Tor 0.2.0.30 is released as stable

Tor 0.2.0.30 is released. A better formatted version of this report can be found at gmane.org

Tor 0.2.0.30 switches to a more efficient directory distribution design,
adds features to make connections to the Tor network harder to block,
allows Tor to act as a DNS proxy, adds separate rate limiting for relayed
traffic to make it easier for clients to become relays, fixes a variety
of potential anonymity problems, and includes the usual huge pile of
other features and bug fixes.

https://www.torproject.org/download.html

Changes in version 0.2.0.30 - 2008-07-15
o New v3 directory design:
- Tor now uses a new way to learn about and distribute information
about the network: the directory authorities vote on a common
network status document rather than each publishing their own
opinion. Now clients and caches download only one networkstatus
document to bootstrap, rather than downloading one for each
authority. Clients only download router descriptors listed in
the consensus. Implements proposal 101; see doc/spec/dir-spec.txt
for details.
- Set up moria1, tor26, and dizum as v3 directory authorities
in addition to being v2 authorities. Also add three new ones:
ides (run by Mike Perry), gabelmoo (run by Karsten Loesing), and
dannenberg (run by CCC).
- Switch to multi-level keys for directory authorities: now their
long-term identity key can be kept offline, and they periodically
generate a new signing key. Clients fetch the "key certificates"
to keep up to date on the right keys. Add a standalone tool
"tor-gencert" to generate key certificates. Implements proposal 103.
- Add a new V3AuthUseLegacyKey config option to make it easier for
v3 authorities to change their identity keys if another bug like
Debian's OpenSSL RNG flaw appears.
- Authorities and caches fetch the v2 networkstatus documents
less often, now that v3 is recommended.

o Make Tor connections stand out less on the wire:
- Use an improved TLS handshake designed by Steven Murdoch in proposal
124, as revised in proposal 130. The new handshake is meant to
be harder for censors to fingerprint, and it adds the ability
to detect certain kinds of man-in-the-middle traffic analysis
attacks. The new handshake format includes version negotiation for
OR connections as described in proposal 105, which will allow us
to improve Tor's link protocol more safely in the future.
- Enable encrypted directory connections by default for non-relays,
so censor tools that block Tor directory connections based on their
plaintext patterns will no longer work. This means Tor works in
certain censored countries by default again.
- Stop including recognizeable strings in the commonname part of
Tor's x509 certificates.

o Implement bridge relays:
- Bridge relays (or "bridges" for short) are Tor relays that aren't
listed in the main Tor directory. Since there is no complete public
list of them, even an ISP that is filtering connections to all the
known Tor relays probably won't be able to block all the bridges.
See doc/design-paper/blocking.pdf and proposal 125 for details.
- New config option BridgeRelay that specifies you want to be a
bridge relay rather than a normal relay. When BridgeRelay is set
to 1, then a) you cache dir info even if your DirPort ins't on,
and b) the default for PublishServerDescriptor is now "bridge"
rather than "v2,v3".
- New config option "UseBridges 1" for clients that want to use bridge
relays instead of ordinary entry guards. Clients then specify
bridge relays by adding "Bridge" lines to their config file. Users
can learn about a bridge relay either manually through word of
mouth, or by one of our rate-limited mechanisms for giving out
bridge addresses without letting an attacker easily enumerate them
all. See https://www.torproject.org/bridges for details.
- Bridge relays behave like clients with respect to time intervals
for downloading new v3 consensus documents -- otherwise they
stand out. Bridge users now wait until the end of the interval,
so their bridge relay will be sure to have a new consensus document.

o Implement bridge directory authorities:
- Bridge authorities are like normal directory authorities, except
they don't serve a list of known bridges. Therefore users that know
a bridge's fingerprint can fetch a relay descriptor for that bridge,
including fetching updates e.g. if the bridge changes IP address,
yet an attacker can't just fetch a list of all the bridges.
- Set up Tonga as the default bridge directory authority.
- Bridge authorities refuse to serve bridge descriptors or other
bridge information over unencrypted connections (that is, when
responding to direct DirPort requests rather than begin_dir cells.)
- Bridge directory authorities do reachability testing on the
bridges they know. They provide router status summaries to the
controller via "getinfo ns/purpose/bridge", and also dump summaries
to a file periodically, so we can keep internal stats about which
bridges are functioning.
- If bridge users set the UpdateBridgesFromAuthority config option,
but the digest they ask for is a 404 on the bridge authority,
they fall back to contacting the bridge directly.
- Bridges always use begin_dir to publish their server descriptor to
the bridge authority using an anonymous encrypted tunnel.
- Early work on a "bridge community" design: if bridge authorities set
the BridgePassword config option, they will serve a snapshot of
known bridge routerstatuses from their DirPort to anybody who
knows that password. Unset by default.
- Tor now includes an IP-to-country GeoIP file, so bridge relays can
report sanitized aggregated summaries in their extra-info documents
privately to the bridge authority, listing which countries are
able to reach them. We hope this mechanism will let us learn when
certain countries start trying to block bridges.
- Bridge authorities write bridge descriptors to disk, so they can
reload them after a reboot. They can also export the descriptors
to other programs, so we can distribute them to blocked users via
the BridgeDB interface, e.g. via https://bridges.torproject.org/
and bridges torproject.org.

