[tor-talk] Tor 0.3.3.4-alpha source code is released

[Nick Mathewson]

Hi, all!

There's a new alpha Tor release available as source code! 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 a Tor Browser alpha release likely by some
time in April.

Here's what's new:

Changes in version 0.3.3.4-alpha - 2018-03-29
  Tor 0.3.3.4-alpha includes various bugfixes for issues found during
  the alpha testing of earlier releases in its series. We are
  approaching a stable 0.3.3.4-alpha release: more testing is welcome!

  o New system requirements:
    - When built with Rust, Tor now depends on version 0.2.39 of the
      libc crate. Closes tickets 25310 and 25664.

  o Major bugfixes (relay, connection):
    - If we have failed to connect to a relay and received a connection
      refused, timeout, or similar error (at the TCP level), do not try
      that same address/port again for 60 seconds after the failure has
      occurred. Fixes bug 24767; bugfix on 0.0.6.

  o Minor features (geoip):
    - Update geoip and geoip6 to the March 8 2018 Maxmind GeoLite2
      Country database. Closes ticket 25469.

  o Minor features (log messages):
    - Improve log message in the out-of-memory handler to include
      information about memory usage from the different compression
      backends. Closes ticket 25372.

  o Minor features (sandbox):
    - Explicitly permit the poll() system call when the Linux
      seccomp2-based sandbox is enabled: apparently, some versions of
      libc use poll() when calling getpwnam(). Closes ticket 25313.

  o Minor bugfixes (C correctness):
    - Fix a very unlikely (impossible, we believe) null pointer
      dereference. Fixes bug 25629; bugfix on 0.2.9.15. Found by
      Coverity; this is CID 1430932.

  o Minor bugfixes (channel, client):
    - Better identify client connection when reporting to the geoip
      client cache. Fixes bug 24904; bugfix on 0.3.1.7.

  o Minor bugfixes (compilation):
    - Fix a C99 compliance issue in our configuration script that caused
      compilation issues when compiling Tor with certain versions of
      xtools. Fixes bug 25474; bugfix on 0.3.2.5-alpha.

  o Minor bugfixes (controller, reliability):
    - Avoid a (nonfatal) assertion failure when extending a one-hop
      circuit from the controller to become a multihop circuit. Fixes
      bug 24903; bugfix on 0.2.5.2-alpha.

  o Minor bugfixes (networking):
    - Tor will no longer reject IPv6 address strings from TorBrowser
      when they are passed as hostnames in SOCKS5 requests. Fixes bug
      25036, bugfix on Tor 0.3.1.2.
    - string_is_valid_hostname() will not consider IP strings to be
      valid hostnames. Fixes bug 25055; bugfix on Tor 0.2.5.5.

  o Minor bugfixes (onion service v3):
    - Avoid an assertion failure when the next the next onion service
      descriptor rotation type is out of sync with the consensus's
      valid-after time. Instead, log a warning message with extra
      information, so we can better hunt down the cause of this
      assertion. Fixes bug 25306; bugfix on 0.3.2.1-alpha.

  o Minor bugfixes (testing):
    - Avoid intermittent test failures due to a test that had relied on
      onion service introduction point creation finishing within 5
      seconds of real clock time. Fixes bug 25450; bugfix
      on 0.3.1.3-alpha.
    - Rust crates are now automatically detected and tested. Previously,
      some crates were not tested by `make test-rust` due to a static
      string in the `src/test/test_rust.sh` script specifying which
      crates to test. Fixes bug 25560; bugfix on 0.3.3.3-alpha.

  o Minor bugfixes (testing, benchmarks):
    - Fix a crash when running benchmark tests on win32 systems. The
      crash was due to a mutex that wasn't initialized before logging
      and options were initialized. Fixes bug 25479; bugfix
      on 0.3.3.3-alpha.

  o Minor bugfixes (warnings, ipv6):
    - Avoid a bug warning that could occur when trying to connect to a
      relay over IPv6. This warning would occur on a Tor instance that
      downloads router descriptors, but prefers to use microdescriptors.
      Fixes bug 25213; bugfix on 0.3.3.1-alpha.

  o Code simplification and refactoring:
    - Remove the old (deterministic) directory retry logic entirely:
      We've used exponential backoff exclusively for some time. Closes
      ticket 23814.

  o Documentation:
    - Improved the documentation of AccountingStart parameter. Closes
      ticket 23635.
    - Update the documentation for "Log" to include the current list of
      logging domains. Closes ticket 25378.