tor network | Tor Blog

KIST and Tell: Tor’s New Traffic Scheduling Feature

The latest Tor alpha release included a new feature to address traffic congestion in the Tor network. The new algorithm —Kernel Informed Socket Transport (KIST)— prevents connections between Tor relays from becoming overwhelmed by changing how traffic is distributed throughout the Tor network.

Debian and Tor Services available as Onion Services

We, the Debian project and the Tor Project are enabling Tor

58 comments

Hidden Services, Current Events, and Freedom Hosting

Around midnight on August 4th we were notified by a few people that a large number of hidden service addresses have disappeared from the Tor Network.

563 comments

New Python/Django-based TorStatus

We're excited to announce that a group of students from Wesleyan has created a new TorStatus website written in Python.

6 comments

Upcoming Events

February 02, 2019 - February 03, 2019

FOSDEM (Brussels)

February 06, 2019 - February 08, 2019

IT Defense (Stuttgart)

March 23, 2019 - March 24, 2019

LibrePlanet (Boston)

March 24, 2019 - March 27, 2019

KNOW 2019 (Vegas)

June 11, 2019 - June 14, 2019

RightsCon (Tunis)

See All Upcoming Events

Recent Updates

Strength in Numbers: The Final Count Is In

One of the Tor Project’s ongoing goals has been to diversify our funding sources.

New Releases: Tor 0.3.5.7, 0.3.4.10, and 0.3.3.11

Tor 0.3.5.7 is the first stable release in its series; it includes compilation and portability fixes, and a fix for a severe problem affecting directory caches. Tor 0.3.4.10 and 0.3.3.11 are also released today; please see the official announcements for those releases if you are tracking older stable versions.

The Tor 0.3.5 series includes several new features and performance improvements, including client authorization for v3 onion services, cleanups to bootstrap reporting, support for improved bandwidth- measurement tools, experimental support for NSS in place of OpenSSL, and much more. It also begins a full reorganization of Tor's code layout, for improved modularity and maintainability in the future. Finally, there is the usual set of performance improvements and bugfixes that we try to do in every release series.

There are a couple of changes in the 0.3.5 that may affect compatibility. First, the default version for newly created onion services is now v3. Use the HiddenServiceVersion option if you want to override this. Second, some log messages related to bootstrapping have changed; if you use stem, you may need to update to the latest version so it will recognize them.

We have designated 0.3.5 as a "long-term support" (LTS) series: we will continue to patch major bugs in typical configurations of 0.3.5 until at least 1 Feb 2022. (We do not plan to provide long-term support for embedding, Rust support, NSS support, running a directory authority, or unsupported platforms. For these, you will need to stick with the latest stable release.)

Below are the changes since 0.3.5.6-rc. For a complete list of changes since 0.3.4.9, see the ReleaseNotes file.

Changes in version 0.3.5.7 - 2019-01-07

Major bugfixes (relay, directory):
- Always reactivate linked connections in the main loop so long as any linked connection has been active. Previously, connections serving directory information wouldn't get reactivated after the first chunk of data was sent (usually 32KB), which would prevent clients from bootstrapping. Fixes bug 28912; bugfix on 0.3.4.1-alpha. Patch by "cypherpunks3".
Minor features (compilation):
- When possible, place our warning flags in a separate file, to avoid flooding verbose build logs. Closes ticket 28924.

Strength in Numbers: Library Freedom Is Intellectual Freedom

Photo by Janko Ferlič on

Strength in Numbers: Usable Tools Don’t Need To Be Invasive

This post is one in a series of blogs to complement our 2018 crowdfunding campaign, Strength in Numbers. Anonymity loves company and we are all safer and stronger when we work together.