o Tor can be a DNS proxy:
- The new client-side DNS proxy feature replaces the need for
dns-proxy-tor: Just set "DNSPort 9999", and Tor will now listen
for DNS requests on port 9999, use the Tor network to resolve them
anonymously, and send the reply back like a regular DNS server.
The code still only implements a subset of DNS.
- Add a new AutomapHostsOnResolve option: when it is enabled, any
resolve request for hosts matching a given pattern causes Tor to
generate an internal virtual address mapping for that host. This
allows DNSPort to work sensibly with hidden service users. By
default, .exit and .onion addresses are remapped; the list of
patterns can be reconfigured with AutomapHostsSuffixes.
- Add an "-F" option to tor-resolve to force a resolve for a .onion
address. Thanks to the AutomapHostsOnResolve option, this is no
longer a completely silly thing to do.

o Major features (relay usability):
- New config options RelayBandwidthRate and RelayBandwidthBurst:
a separate set of token buckets for relayed traffic. Right now
relayed traffic is defined as answers to directory requests, and
OR connections that don't have any local circuits on them. See
proposal 111 for details.
- Create listener connections before we setuid to the configured
User and Group. Now non-Windows users can choose port values
under 1024, start Tor as root, and have Tor bind those ports
before it changes to another UID. (Windows users could already
pick these ports.)
- Added a new ConstrainedSockets config option to set SO_SNDBUF and
SO_RCVBUF on TCP sockets. Hopefully useful for Tor servers running
on "vserver" accounts. Patch from coderman.

o Major features (directory authorities):
- Directory authorities track weighted fractional uptime and weighted
mean-time-between failures for relays. WFU is suitable for deciding
whether a node is "usually up", while MTBF is suitable for deciding
whether a node is "likely to stay up." We need both, because
"usually up" is a good requirement for guards, while "likely to
stay up" is a good requirement for long-lived connections.
- Directory authorities use a new formula for selecting which relays
to advertise as Guards: they must be in the top 7/8 in terms of
how long we have known about them, and above the median of those
nodes in terms of weighted fractional uptime.
- Directory authorities use a new formula for selecting which relays
to advertise as Stable: when we have 4 or more days of data, use
median measured MTBF rather than median declared uptime. Implements
proposal 108.
- Directory authorities accept and serve "extra info" documents for
routers. Routers now publish their bandwidth-history lines in the
extra-info docs rather than the main descriptor. This step saves
60% (!) on compressed router descriptor downloads. Servers upload
extra-info docs to any authority that accepts them; directory
authorities now allow multiple router descriptors and/or extra
info documents to be uploaded in a single go. Authorities, and
caches that have been configured to download extra-info documents,
download them as needed. Implements proposal 104.
- Authorities now list relays who have the same nickname as
a different named relay, but list them with a new flag:
"Unnamed". Now we can make use of relays that happen to pick the
same nickname as a server that registered two years ago and then
disappeared. Implements proposal 122.
- Store routers in a file called cached-descriptors instead of in
cached-routers. Initialize cached-descriptors from cached-routers
if the old format is around. The new format allows us to store
annotations along with descriptors, to record the time we received
each descriptor, its source, and its purpose: currently one of
general, controller, or bridge.

o Major features (other):
- New config options WarnPlaintextPorts and RejectPlaintextPorts so
Tor can warn and/or refuse connections to ports commonly used with
vulnerable-plaintext protocols. Currently we warn on ports 23,
109, 110, and 143, but we don't reject any. Based on proposal 129
by Kevin Bauer and Damon McCoy.
- Integrate Karsten Loesing's Google Summer of Code project to publish
hidden service descriptors on a set of redundant relays that are a
function of the hidden service address. Now we don't have to rely
on three central hidden service authorities for publishing and
fetching every hidden service descriptor. Implements proposal 114.
- Allow tunnelled directory connections to ask for an encrypted
"begin_dir" connection or an anonymized "uses a full Tor circuit"
connection independently. Now we can make anonymized begin_dir
connections for (e.g.) more secure hidden service posting and
fetching.

