Use a Mask, Use Tor: Friends of Tor Matching Donations up to $100,000

Starting today through December 31, every dollar donated to the Tor Project, up to $100,000, will be matched by Friends of Tor. That means that your donation will make double the impact. We’re able to offer this match because of generous folks in our community who believe in Tor, privacy online, and the work to resist the surveillance pandemic.

New alpha release: Tor 0.4.5.1-alpha

by nickm | November 01, 2020

There's a new alpha release available for download. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for Tor 0.4.5.1-alpha from the download page on the website. Packages should be available over the coming weeks, with a new alpha Tor Browser release some time this month, assuming we get #40172 figured out.

Remember, this is an alpha release: you should only run this if you'd like to find and report more bugs than usual. We'll be trying to put out putting out stable backport releases in the next week or so.

Tor 0.4.5.1-alpha is the first alpha release in the 0.4.5.x series. It improves support for IPv6, address discovery and self-testing, code metrics and tracing.

This release also fixes TROVE-2020-005, a security issue that could be used, under certain cases, by an adversary to observe traffic patterns on a limited number of circuits intended for a different relay. To mount this attack, the adversary would need to actively extend circuits to an incorrect address, as well as compromise a relay's legacy RSA-1024 key. We'll be backporting this fix to other release series soon, after it has had some testing.

Here are the changes since 0.4.4.5.

Changes in version 0.4.5.1-alpha - 2020-11-01

  • Major features (build):
    • When building Tor, first link all object files into a single static library. This may help with embedding Tor in other programs. Note that most Tor functions do not constitute a part of a stable or supported API: only those functions in tor_api.h should be used if embedding Tor. Closes ticket 40127.
  • Major features (metrics):
    • Introduce a new MetricsPort which exposes, through an HTTP interface, a series of metrics that tor collects at runtime. At the moment, the only supported output format is Prometheus data model. Closes ticket 40063. See the manual page for more information and security considerations.

 

Use A Mask, Use Tor: Resist the Surveillance Pandemic

As many friends and followers of Tor know by now, we spend the final weeks of each year asking for your help as part of our year-end fundraising campaign. For our 2020 campaign, we wanted a theme that conveys a positive message and speaks to the power of this kind of community action. That’s why we decided on the theme Use a Mask, Use Tor.