Arti 1.1.4 is released: Development on Onion Services and RPC

Arti is our ongoing project to create a next-generation Tor client in Rust. Now we're announcing the latest release, Arti 1.1.4.

For this month and the next, our efforts are divided between onion services and work on a new RPC API (a successor to C Tor's "control port") that will give applications a safe and powerful way to work with Arti without having to write their code in Rust or link Arti as a library (unless they want to).

(This release is a little smaller than usual, since many of us spent a week at an in-person meeting.)

For onion services, we have implemented the client side of the service descriptor downloading, including support for finding descriptors on the HSDir ring.

Our RPC code is still in an "infrastructure-only" state: the backend is mostly built, but as of yet it supports no useful functionality. For information on the general shape of our design, see the work-in-progress specification document.

This release also solves a bug that prevented directories from updating under some circumstances.

There have been many smaller changes as well; for those, please see the CHANGELOG.

For more information on using Arti, see our top-level README, and the documentation for the arti binary.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release, including Alexander Færøy, juga, Neel Chauhan, tranna, and Trinity Pointard.

Finally, our deep thanks to Zcash Community Grants for funding the development of Arti!