o Major bugfixes (crashes and assert failures):
- Stop imposing an arbitrary maximum on the number of file descriptors
used for busy servers. Bug reported by Olaf Selke; patch from
Sebastian Hahn.
- Avoid possible failures when generating a directory with routers
with over-long versions strings, or too many flags set.
- Fix a rare assert error when we're closing one of our threads:
use a mutex to protect the list of logs, so we never write to the
list as it's being freed. Fixes the very rare bug 575, which is
kind of the revenge of bug 222.
- Avoid segfault in the case where a badly behaved v2 versioning
directory sends a signed networkstatus with missing client-versions.
- When we hit an EOF on a log (probably because we're shutting down),
don't try to remove the log from the list: just mark it as
unusable. (Bulletproofs against bug 222.)

o Major bugfixes (code security fixes):
- Detect size overflow in zlib code. Reported by Justin Ferguson and
Dan Kaminsky.
- Rewrite directory tokenization code to never run off the end of
a string. Fixes bug 455. Patch from croup.
- Be more paranoid about overwriting sensitive memory on free(),
as a defensive programming tactic to ensure forward secrecy.

o Major bugfixes (anonymity fixes):
- Reject requests for reverse-dns lookup of names that are in
a private address space. Patch from lodger.
- Never report that we've used more bandwidth than we're willing to
relay: it leaks how much non-relay traffic we're using. Resolves
bug 516.
- As a client, do not believe any server that tells us that an
address maps to an internal address space.
- Warn about unsafe ControlPort configurations.
- Directory authorities now call routers Fast if their bandwidth is
at least 100KB/s, and consider their bandwidth adequate to be a
Guard if it is at least 250KB/s, no matter the medians. This fix
complements proposal 107.
- Directory authorities now never mark more than 2 servers per IP as
Valid and Running (or 5 on addresses shared by authorities).
Implements proposal 109, by Kevin Bauer and Damon McCoy.
- If we're a relay, avoid picking ourselves as an introduction point,
a rendezvous point, or as the final hop for internal circuits. Bug
reported by taranis and lodger.
- Exit relays that are used as a client can now reach themselves
using the .exit notation, rather than just launching an infinite
pile of circuits. Fixes bug 641. Reported by Sebastian Hahn.
- Fix a bug where, when we were choosing the 'end stream reason' to
put in our relay end cell that we send to the exit relay, Tor
clients on Windows were sometimes sending the wrong 'reason'. The
anonymity problem is that exit relays may be able to guess whether
the client is running Windows, thus helping partition the anonymity
set. Down the road we should stop sending reasons to exit relays,
or otherwise prevent future versions of this bug.
- Only update guard status (usable / not usable) once we have
enough directory information. This was causing us to discard all our
guards on startup if we hadn't been running for a few weeks. Fixes
bug 448.
- When our directory information has been expired for a while, stop
being willing to build circuits using it. Fixes bug 401.

o Major bugfixes (peace of mind for relay operators)
- Non-exit relays no longer answer "resolve" relay cells, so they
can't be induced to do arbitrary DNS requests. (Tor clients already
avoid using non-exit relays for resolve cells, but now servers
enforce this too.) Fixes bug 619. Patch from lodger.
- When we setconf ClientOnly to 1, close any current OR and Dir
listeners. Reported by mwenge.

o Major bugfixes (other):
- If we only ever used Tor for hidden service lookups or posts, we
would stop building circuits and start refusing connections after
24 hours, since we falsely believed that Tor was dormant. Reported
by nwf.
- Add a new __HashedControlSessionPassword option for controllers
to use for one-off session password hashes that shouldn't get
saved to disk by SAVECONF --- Vidalia users were accumulating a
pile of HashedControlPassword lines in their torrc files, one for
each time they had restarted Tor and then clicked Save. Make Tor
automatically convert "HashedControlPassword" to this new option but
only when it's given on the command line. Partial fix for bug 586.
- Patch from "Andrew S. Lists" to catch when we contact a directory
mirror at IP address X and he says we look like we're coming from
IP address X. Otherwise this would screw up our address detection.
- Reject uploaded descriptors and extrainfo documents if they're
huge. Otherwise we'll cache them all over the network and it'll
clog everything up. Suggested by Aljosha Judmayer.
- When a hidden service was trying to establish an introduction point,
and Tor *did* manage to reuse one of the preemptively built
circuits, it didn't correctly remember which one it used,
so it asked for another one soon after, until there were no
more preemptive circuits, at which point it launched one from
scratch. Bugfix on 0.0.9.x.

