State of the Onion: Tor & Community Updates from 2020

November 16, 2020

Join us for the (virtual) State of the Onion at on Nov 16, 2020 @ 16:00 - 18:00 UTC.*

The Tor Project is building usable free software to fight surveillance and censorship across the globe. In this talk we'll give an update on what we got up to during 2020, what happened in the wider Tor ecosystem, and what lies ahead of us.

Watch the State of the Onion on YouTube: https://youtu.be/IyWyTypRGWQ

We will update this page with more information as it is available.

* Show local time for the day-of the event.

Upcoming Events

September 27, 2021

Privchat #5: Pegasus

October 21, 2021

Global Encryption Day

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Recent Updates

V3 onion services usage

Guest post by Tobias Höller

New Alpha Release: Tor 0.4.7.1-alpha

There's a new alpha release available for download. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.4.7.1-alpha from the download page on the website. Packages should be available over the coming weeks, with a new alpha Tor Browser release likely some time next week.

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

This version is the first alpha release of the 0.4.7.x series. One major feature is Vanguards Lite, from proposal 333, to help mitigate guard discovery attacks against onion services. It also includes numerous bugfixes.

Changes in version 0.4.7.1-alpha - 2021-09-17

Major features (Proposal 332, onion services, guard selection algorithm):
- Clients and onion services now choose four long-lived "layer 2" guard relays for use as the middle hop in all onion circuits. These relays are kept in place for a randomized duration averaging 1 week. This mitigates guard discovery attacks against clients and short-lived onion services such as OnionShare. Long-lived onion services that need high security should still use the Vanguards addon (https://github.com/mikeperry-tor/vanguards). Closes ticket 40363; implements proposal 333.
Minor features (bridge testing support):
- Let external bridge reachability testing tools discard cached bridge descriptors when setting new bridges, so they can be sure to get a clean reachability test. Implements ticket 40209.

New Release: Tor Browser 10.5.6 (Windows, macOS, Linux)

Tor Browser 10.5.6 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our

New Release: Tails 4.22

In Tails 4.22, we focused on solving the most important issues in the Tor Connection assistant to make it more robust and easier to use.