tor releases

May 2010 Progress Report

phobos — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 10:55:48 -0700

New releases

On May 26, Tor Browser Bundle for Microsoft Windows is updated to include the newer Vidalia 0.2.9. This ﬁxes some issues with character set handling, and adds Vietnamese as a new language.

On May 31, we released Tor Browser Bundle for Linux 1.0.6. It contains the following updates:

Add arch to tarball name so there's no collision
Add libpng for Arch Linux
Add HTTPS Everywhere extension
Update Qt to 4.6.2
Update Vidalia to 0.2.9
Update NoScript to 1.9.9.80

On June 1st, we released Tor Browser Bundle for Linux 1.0.7. It uses an older glibc for better compatibility with older linux distributions.

On May 20, we released Vidalia 0.2.9. Fixes include Qt 4.6.2 compatibility, new cert, and some new translations. You can download it at https://www.torproject.org/vidalia/. Packages are slowly being updated to include this version of Vidalia.
The full changelog is:

Remove the GoDaddy CA certificate bundle since we changed the certificate used to authenticate connections to geoips.vidalia-project.net for downloading GeoIP information from a commercial GoDaddy certificate to a free CACert certificate.
Define -D_WIN32_WINNT=0x0501 on Windows builds so that MiniUPnPc will build with the latest versions of MinGW.
Modify miniupnpc.c from MiniUPnPc's source so that it will build on Mac OS X 10.4.
Work around Qt's new behavior for the QT_WA macro so that Vidalia will work correctly again on Windows with Qt >= 4.6.

On May 2nd, we released an updated stable version of Tor, 0.2.1.26.
The detailed list of changes is:

o Major bugfixes:
- Teach relays to defend themselves from connection overload. Relays
now close idle circuits early if it looks like they were intended
for directory fetches. Relays are also more aggressive about closing
TLS connections that have no circuits on them. Such circuits are
unlikely to be re-used, and tens of thousands of them were piling
up at the fast relays, causing the relays to run out of sockets
and memory. Bugfix on 0.2.0.22-rc (where clients started tunneling
their directory fetches over TLS).
- Fix SSL renegotiation behavior on OpenSSL versions like on Centos
that claim to be earlier than 0.9.8m, but which have in reality
backported huge swaths of 0.9.8m or 0.9.8n renegotiation
behavior. Possible fix for some cases of bug 1346.
- Directory mirrors were fetching relay descriptors only from v2
directory authorities, rather than v3 authorities like they should.
Only 2 v2 authorities remain (compared to 7 v3 authorities), leading
to a serious bottleneck. Bugfix on 0.2.0.9-alpha. Fixes bug 1324.

o Minor bugfixes:
- Finally get rid of the deprecated and now harmful notion of "clique
mode", where directory authorities maintain TLS connections to
every other relay.

o Testsuite fixes:
- In the util/threads test, no longer free the test_mutex before all
worker threads have finished. Bugfix on 0.2.1.6-alpha.
- The master thread could starve the worker threads quite badly on
certain systems, causing them to run only partially in the allowed
window. This resulted in test failures. Now the master thread sleeps
occasionally for a few microseconds while the two worker-threads
compete for the mutex. Bugfix on 0.2.0.1-alpha.

On May 19, we released an updated OrBot (Tor for Android), version 0.0.6, which contains Tor 0.2.2.13-alpha.

On May 26, we released an updated Orbot (Tor for Android), version 0.0.7, which contains a number of usability fixes reported by users. See the bugfixes in trac.

Design, develop, and implement enhancements that make Tor a better tool for users in censored countries.

On May 4, China's Great Firewall began blocking connections to the public Tor relays. They also updated their blocking to include bridge relays published via email and https websites. Further research into the blocking mechanisms from inside China show they are simply blocking IP Address and TCP port combinations. Bridge relays that have been seeded into various social networks in China continue to work well.

Tor on the Android OS, called Orbot, continues progress. Work continues on a privacy-preserving web browser, Orweb, and other supporting applications to make Tor on Android more useful for daily users. Nathan got a Tor relay running on a Moons e-7001 “iRobot” tablet, tor on a tablet.

Grow the Tor network and user base. Outreach.

Jacob, Roger, Runa, and Linus talked to various NorduNet and SUNET people in Sweden. As a result, we have a new directory authority and bandwidth authority located within NorduNET.
Erinn and Karen attended the Global Voices Summit 2010 in Santiago, Chile. There were a number of discussions about how to use Tor safely and its usage in activism. Erinn held a detailed Tor training for 5-10 activists in Spanish. http://summit2010.globalvoicesonline.org
Roger gave a few talks as AUSCERT, http://www.auscert.org.au/
Roger was interviewed by The Australian about Internet censorship and privacy. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/call-to-join-tor-network-t...
Roger was interviewed by ComputerWorld Australia about the relationship between China and Tor. http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/347273/auscert_2010_china_set_ne...
Jacob gave the keynote speech at CONFidence in Krakow, Poland, http://2010.confidence.org.pl/.
Jacob, Christian, and others attended pH neutral in Berlin, Germany. http://ph-neutral.darklab.org/
Karen met with a sub-committee of the US Senate Intelligence Committee to discuss the fallacy of cyberwar.