o Rate limiting and load balancing improvements:
- When we add data to a write buffer in response to the data on that
write buffer getting low because of a flush, do not consider the
newly added data as a candidate for immediate flushing, but rather
make it wait until the next round of writing. Otherwise, we flush
and refill recursively, and a single greedy TLS connection can
eat all of our bandwidth.
- When counting the number of bytes written on a TLS connection,
look at the BIO actually used for writing to the network, not
at the BIO used (sometimes) to buffer data for the network.
Looking at different BIOs could result in write counts on the
order of ULONG_MAX. Fixes bug 614.
- If we change our MaxAdvertisedBandwidth and then reload torrc,
Tor won't realize it should publish a new relay descriptor. Fixes
bug 688, reported by mfr.
- Avoid using too little bandwidth when our clock skips a few seconds.
- Choose which bridge to use proportional to its advertised bandwidth,
rather than uniformly at random. This should speed up Tor for
bridge users. Also do this for people who set StrictEntryNodes.

o Bootstrapping faster and building circuits more intelligently:
- Fix bug 660 that was preventing us from knowing that we should
preemptively build circuits to handle expected directory requests.
- When we're checking if we have enough dir info for each relay
to begin establishing circuits, make sure that we actually have
the descriptor listed in the consensus, not just any descriptor.
- Correctly notify one-hop connections when a circuit build has
failed. Possible fix for bug 669. Found by lodger.
- Clients now hold circuitless TLS connections open for 1.5 times
MaxCircuitDirtiness (15 minutes), since it is likely that they'll
rebuild a new circuit over them within that timeframe. Previously,
they held them open only for KeepalivePeriod (5 minutes).

o Performance improvements (memory):
- Add OpenBSD malloc code from "phk" as an optional malloc
replacement on Linux: some glibc libraries do very poorly with
Tor's memory allocation patterns. Pass --enable-openbsd-malloc to
./configure to get the replacement malloc code.
- Switch our old ring buffer implementation for one more like that
used by free Unix kernels. The wasted space in a buffer with 1mb
of data will now be more like 8k than 1mb. The new implementation
also avoids realloc();realloc(); patterns that can contribute to
memory fragmentation.
- Change the way that Tor buffers data that it is waiting to write.
Instead of queueing data cells in an enormous ring buffer for each
client->OR or OR->OR connection, we now queue cells on a separate
queue for each circuit. This lets us use less slack memory, and
will eventually let us be smarter about prioritizing different kinds
of traffic.
- Reference-count and share copies of address policy entries; only 5%
of them were actually distinct.
- Tune parameters for cell pool allocation to minimize amount of
RAM overhead used.
- Keep unused 4k and 16k buffers on free lists, rather than wasting 8k
for every single inactive connection_t. Free items from the
4k/16k-buffer free lists when they haven't been used for a while.
- Make memory debugging information describe more about history
of cell allocation, so we can help reduce our memory use.
- Be even more aggressive about releasing RAM from small
empty buffers. Thanks to our free-list code, this shouldn't be too
performance-intensive.
- Log malloc statistics from mallinfo() on platforms where it exists.
- Use memory pools to allocate cells with better speed and memory
efficiency, especially on platforms where malloc() is inefficient.
- Add a --with-tcmalloc option to the configure script to link
against tcmalloc (if present). Does not yet search for non-system
include paths.

o Performance improvements (socket management):
- Count the number of open sockets separately from the number of
active connection_t objects. This will let us avoid underusing
our allocated connection limit.
- We no longer use socket pairs to link an edge connection to an
anonymous directory connection or a DirPort test connection.
Instead, we track the link internally and transfer the data
in-process. This saves two sockets per "linked" connection (at the
client and at the server), and avoids the nasty Windows socketpair()
workaround.
- We were leaking a file descriptor if Tor started with a zero-length
cached-descriptors file. Patch by "freddy77".

o Performance improvements (CPU use):
- Never walk through the list of logs if we know that no log target
is interested in a given message.
- Call routerlist_remove_old_routers() much less often. This should
speed startup, especially on directory caches.
- Base64 decoding was actually showing up on our profile when parsing
the initial descriptor file; switch to an in-process all-at-once
implementation that's about 3.5x times faster than calling out to
OpenSSL.
- Use a slightly simpler string hashing algorithm (copying Python's
instead of Java's) and optimize our digest hashing algorithm to take
advantage of 64-bit platforms and to remove some possibly-costly
voodoo.
- When implementing AES counter mode, update only the portions of the
counter buffer that need to change, and don't keep separate
network-order and host-order counters on big-endian hosts (where
they are the same).
- Add an in-place version of aes_crypt() so that we can avoid doing a
needless memcpy() call on each cell payload.
- Use Critical Sections rather than Mutexes for synchronizing threads
on win32; Mutexes are heavier-weight, and designed for synchronizing
between processes.

