Arti 1.9.0 released: Proxy improvements, relay development, and more.

Arti is our ongoing project to create a next-generation Tor implementation in Rust. We're happy to announce the latest release, Arti 1.9.0.

This release includes some behind-the-scences work on relays and directory authority development, and adds improved support for running with dynamically assigned ports. For example, Arti now accepts proxy.socks_listen = "auto" to configure its SOCKS proxy with an operating-system-assigned port, and writes the assigned port to a structured JSON file in Arti's data directory.

Following this change to dynamic port assignments, we also depreacted 0 as a port number for making it disabling this feature all together.

There has also been some interesting development going on with onion services, namely that Arti's key manager is now available as an experimental public API, intended for use by Arti's key management CLI. This is an API change only, users of the CLI are not affected by it.

Our effort to support relays in Arti also made notable progress. Namely, the relay circuit reactor is now capable of handling incoming data stream requests, something crucial for the overall operational design of this component.

Likewise, development in the domain of directory authorities also progressed significantly. This release contains some refactoring of various network document types and APIs and adds experimental support for directory authority key certificates. Similarly, the directory mirror got the relevant logic for downloading network documents from directory authorities.

For full details on what we've done, including API changes, and for information about many more minor and less-visible changes, 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 Benjamin Erhart, Jérôme Charaoui, Neel Chauhan, Nihal, Pier Angelo Vendrame, Yaksh Bariya, hjrgrn, and tla.

Also, our deep thanks to our sponsors for funding the development of Arti!