Preconfigured privacy (circumvention) bundles for USB or LiveCD.
Continued to work on Linux and Mac OS X tor browser bundles. The Mac version of TBB is going to use a sandboxing technology borrowed from IronFox. This should help minimize the footprint and security concerns about running TBB on OS X computers.

Scalability, load balancing, directory overhead, efficiency.
From the 0.2.1.26 release notes, teach relays to defend themselves from connection overload. Relays now close idle circuits early if it looks like they were intended for directory fetches. Relays are also more aggressive about closing TLS connections that have no circuits on them. Such circuits are unlikely to be re-used, and tens of thousands of them were piling up at the fast relays, causing the relays to run out of sockets and memory. Bugfix on 0.2.0.22-rc (where clients started tunneling their directory fetches over TLS).

Translation work, ultimately a browser-based approach.

Added the Android orbot application to the translation portal.
By user request, add Serbian to the available languages.
Translation updates for the following languages: Polish, Arabic, Greek, Serbian, Russian, Swedish, Chinese, Norwegian, Japanese, German, Spanish, Portugese, French, Dutch, Romanian, and Farsi.

October 2009 Progress Report

phobos — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 07:14:19 -0800

New releases, new hires, new funding
Christian Fromme joins Tor to work on development and maintenance of the growing number of tools we’ve created over the past year. Christian is a great python hacker with a strong security mindset. He’s going to enhance and maintain the tools such as tor weather, get-tor, bridge database, tor control, tor flow, check.torproject.org, etc. Christian has been a volunteer developer for the past year helping to enhance get-tor, tor weather, and generally helping out with our python coding needs.

On October 10, we released Tor version 0.2.2.4-alpha. The release notes can be read at https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-0224-alpha-released or below:
Major bugfixes:

Fix several more asserts in the circuit build times code, for example one that causes Tor to fail to start once we have accumulated 5000 build times in the state file. Bugfixes on 0.2.2.2-alpha; fixes bug 1108.

New directory authorities:

Move moria1 and Tonga to alternate IP addresses.

Minor features:

Log SSL state transitions at debug level during handshake, and include SSL states in error messages. This may help debug future SSL handshake issues.
Add a new ”Handshake” log domain for activities that happen during the TLS handshake.
Revert to the ”June 3 2009” ip-to-country file. The September one seems to have removed most US IP addresses.
Directory authorities now reject Tor relays with versions less than 0.1.2.14. This step cuts out four relays from the current network, none of which are very big.

Minor bugfixes:

Fix a couple of smaller issues with gathering statistics. Bugfixes on 0.2.2.1-alpha.
Fix two memory leaks in the error case of circuit build times parse state. Bugfix on 0.2.2.2-alpha.
Don’t count one-hop circuits when we’re estimating how long it takes circuits to build on average. Otherwise we’ll set our circuit build timeout lower than we should. Bugfix on 0.2.2.2-alpha.
Directory authorities no longer change their opinion of, or vote on, whether a router is Running, unless they have themselves been online long enough to have some idea. Bugfix on 0.2.0.6-alpha. Fixes bug 1023.

Code simplifications and refactoring:

Revise our unit tests to use the ”tinytest” framework, so we can run tests in their own processes, have smarter setup/teardown code, and so on. The unit test code has moved to its own subdirectory, and has been split into multiple modules.

On October 11, we released Tor 0.2.2.5-alpha. The release notes can be read at https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-0225-alpha-released or below:
Major bugfixes:

Make the tarball compile again. Oops. Bugfix on 0.2.2.4-alpha.

New directory authorities:

Move dizum to an alternate IP address.
Code simplifications and refactorings
Numerous changes, bugfixes, and workarounds from Nathan Freitas to help Tor build correctly for Android phones.

