Arti 1.1.6 is released: Now you can connect* to Onion Services!

Arti is our ongoing project to create a next-generation Tor client in Rust. Now we're announcing the latest release, Arti 1.1.6.

After months of hard work, Arti finally has working client-side onion service support! That is, programs can* now use Arti to connect to onion services on the Tor network.

*: Note that this feature is not yet as secure as the equivalent feature in the C tor implementation, and as such you probably shouldn't use it for security-sensitive purposes. (Our implementation is missing the “vanguards-lite” feature that C tor uses to prevent guard discovery attacks.) For this reason, the feature is (for now) disabled by default. To turn it on, you can enable it on the command line (arti -o address_filter.allow_onion_addrs=true proxy) or edit your arti.toml configuration file (set allow_onion_addrs = true in the section [address_filter]).

(Edited 2023-07-07 to add: Also, when you build Arti, you need to provide a non-default Cargo feature. Add --features=arti/onion-service-client when building. This restriction will be removed in the next release.)

This release also introduces our key manager functionality. Unlike the C tor implementation, where the ability to manage keys on disk grew organically (and unevenly) over time, with Arti we’re trying to provide a uniform and consistent API and CLI for managing secret keys. For now, this functionality is in a preliminary state, and the usability is somewhat lacking. If you want, you can use it to experiment with onion service client authorization, but you might have a better time if you wait until the next release.

With this release, there have been many smaller and less visible changes as well; for those, please see the CHANGELOG.

For more information on using Arti, see our top-level README, and the documentation for the arti binary.

Thanks to everybody who's contributed to this release, including Alexander Færøy, Andy, Jim Newsome, nate_d1azzz, pinkforest, Saksham Mittal, and Trinity Pointard.

Finally, our deep thanks to Zcash Community Grants for funding the development of Arti!