o Performance improvements (bandwidth use):
- Don't try to launch new descriptor downloads quite so often when we
already have enough directory information to build circuits.
- Version 1 directories are no longer generated in full. Instead,
authorities generate and serve "stub" v1 directories that list
no servers. This will stop Tor versions 0.1.0.x and earlier from
working, but (for security reasons) nobody should be running those
versions anyway.
- Avoid going directly to the directory authorities even if you're a
relay, if you haven't found yourself reachable yet or if you've
decided not to advertise your dirport yet. Addresses bug 556.
- If we've gone 12 hours since our last bandwidth check, and we
estimate we have less than 50KB bandwidth capacity but we could
handle more, do another bandwidth test.
- Support "If-Modified-Since" when answering HTTP requests for
directories, running-routers documents, and v2 and v3 networkstatus
documents. (There's no need to support it for router descriptors,
since those are downloaded by descriptor digest.)
- Stop fetching directory info so aggressively if your DirPort is
on but your ORPort is off; stop fetching v2 dir info entirely.
You can override these choices with the new FetchDirInfoEarly
config option.

o Changed config option behavior (features):
- Configuration files now accept C-style strings as values. This
helps encode characters not allowed in the current configuration
file format, such as newline or #. Addresses bug 557.
- Add hidden services and DNSPorts to the list of things that make
Tor accept that it has running ports. Change starting Tor with no
ports from a fatal error to a warning; we might change it back if
this turns out to confuse anybody. Fixes bug 579.
- Make PublishServerDescriptor default to 1, so the default doesn't
have to change as we invent new directory protocol versions.
- Allow people to say PreferTunnelledDirConns rather than
PreferTunneledDirConns, for those alternate-spellers out there.
- Raise the default BandwidthRate/BandwidthBurst to 5MB/10MB, to
accommodate the growing number of servers that use the default
and are reaching it.
- Make it possible to enable HashedControlPassword and
CookieAuthentication at the same time.
- When a TrackHostExits-chosen exit fails too many times in a row,
stop using it. Fixes bug 437.

o Changed config option behavior (bugfixes):
- Do not read the configuration file when we've only been told to
generate a password hash. Fixes bug 643. Bugfix on 0.0.9pre5. Fix
based on patch from Sebastian Hahn.
- Actually validate the options passed to AuthDirReject,
AuthDirInvalid, AuthDirBadDir, and AuthDirBadExit.
- Make "ClientOnly 1" config option disable directory ports too.
- Don't stop fetching descriptors when FetchUselessDescriptors is
set, even if we stop asking for circuits. Bug reported by tup
and ioerror.
- Servers used to decline to publish their DirPort if their
BandwidthRate or MaxAdvertisedBandwidth were below a threshold. Now
they look only at BandwidthRate and RelayBandwidthRate.
- Treat "2gb" when given in torrc for a bandwidth as meaning 2gb,
minus 1 byte: the actual maximum declared bandwidth.
- Make "TrackHostExits ." actually work. Bugfix on 0.1.0.x.
- Make the NodeFamilies config option work. (Reported by
lodger -- it has never actually worked, even though we added it
in Oct 2004.)
- If Tor is invoked from something that isn't a shell (e.g. Vidalia),
now we expand "-f ~/.tor/torrc" correctly. Suggested by Matt Edman.

o New config options:
- New configuration options AuthDirMaxServersPerAddr and
AuthDirMaxServersperAuthAddr to override default maximum number
of servers allowed on a single IP address. This is important for
running a test network on a single host.
- Three new config options (AlternateDirAuthority,
AlternateBridgeAuthority, and AlternateHSAuthority) that let the
user selectively replace the default directory authorities by type,
rather than the all-or-nothing replacement that DirServer offers.
- New config options AuthDirBadDir and AuthDirListBadDirs for
authorities to mark certain relays as "bad directories" in the
networkstatus documents. Also supports the "!baddir" directive in
the approved-routers file.
- New config option V2AuthoritativeDirectory that all v2 directory
authorities must set. This lets v3 authorities choose not to serve
v2 directory information.