On October 14th we released Vidalia 0.2.5. The release notes can be read at https://blog.torproject.org/blog/vidalia-025-released or below:

Add support in the Network settings page for configuring the Socks4Proxy and Socks5Proxy* options that were added in Tor 0.2.2.1-alpha. Patch from Christopher Davis.
Add a ”Automatically distribute my bridge address” checkbox (enabled by default) to the bridge relay settings options. (Ticket #524)
Add ports 7000 and 7001 to the list of ports excluded by the IRC category in the exit policy configuration tab. (Ticket #517)
Add a context menu for highlighted event items in the ”Basic” message log view that allows the user to copy the selected item text to the clipboard.
Maybe fix a time conversion bug that could result in Vidalia displaying the wrong uptime for a relay in the network map. Stop trying to enforce proper quoting and escaping of arguments to be given to the proxy executable (e.g., Polipo). Now the user is on their own for properly formatting the command line used to start the proxy executable. (Ticket #523)

Design, develop, and implement enhancements that make Tor a better tool for users in censored countries.

Jacob and Nathan Frietas finished development of Orbot, a tor client and relay with a graphical control interface for the Android mobile operating system. More details can be found at http://openideals.com/2009/10/22/orbot-proxy/.

Karsten rewrote the directory archive script that evaluates whether an IP address was a relay at a given point in the past in Python.

Started comparing free and commercial GeoIP databases for their accuracy. It would be great if someone else (a student?) would pick up this work and move it forward.

Grow the Tor network and user base. Outreach.

Andrew attended the Salzburg Global Seminar SIM Initiative 2020 Vision: Setting a Long-Term Agenda for Global Media Development from October 3 - 8. http://www.salzburgglobal.org/2009/sim.cfm?nav=news&IDMedia=1. A quick writeup of the seminar was posted at https://blog.torproject.org/blog/seminar-salzburg-global.
Roger gave a talk at Drexel University, https://www.cs.drexel.edu/research/colloquia.
Andrew gave a talk about Freedom of Speech, Online Censorship, and Tor at the US Agency for International Development. It was attended by members of US AID, State Department, and National Security Staff from The White House.
Roger, Jacob, Karsten, and Mike attended the 2009 Google Summer of Code Mentors Summit at Google HQ.
Andrew gave a talk about Tor and its Privacy by Design at the 2009 Access and Privacy Workshop in Toronto, Canada. http://www.verney.ca/onap2009/agenda_dynamic.php.
Jacob gave a talk at the 25th NorduNet Conference, http://www.nordu.net/conference/ndn2009web/welcome.html.
Andrew, Wendy, and others were interviewed for a Tech Review article on Tor being blocked by the Chinese Government for the first time ever, http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=23736.
Karsten attended EMANICS Workshop on Network Security in Bremen, Germany, and gave a 90-minute talk on Tor and my metrics work.
Karsten and Sebastian attended PET-CON 2009.2 in Regensburg, Germany, and talked about measuring sensitive data in the Tor network.
Finished paper on ”A Case Study on Measuring Statistical Data in the Tor Anonymity Network” together with Steven and Roger and submitted it to WECSR 2010.

Preconfigured privacy (circumvention) bundles for USB or LiveCD.
Testing program updates to Tor Browser Bundle destined for the next release. The multi-protocol instant messaging client we use, Pidgin, includes voip and video chat functionality. Vidalia 0.2.5 inclusion to make the process of acquiring bridge addresses or becoming a bridge easier.

Bridge relay and bridge authority work.
The bridge distribution backend is now far more reliable than it was, and the algorithm has been retuned with design from Nick and Roger. Now the bridgedb code is much more willing to hand out a user’s first few bridges, but it is much harder to get it to hand out a whole bunch of bridges.

Scalability, load balancing, directory overhead, efficiency.
Nick rewrote the directory authority backend code to be able to provide multiple flavors of directory info: a new flavor that can be used for low-directory-bandwidth clients, and the existing flavor to support existing clients. This is the authority-side of proposals 158 and 162; once the authorities are migrated to this, we can start rolling out the client-side. Once it’s done, the directory overhead for clients should be dramatically reduced.

More reliable (e.g. split) download mechanism.
Christian rolled out changes to the email auto-responder, get-tor, to better handle emails coming to us in various languages. 50% more emails are being answered correctly since the change.
Thanks to some open internet activists in India, we have a fine new mirror of the Tor website in country at http://www.torproject.org.in/.
4 new website mirrors joined, 4 existing mirrors left.

Translation work

6 German updates to the website.
114 Italian updates to Torbutton.
17 Italian updates to the website.
Updated Arabic translation of Torbutton.
Complete Burmese translation of Torbutton.
Complete Burmese translation of Torcheck.
Complete Danish translation of Torcheck.
Brazilian translation of Torbutton.

Tor Browser Bundle 1.2.5 and 1.2.6 released

phobos — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 23:51:22 -0700

Tor Browser Bundle 1.2.5 and 1.2.6 are released.

The changes for the respective releases are:

1.2.5: Released 2009-07-25
update Tor to 0.2.1.18

1.2.6: Released 2009-07-28
update Tor to 0.2.1.19