2007-01-06: Tor 0.1.2.5-alpha is out

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Tor is a anonymity network which allows you to read and publish anonymously on the Internet.

"This is the fifth development snapshot for the 0.1.2.x series. It enables write limiting by default, makes NT services more convenient and more correct, includes better detection for misbehaving DNS on servers, and a bunch of other features and bugfixes. It also ships with the new Vidalia 0.0.10 release."

Roger Dingeldine, the project leader, held a very interesting talk about Tor usage in China (and the world) at the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress. You can download it (filename "23C3-1444-en-tor_and_china.m4v") from one of the CCC "Official recordings" mirrors.

Changes in version 0.1.2.5-alpha - 2007-01-06

  • Major features:
    • Enable write limiting as well as read limiting. Now we sacrifice capacity if we're pushing out lots of directory traffic, rather than overrunning the user's intended bandwidth limits.
    • Include TLS overhead when counting bandwidth usage; previously, we would count only the bytes sent over TLS, but not the bytes used to send them.
    • Support running the Tor service with a torrc not in the same directory as tor.exe and default to using the torrc located in the %appdata%\Tor\ of the user who installed the service. Patch from Matt Edman.
    • Servers now check for the case when common DNS requests are going to wildcarded addresses (i.e. all getting the same answer), and change their exit policy to reject *:* if it's happening.
    • Implement BEGIN_DIR cells, so we can connect to the directory server via TLS to do encrypted directory requests rather than plaintext. Enable via the TunnelDirConns and PreferTunneledDirConns config options if you like. This still needs more debugging before people other than developers should try it.
  • Minor features (config and docs):
    • Start using the state file to store bandwidth accounting data: the bw_accounting file is now obsolete. We'll keep generating it for a while for people who are still using 0.1.2.4-alpha.
    • Try to batch changes to the state file so that we do as few disk writes as possible while still storing important things in a timely fashion.
    • The state file and the bw_accounting file get saved less often when the AvoidDiskWrites config option is set.
    • Make PIDFile work on Windows (untested).
    • Add internal descriptions for a bunch of configuration options: accessible via controller interface and in comments in saved options files.
    • Reject *:563 (NNTPS) in the default exit policy. We already reject NNTP by default, so this seems like a sensible addition.
    • Clients now reject hostnames with invalid characters. This should avoid some inadvertent info leaks. Add an option AllowNonRFC953Hostnames to disable this behavior, in case somebody is running a private network with hosts called @, !, and #.
    • Add a maintainer script to tell us which options are missing documentation: "make check-docs".
    • Add a new address-spec.txt document to describe our special-case addresses: .exit, .onion, and .noconnnect.
  • Minor features (DNS):
    • Ongoing work on eventdns infrastructure: now it has dns server and ipv6 support. One day Tor will make use of it.
    • Add client-side caching for reverse DNS lookups.
    • Add support to tor-resolve tool for reverse lookups and SOCKS5.
    • When we change nameservers or IP addresses, reset and re-launch our tests for DNS hijacking.
  • Minor features (directory):
    • Authorities now specify server versions in networkstatus. This adds about 2% to the side of compressed networkstatus docs, and allows clients to tell which servers support BEGIN_DIR and which don't. The implementation is forward-compatible with a proposed future protocol version scheme not tied to Tor versions.
    • DirServer configuration lines now have an orport= option so clients can open encrypted tunnels to the authorities without having downloaded their descriptors yet. Enabled for moria1, moria2, tor26, and lefkada now in the default configuration.
    • Directory servers are more willing to send a 503 "busy" if they are near their write limit, especially for v1 directory requests. Now they can use their limited bandwidth for actual Tor traffic.
    • Clients track responses with status 503 from dirservers. After a dirserver has given us a 503, we try not to use it until an hour has gone by, or until we have no dirservers that haven't given us a 503.
    • When we get a 503 from a directory, and we're not a server, we don't count the failure against the total number of failures allowed for the thing we're trying to download.