o Minor features (other):
- When we're not serving v2 directory information, there is no reason
to actually keep any around. Remove the obsolete files and directory
on startup if they are very old and we aren't going to serve them.
- When we negotiate a v2 link-layer connection (not yet implemented),
accept RELAY_EARLY cells and turn them into RELAY cells if we've
negotiated a v1 connection for their next step. Initial steps for
proposal 110.
- When we have no consensus, check FallbackNetworkstatusFile (defaults
to $PREFIX/share/tor/fallback-consensus) for a consensus. This way
we can start out knowing some directory caches. We don't ship with
a fallback consensus by default though, because it was making
bootstrapping take too long while we tried many down relays.
- Authorities send back an X-Descriptor-Not-New header in response to
an accepted-but-discarded descriptor upload. Partially implements
fix for bug 535.
- If we find a cached-routers file that's been sitting around for more
than 28 days unmodified, then most likely it's a leftover from
when we upgraded to 0.2.0.8-alpha. Remove it. It has no good
routers anyway.
- When we (as a cache) download a descriptor because it was listed
in a consensus, remember when the consensus was supposed to expire,
and don't expire the descriptor until then.
- Optionally (if built with -DEXPORTMALLINFO) export the output
of mallinfo via http, as tor/mallinfo.txt. Only accessible
from localhost.
- Tag every guard node in our state file with the version that
we believe added it, or with our own version if we add it. This way,
if a user temporarily runs an old version of Tor and then switches
back to a new one, she doesn't automatically lose her guards.
- When somebody requests a list of statuses or servers, and we have
none of those, return a 404 rather than an empty 200.
- Merge in some (as-yet-unused) IPv6 address manipulation code. (Patch
from croup.)
- Add an HSAuthorityRecordStats option that hidden service authorities
can use to track statistics of overall hidden service usage without
logging information that would be as useful to an attacker.
- Allow multiple HiddenServicePort directives with the same virtual
port; when they occur, the user is sent round-robin to one
of the target ports chosen at random. Partially fixes bug 393 by
adding limited ad-hoc round-robining.
- Revamp file-writing logic so we don't need to have the entire
contents of a file in memory at once before we write to disk. Tor,
meet stdio.

o Minor bugfixes (other):
- Alter the code that tries to recover from unhandled write
errors, to not try to flush onto a socket that's given us
unhandled errors.
- Directory mirrors no longer include a guess at the client's IP
address if the connection appears to be coming from the same /24
network; it was producing too many wrong guesses.
- If we're trying to flush the last bytes on a connection (for
example, when answering a directory request), reset the
time-to-give-up timeout every time we manage to write something
on the socket.
- Reject router descriptors with out-of-range bandwidthcapacity or
bandwidthburst values.
- If we can't expand our list of entry guards (e.g. because we're
using bridges or we have StrictEntryNodes set), don't mark relays
down when they fail a directory request. Otherwise we're too quick
to mark all our entry points down.
- Authorities no longer send back "400 you're unreachable please fix
it" errors to Tor servers that aren't online all the time. We're
supposed to tolerate these servers now.
- Let directory authorities startup even when they can't generate
a descriptor immediately, e.g. because they don't know their
address.
- Correctly enforce that elements of directory objects do not appear
more often than they are allowed to appear.
- Stop allowing hibernating servers to be "stable" or "fast".
- On Windows, we were preventing other processes from reading
cached-routers while Tor was running. (Reported by janbar)
- Check return values from pthread_mutex functions.
- When opening /dev/null in finish_daemonize(), do not pass the
O_CREAT flag. Fortify was complaining, and correctly so. Fixes
bug 742; fix from Michael Scherer. Bugfix on 0.0.2pre19.

o Controller features:
- The GETCONF command now escapes and quotes configuration values
that don't otherwise fit into the torrc file.
- The SETCONF command now handles quoted values correctly.
- Add "GETINFO/desc-annotations/id/≤OR digest>" so controllers can
ask about source, timestamp of arrival, purpose, etc. We need
something like this to help Vidalia not do GeoIP lookups on bridge
addresses.
- Allow multiple HashedControlPassword config lines, to support
multiple controller passwords.
- Accept LF instead of CRLF on controller, since some software has a
hard time generating real Internet newlines.
- Add GETINFO values for the server status events
"REACHABILITY_SUCCEEDED" and "GOOD_SERVER_DESCRIPTOR". Patch from
Robert Hogan.
- There is now an ugly, temporary "desc/all-recent-extrainfo-hack"
GETINFO for Torstat to use until it can switch to using extrainfos.
- New config option CookieAuthFile to choose a new location for the
cookie authentication file, and config option
CookieAuthFileGroupReadable to make it group-readable.
- Add a SOURCE_ADDR field to STREAM NEW events so that controllers can
match requests to applications. Patch from Robert Hogan.
- Add a RESOLVE command to launch hostname lookups. Original patch
from Robert Hogan.
- Add GETINFO status/enough-dir-info to let controllers tell whether
Tor has downloaded sufficient directory information. Patch from Tup.
- You can now use the ControlSocket option to tell Tor to listen for
controller connections on Unix domain sockets on systems that
support them. Patch from Peter Palfrader.
- New "GETINFO address-mappings/*" command to get address mappings
with expiry information. "addr-mappings/*" is now deprecated.
Patch from Tup.
- Add a new config option __DisablePredictedCircuits designed for
use by the controller, when we don't want Tor to build any circuits
preemptively.
- Let the controller specify HOP=%d as an argument to ATTACHSTREAM,
so we can exit from the middle of the circuit.
- Implement "getinfo status/circuit-established".
- Implement "getinfo status/version/..." so a controller can tell
whether the current version is recommended, and whether any versions
are good, and how many authorities agree. Patch from "shibz".
- Controllers should now specify cache=no or cache=yes when using
the +POSTDESCRIPTOR command.
- Add a "PURPOSE=" argument to "STREAM NEW" events, as suggested by
Robert Hogan. Fixes the first part of bug 681.
- When reporting clock skew, and we know that the clock is _at least
as skewed_ as some value, but we don't know the actual value,
report the value as a "minimum skew."

