Tor in 2021

This year has been difficult for all of us. Although challenging, we have managed to reorganize in order to meet the goals we originally set for 2020, and now, it’s time to look forward to 2021.

New alpha release: Tor 0.4.5.2-alpha

by nickm | November 23, 2020

There's a new alpha release available for download. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.4.5.2-alpha from the download page on the website. Packages should be available over the coming weeks, with a new alpha Tor Browser release by mid-December.

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

Tor 0.4.5.2-alpha is the second alpha release in the 0.4.5.x series. It fixes several bugs present in earlier releases, including one that made it impractical to run relays on Windows. It also adds a few small safety features to improve Tor's behavior in the presence of strange compile-time options, misbehaving proxies, and future versions of OpenSSL.

Changes in version 0.4.5.2-alpha - 2020-11-23

  • Major bugfixes (relay, windows):
    • Fix a bug in our implementation of condition variables on Windows. Previously, a relay on Windows would use 100% CPU after running for some time. Because of this change, Tor now require Windows Vista or later to build and run. Fixes bug 30187; bugfix on 0.2.6.3-alpha. (This bug became more serious in 0.3.1.1-alpha with the introduction of consensus diffs.) Patch by Daniel Pinto.
  • Minor features (compilation):
    • Disable deprecation warnings when building with OpenSSL 3.0.0 or later. There are a number of APIs newly deprecated in OpenSSL 3.0.0 that Tor still requires. (A later version of Tor will try to stop depending on these APIs.) Closes ticket 40165.