Pride and Privacy

by al | June 05, 2019

Fifty years ago, in New York City’s Greenwich Village, the NYPD raided a gay bar. This wasn’t a new occurrence.

New alpha release: Tor 0.4.1.1-alpha

by nickm | May 22, 2019

There's a new alpha release available for download. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.4.1.1-alpha from the usual place on the website. Packages should be available over the coming weeks, with a new alpha Tor Browser release in the next couple of weeks.

Remember, this is an alpha release: you should only run this if you'd like to find and report more bugs than usual.

This is the first alpha in the 0.4.1.x series. It introduces lightweight circuit padding to make some onion-service circuits harder to distinguish, includes a new "authenticated SENDME" feature to make certain denial-of-service attacks more difficult, and improves performance in several areas.

Changes in version 0.4.1.1-alpha - 2019-05-22

  • Major features (circuit padding):
    • Onion service clients now add padding cells at the start of their INTRODUCE and RENDEZVOUS circuits, to make those circuits' traffic look more like general purpose Exit traffic. The overhead for this is 2 extra cells in each direction for RENDEZVOUS circuits, and 1 extra upstream cell and 10 downstream cells for INTRODUCE circuits. This feature is only enabled when also supported by the circuit's middle node. (Clients may specify fixed middle nodes with the MiddleNodes option, and may force-disable this feature with the CircuitPadding torrc.) Closes ticket 28634.
  • Major features (code organization):
    • Tor now includes a generic publish-subscribe message-passing subsystem that we can use to organize intermodule dependencies. We hope to use this to reduce dependencies between modules that don't need to be related, and to generally simplify our codebase. Closes ticket 28226.

 

Mozilla Research Call: Tune up Tor for Integration and Scale

by gaba | May 08, 2019

What alternative protocol architectures and route selection protocols would offer acceptable gains in Tor performance? Would they preserve Tor properties? Is it possible to improve Tor performance without changing protocols? Is it truly possible to deploy Tor at scale? And what would the full integration of Tor and Firefox look like? Those are some of the questions that Mozilla is calling researchers to answer in the privacy & security part of their Mozilla Research Grants program.

New Release: Tor 0.4.0.5

by nickm | May 03, 2019

After months of work, we have a new stable release series! If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.4.0.5 on the website. Packages should be available within the next several weeks, with a new Tor Browser likely later this month.

This is the first stable release in the 0.4.0.x series. It contains improvements for power management and bootstrap reporting, as well as preliminary backend support for circuit padding to prevent some kinds of traffic analysis. It also continues our work in refactoring Tor for long-term maintainability.