Release 0.3.5.17, 0.4.5.11, 0.4.6.8 and 0.4.7.2-alpha

Where to Download

Changes

Below are the major changes of the released versions and links to more detailed release notes.

Alpha

Congestion Control

Congestion control, detailed in proposal 324, aim at improving Tor network performance, throughput and bandwidth utilization. At this stage, it still needs more work before we can enabled it by default.

It is currently in its testing and tuning phase which means that you should expect more 0.4.7.x alphas as congestion control stabilizes and gets tuned for optimal performance. And so, at this release, it can not be used without a custom patch.

MiddleOnly Relay Flag

The new MiddleOnly flag, detailed in proposal 335, is used to pin relays in the middle position that is they can’t become HSDir, Exit, Guard or V2Dir. And the BadExit flag is also set in this process.

The primary use case for this new flag is for the Tor network health team that often deals with a large number of relays with an incorrect configuration (e.g. not all relays in MyFamily), or needs validation that requires contacting the relay operator. It is desirable to put the said relays in a less powerful position until an assessment can be made.

Release Notes

Stable

Onion service version 2 removal

Version 2 onion service are now disabled at the client, service and relay level meaning that any tor nodes running this version and onward won’t support version 2 as in won’t establish connections, publish a service or relay cells.

This is the last step in the long deprecation process of onion service version 2. If you haven’t migrated just yet from v2 to v3, please see this blog post:

https://blog.torproject.org/v2-deprecation-timeline

Release Notes

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Changes in version 0.4.7.2-alpha - 2021-10-26
This second alpha release of the 0.4.7.x series adds two major
features: congestion control (prop324) for network performance, and
the MiddleOnly flag (prop335) voted by the authorities to pin relays
to the middle position for various network health reasons. This
release also fixes numerous bugs.

The congestion control feature, detailed in proposal 324, still needs
more work before we can enable it by default. It is currently in its
testing and tuning phase which means that you should expect more
0.4.7.x alphas as congestion control gets stabilized and tuned for
optimal performance. And so, at this release, it can not be used
without a custom patch.

o Major features (congestion control):
- Implement support for flow control over congestion controlled
circuits. This work comes from proposal 324. Closes ticket 40450.

o Major features (directory authority):
- Add a new consensus method to handle MiddleOnly specially. When
enough authorities are using this method, then any relay tagged
with the MiddleOnly flag will have its Exit, Guard, HSDir, and
V2Dir flags automatically cleared, and will have its BadExit flag
automatically set. Implements part of proposal 335.
- Authorities can now be configured to label relays as “MiddleOnly”.
When voting for this flag, authorities automatically vote against
Exit, Guard, HSDir, and V2Dir; and in favor of BadExit. Implements
part of proposal 335. Based on a patch from Neel Chauhan.

o Major bugfix (relay, metrics):
- On the MetricsPort, the DNS error statistics are not reported by
record type (“record=…”) anymore due to a libevent bug
(Propagate back the DNS resolution error to the user · Issue #1219 · libevent/libevent · GitHub). Fixes bug
40490; bugfix on 0.4.7.1-alpha.

o Major bugfixes (relay, overload state):
- Relays report the general overload state for DNS timeout errors
only if X% of all DNS queries over Y seconds are errors. Before
that, it only took 1 timeout to report the overload state which
was just too low of a threshold. The X and Y values are 1% and 10
minutes respectively but they are also controlled by consensus
parameters. Fixes bug 40491; bugfix on 0.4.6.1-alpha.

o Minor feature (authority, relay):
- Reject End-Of-Life relays running version 0.4.2.x, 0.4.3.x,
0.4.4.x and 0.4.5 alphas/rc. Closes ticket 40480.

o Minor feature (onion service v2):
- Onion service v2 addresses are now not recognized anymore by tor
meaning a bad hostname is returned when attempting to pass it on a
SOCKS connection. No more deprecation log is emitted client side.
Closes ticket 40476.
- See Onion Service version 2 deprecation timeline | Tor Blog for
details on how to transition from v2 to v3.

o Minor features (fallbackdir):
- Regenerate fallback directories for October 2021. Closes
ticket 40493.

