac. Closes
      ticket 24363.
    - Remove duplicate code in node_has_curve25519_onion_key() and
      node_get_curve25519_onion_key(), and add a check for a zero
      microdesc curve25519 onion key. Closes ticket 23966, patch by
      "aruna1234" and teor.
    - Rewrite channel_rsa_id_group_set_badness to reduce temporary
      memory allocations with large numbers of OR connections (e.g.
      relays). Closes ticket 24119.
    - Separate the function that deletes ephemeral files when Tor
      stops gracefully.
    - Small changes to Tor's buf_t API to make it suitable for use as a
      general-purpose safe string constructor. Closes ticket 22342.
    - Switch -Wnormalized=id to -Wnormalized=nfkc in configure.ac to
      avoid source code identifier confusion. Closes ticket 24467.
    - The tor_git_revision[] constant no longer needs to be redeclared
      by everything that links against the rest of Tor. Done as part of
      ticket 23845, to simplify our external API.
    - We make extend_info_from_node() use node_get_curve25519_onion_key()
      introduced in ticket 23577 to access the curve25519 public keys
      rather than accessing it directly. Closes ticket 23760. Patch by
      Neel Chauhan.
    - Add a function to log channels' scheduler state changes to aid
      debugging efforts. Closes ticket 24531.

  o Documentation:
    - Add documentation on how to build tor with Rust dependencies
      without having to be online. Closes ticket 22907; bugfix
      on 0.3.0.3-alpha.
    - Clarify the behavior of RelayBandwidth{Rate,Burst} with client
      traffic. Closes ticket 24318.
    - Document that OutboundBindAddress doesn't apply to DNS requests.
      Closes ticket 22145. Patch from Aruna Maurya.
    - Document that operators who run more than one relay or bridge are
      expected to set MyFamily and ContactInfo correctly. Closes
      ticket 24526.

  o Code simplification and refactoring (channels):
    - Remove the incoming and outgoing channel queues. These were never
      used, but still took up a step in our fast path.
    - The majority of the channel unit tests have been rewritten and the
      code coverage has now been raised to 83.6% for channel.c. Closes
      ticket 23709.
    - Remove other dead code from the channel subsystem: All together,
      this cleanup has removed more than 1500 lines of code overall and
      adding very little except for unit test.

  o Code simplification and refactoring (circuit rendezvous):
    - Split the client-size rendezvous circuit lookup into two
      functions: one that returns only established circuits and another
      that returns all kinds of circuits. Closes ticket 23459.

  o Code simplification and refactoring (controller):
    - Make most of the variables in networkstatus_getinfo_by_purpose()
      const. Implements ticket 24489.


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