    • Report X-Your-Address-Is correctly from tunneled directory connections; don't report X-Your-Address-Is when it's an internal address; and never believe reported remote addresses when they're internal.
    • Protect against an unlikely DoS attack on directory servers.
    • Add a BadDirectory flag to network status docs so that authorities can (eventually) tell clients about caches they believe to be broken.
  • Minor features (controller):
    • Have GETINFO dir/status/* work on hosts with DirPort disabled.
    • Reimplement GETINFO so that info/names stays in sync with the actual keys.
    • Implement "GETINFO fingerprint".
    • Implement "SETEVENTS GUARD" so controllers can get updates on entry guard status as it changes.
  • Minor features (clean up obsolete pieces):
    • Remove some options that have been deprecated since at least 0.1.0.x: AccountingMaxKB, LogFile, DebugLogFile, LogLevel, and SysLog. Use AccountingMax instead of AccountingMaxKB, and use Log to set log options.
    • We no longer look for identity and onion keys in "identity.key" and "onion.key" -- these were replaced by secret_id_key and secret_onion_key in 0.0.8pre1.
    • We no longer require unrecognized directory entries to be preceded by "opt".
  • Major bugfixes (security):
    • Stop sending the HttpProxyAuthenticator string to directory servers when directory connections are tunnelled through Tor.
    • Clients no longer store bandwidth history in the state file.
    • Do not log introduction points for hidden services if SafeLogging is set.
    • When generating bandwidth history, round down to the nearest 1k. When storing accounting data, round up to the nearest 1k.
    • When we're running as a server, remember when we last rotated onion keys, so that we will rotate keys once they're a week old even if we never stay up for a week ourselves.
  • Major bugfixes (other):
    • Fix a longstanding bug in eventdns that prevented the count of timed-out resolves from ever being reset. This bug caused us to give up on a nameserver the third time it timed out, and try it 10 seconds later... and to give up on it every time it timed out after that.
    • Take out the '5 second' timeout from the connection retry schedule. Now the first connect attempt will wait a full 10 seconds before switching to a new circuit. Perhaps this will help a lot. Based on observations from Mike Perry.
    • Fix a bug on the Windows implementation of tor_mmap_file() that would prevent the cached-routers file from ever loading. Reported by John Kimble.
  • Minor bugfixes:
    • Fix an assert failure when a directory authority sets AuthDirRejectUnlisted and then receives a descriptor from an unlisted router. Reported by seeess.
    • Avoid a double-free when parsing malformed DirServer lines.
    • Fix a bug when a BSD-style PF socket is first used. Patch from Fabian Keil.
    • Fix a bug in 0.1.2.2-alpha that prevented clients from asking to resolve an address at a given exit node even when they ask for it by name.
    • Servers no longer ever list themselves in their "family" line, even if configured to do so. This makes it easier to configure family lists conveniently.
    • When running as a server, don't fall back to 127.0.0.1 when no nameservers are configured in /etc/resolv.conf; instead, make the user fix resolv.conf or specify nameservers explicitly. (Resolves bug 363.)
    • Stop accepting certain malformed ports in configured exit policies.
    • Don't re-write the fingerprint file every restart, unless it has changed.
    • Stop warning when a single nameserver fails: only warn when _all_ of our nameservers have failed. Also, when we only have one nameserver, raise the threshold for deciding that the nameserver is dead.
    • Directory authorities now only decide that routers are reachable if their identity keys are as expected.
    • When the user uses bad syntax in the Log config line, stop suggesting other bad syntax as a replacement.
    • Correctly detect ipv6 DNS capability on OpenBSD.
  • Minor bugfixes (controller):
    • Report the circuit number correctly in STREAM CLOSED events. Bug reported by Mike Perry.
    • Do not report bizarre values for results of accounting GETINFOs when the last second's write or read exceeds the allotted bandwidth.
    • Report "unrecognized key" rather than an empty string when the controller tries to fetch a networkstatus that doesn't exist.

Download: http://tor.eff.org/download.html


published 2007-01-06 - last edited 2019-06-15


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