o Minor features (logging, heartbeat):
- When a relay receives a cell that isn’t encrypted properly for it,
but the relay is the last hop on the circuit, the relay now counts
how many cells of this kind it receives, on how many circuits, and
reports this information in the log. Previously, we’d log each
cell at PROTOCOL_WARN level, which is far too verbose to be
useful. Fixes part of ticket 40400.

o Minor features (testing):
- We now have separate fuzzers for the inner layers of v3 onion
service descriptors, to prevent future bugs like 40392. Closes
ticket 40488.

o Minor bugfixes (compilation):
- Fix compilation error when __NR_time is not defined. Fixes bug
40465; bugfix on 0.2.5.5-alpha. Patch by Daniel Pinto.

o Minor bugfixes (dirauth, bandwidth scanner):
- Add the AuthDirDontVoteOnDirAuthBandwidth dirauth config parameter
to avoid voting on bandwidth scanner weights to v3 directory
authorities. Fixes bug 40471; bugfix on 0.2.2.1-alpha. Patch by
Neel Chauhan.

o Minor bugfixes (fragile-hardening, sandbox):
- When building with --enable-fragile-hardening, add or relax Linux
seccomp rules to allow AddressSanitizer to execute normally if the
process terminates with the sandbox active. This has the side
effect of disabling the filtering of file- and directory-open
requests on most systems and dilutes the effectiveness of the
sandbox overall, as a wider range of system calls must be
permitted. Fixes bug 11477; bugfix on 0.2.5.4-alpha.

o Minor bugfixes (logging):
- If a channel has never received or transmitted a cell, or seen a
client, do not calculate time diffs against 1/1/1970 but log a
better prettier message. Fixes bug 40182; bugfix on 0.2.4.4.

o Minor bugfixes (onion service):
- Fix a warning BUG that would occur often on heavily loaded onion
service leading to filling the logs with useless warnings. Fixes
bug 34083; bugfix on 0.3.2.1-alpha.

o Minor bugfix (CI, onion service):
- Exclude onion service version 2 Stem tests in our CI. Fixes bug 40500;
bugfix on 0.3.2.1-alpha.

o Minor bugfixes (onion service, config):
- Fix a memory leak for a small config line string that could occur
if the onion service failed to be configured from file properly.
Fixes bug 40484; bugfix on 0.3.2.1-alpha.

o Minor bugfixes (onion service, TROVE-2021-008):
- Only log v2 access attempts once total, in order to not pollute
the logs with warnings and to avoid recording the times on disk
when v2 access was attempted. Note that the onion address was
never logged. This counts as a Low-severity security issue.
Fixes bug 40474; bugfix on 0.4.5.8.
- Note that due to #40476 which removes v2 support entirely, this
log line is not emitted anymore. We still mention this in the
changelog because it is a Low-severity TROVE.

o Minor bugfixes (usability):
- Do not log “RENDEZVOUS1 cell with unrecognized rendezvous cookie”
at LOG_PROTOCOL_WARN; instead log it at DEBUG. This warning can
happen naturally if a client gives up on a rendezvous circuit
after sending INTRODUCE1. Fixes part of bug 40400; bugfix
on 0.1.1.13-alpha.
- Do not log “circuit_receive_relay_cell failed” at
LOG_PROTOCOL_WARN; instead log it at DEBUG. In every case where we
would want to log this as a protocol warning, we are already
logging another warning from inside circuit_receive_relay_cell.
Fixes part of bug 40400; bugfix on 0.1.1.9-alpha.

o Code simplification and refactoring:
- Lower the official maximum for “guard-extreme-restriction-percent”
to 100. This has no effect on when the guard code will generate a
warning, but it makes the intent of the option clearer. Fixes bug
40486; bugfix on 0.3.0.1-alpha.

o Testing:
- Add unit tests for the Linux seccomp sandbox. Resolves
issue 16803.

o Code simplification and refactoring (rust):
- Remove Rust support and its associated code. It is unsupported and
Rust focus should be shifted to arti. Closes ticket 40469.

o Testing (CI, chutney):
- Bump the data size that chutney transmits to 5MBytes in order to
trigger the flow control and congestion window code. Closes
ticket 40485.

What sort of reasons would a relay operator want to use the MiddleOnly flag? I’m wondering if you can go into the justification at all?

The middleonly flag isn’t something that you set on your own relay: It’s something that the directory authorities would set on a relay in order to indicate that it shouldn’t be used except in a middle position. Here’s the design proposal.

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