o Controller bugfixes:
- Generate "STATUS_SERVER" events rather than misspelled
"STATUS_SEVER" events. Caught by mwenge.
- Reject controller commands over 1MB in length, so rogue
processes can't run us out of memory.
- Change the behavior of "getinfo status/good-server-descriptor"
so it doesn't return failure when any authority disappears.
- Send NAMESERVER_STATUS messages for a single failed nameserver
correctly.
- When the DANGEROUS_VERSION controller status event told us we're
running an obsolete version, it used the string "OLD" to describe
it. Yet the "getinfo" interface used the string "OBSOLETE". Now use
"OBSOLETE" in both cases.
- Respond to INT and TERM SIGNAL commands before we execute the
signal, in case the signal shuts us down. We had a patch in
0.1.2.1-alpha that tried to do this by queueing the response on
the connection's buffer before shutting down, but that really
isn't the same thing at all. Bug located by Matt Edman.
- Provide DNS expiry times in GMT, not in local time. For backward
compatibility, ADDRMAP events only provide GMT expiry in an extended
field. "GETINFO address-mappings" always does the right thing.
- Use CRLF line endings properly in NS events.
- Make 'getinfo fingerprint' return a 551 error if we're not a
server, so we match what the control spec claims we do. Reported
by daejees.
- Fix a typo in an error message when extendcircuit fails that
caused us to not follow the \r\n-based delimiter protocol. Reported
by daejees.
- When tunneling an encrypted directory connection, and its first
circuit fails, do not leave it unattached and ask the controller
to deal. Fixes the second part of bug 681.
- Treat some 403 responses from directory servers as INFO rather than
WARN-severity events.

o Portability / building / compiling:
- When building with --enable-gcc-warnings, check for whether Apple's
warning "-Wshorten-64-to-32" is available.
- Support compilation to target iPhone; patch from cjacker huang.
To build for iPhone, pass the --enable-iphone option to configure.
- Detect non-ASCII platforms (if any still exist) and refuse to
build there: some of our code assumes that 'A' is 65 and so on.
- Clear up some MIPSPro compiler warnings.
- Make autoconf search for libevent, openssl, and zlib consistently.
- Update deprecated macros in configure.in.
- When warning about missing headers, tell the user to let us
know if the compile succeeds anyway, so we can downgrade the
warning.
- Include the current subversion revision as part of the version
string: either fetch it directly if we're in an SVN checkout, do
some magic to guess it if we're in an SVK checkout, or use
the last-detected version if we're building from a .tar.gz.
Use this version consistently in log messages.
- Correctly report platform name on Windows 95 OSR2 and Windows 98 SE.
- Read resolv.conf files correctly on platforms where read() returns
partial results on small file reads.
- Build without verbose warnings even on gcc 4.2 and 4.3.
- On Windows, correctly detect errors when listing the contents of
a directory. Fix from lodger.
- Run 'make test' as part of 'make dist', so we stop releasing so
many development snapshots that fail their unit tests.
- Add support to detect Libevent versions in the 1.4.x series
on mingw.
- Add command-line arguments to unit-test executable so that we can
invoke any chosen test from the command line rather than having
to run the whole test suite at once; and so that we can turn on
logging for the unit tests.
- Do not automatically run configure from autogen.sh. This
non-standard behavior tended to annoy people who have built other
programs.
- Fix a macro/CPP interaction that was confusing some compilers:
some GCCs don't like #if/#endif pairs inside macro arguments.
Fixes bug 707.
- Fix macro collision between OpenSSL 0.9.8h and Windows headers.
Fixes bug 704; fix from Steven Murdoch.
- Correctly detect transparent proxy support on Linux hosts that
require in.h to be included before netfilter_ipv4.h. Patch
from coderman.

o Logging improvements:
- When we haven't had any application requests lately, don't bother
logging that we have expired a bunch of descriptors.
- When attempting to open a logfile fails, tell us why.
- Only log guard node status when guard node status has changed.
- Downgrade the 3 most common "INFO" messages to "DEBUG". This will
make "INFO" 75% less verbose.
- When SafeLogging is disabled, log addresses along with all TLS
errors.
- Report TLS "zero return" case as a "clean close" and "IO error"
as a "close". Stop calling closes "unexpected closes": existing
Tors don't use SSL_close(), so having a connection close without
the TLS shutdown handshake is hardly unexpected.
- When we receive a consensus from the future, warn about skew.
- Make "not enough dir info yet" warnings describe *why* Tor feels
it doesn't have enough directory info yet.
- On the USR1 signal, when dmalloc is in use, log the top 10 memory
consumers. (We already do this on HUP.)
- Give more descriptive well-formedness errors for out-of-range
hidden service descriptor/protocol versions.
- Stop recommending that every server operator send mail to tor-ops.
Resolves bug 597. Bugfix on 0.1.2.x.
- Improve skew reporting: try to give the user a better log message
about how skewed they are, and how much this matters.
- New --quiet command-line option to suppress the default console log.
Good in combination with --hash-password.
- Don't complain that "your server has not managed to confirm that its
ports are reachable" if we haven't been able to build any circuits
yet.
- Detect the reason for failing to mmap a descriptor file we just
wrote, and give a more useful log message. Fixes bug 533.
- Always prepend "Bug: " to any log message about a bug.
- When dumping memory usage, list bytes used in buffer memory
free-lists.
- When running with dmalloc, dump more stats on hup and on exit.
- Put a platform string (e.g. "Linux i686") in the startup log
message, so when people paste just their logs, we know if it's
OpenBSD or Windows or what.
- When logging memory usage, break down memory used in buffers by
buffer type.
- When we are reporting the DirServer line we just parsed, we were
logging the second stanza of the key fingerprint, not the first.
- Even though Windows is equally happy with / and \ as path separators,
try to use \ consistently on Windows and / consistently on Unix: it
makes the log messages nicer.
- On OSX, stop warning the user that kqueue support in libevent is
"experimental", since it seems to have worked fine for ages.

o Contributed scripts and tools:
- Update linux-tor-prio.sh script to allow QoS based on the uid of
the Tor process. Patch from Marco Bonetti with tweaks from Mike
Perry.
- Include the "tor-ctrl.sh" bash script by Stefan Behte to provide
Unix users an easy way to script their Tor process (e.g. by
adjusting bandwidth based on the time of the day).
- In the exitlist script, only consider the most recently published
server descriptor for each server. Also, when the user requests
a list of servers that _reject_ connections to a given address,
explicitly exclude the IPs that also have servers that accept
connections to that address. Resolves bug 405.
- Include a new contrib/tor-exit-notice.html file that exit relay
operators can put on their website to help reduce abuse queries.

o Newly deprecated features:
- The status/version/num-versioning and status/version/num-concurring
GETINFO controller options are no longer useful in the v3 directory
protocol: treat them as deprecated, and warn when they're used.
- The RedirectExits config option is now deprecated.

o Removed features:
- Drop the old code to choke directory connections when the
corresponding OR connections got full: thanks to the cell queue
feature, OR conns don't get full any more.
- Remove the old "dns worker" server DNS code: it hasn't been default
since 0.1.2.2-alpha, and all the servers are using the new
eventdns code.
- Remove the code to generate the oldest (v1) directory format.
- Remove support for the old bw_accounting file: we've been storing
bandwidth accounting information in the state file since
0.1.2.5-alpha. This may result in bandwidth accounting errors
if you try to upgrade from 0.1.1.x or earlier, or if you try to
downgrade to 0.1.1.x or earlier.
- Drop support for OpenSSL version 0.9.6. Just about nobody was using
it, it had no AES, and it hasn't seen any security patches since
2004.
- Stop overloading the circuit_t.onionskin field for both "onionskin
from a CREATE cell that we are waiting for a cpuworker to be
assigned" and "onionskin from an EXTEND cell that we are going to
send to an OR as soon as we are connected". Might help with bug 600.
- Remove the tor_strpartition() function: its logic was confused,
and it was only used for one thing that could be implemented far
more easily.
- Remove the contrib scripts ExerciseServer.py, PathDemo.py,
and TorControl.py, as they use the old v0 controller protocol,
and are obsoleted by TorFlow anyway.
- Drop support for v1 rendezvous descriptors, since we never used
them anyway, and the code has probably rotted by now. Based on
patch from Karsten Loesing.
- Stop allowing address masks that do not correspond to bit prefixes.
We have warned about these for a really long time; now it's time
to reject them. (Patch from croup.)
- Remove an optimization in the AES counter-mode code that assumed
that the counter never exceeded 2^68. When the counter can be set
arbitrarily as an IV (as it is by Karsten's new hidden services
code), this assumption no longer holds.
- Disable the SETROUTERPURPOSE controller command: it is now
obsolete.