We are in the final stages of finalizing our new support portal, just one portal of many new sites to come in our website redesign. In order to finish it, we need to translate it from English into more languages. At the very least, we want to translate it to Farsi, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Portuguese, German, Korean, Turkish, Italian, Arabic, French, and Spanish. If you are knowledgeable about another language not listed here, we'd be grateful for your help as well.
This installment will feature a Q&A with our incoming Executive Director, Isabela Bagueros. We'll start with a brief introduction on Tor, then Isa will highlight a few things we've been up to and give an overview of her vision for the organization as she prepares to become the Tor Project's ED at the end of this year.
The purpose of this post is to discuss what good research needs to do in order to ensure it has the best chance of being adopted by Tor, or any other large software project.
We have structured this post in terms of an ordered list of goals for research. Each successive goal is more difficult to accomplish than the previous one. At the end of this post, we will look at a positive example of excellent research that successfully accomplished all of these goals and give overall takeaways.
This post is meant to update the list of open Tor research problems, to bring focus to specific areas of research that the Tor Project thinks are necessary/useful in our efforts to upgrade and improve the Tor network and associated components and software. It is organized by topic area: network performance, network security, censorship circumvention, and application research. Each topic area provides information about current and desired work and ideas. We conclude with information about doing ethical and useful research on Tor and with suggestions on how to best ensure that this work is useful and easy for us to adopt.
Fixing the guard discovery problem in Tor itself is an immense project -- primarily because it involves many trade-offs between performance and scalability versus path security, which makes it very hard to pick good defaults for every onion service. Because of this, we have created an add-on that can be used in conjunction with a Tor onion service server or a Tor client that accesses Tor onion services.
We have a new stable release today. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.3.3.8 on the website. Packages should be available within the next several weeks, with a new stable Tor Browser by some time in September. (Don't worry, this isn't an urgent release for clients.)
Tor 0.3.3.8 backports several changes from the 0.3.4.x series, including fixes for a memory leak affecting directory authorities.
Changes in version 0.3.3.8 - 2018-07-09
Major bugfixes (directory authority, backport from 0.3.4.3-alpha):
Stop leaking memory on directory authorities when planning to vote. This bug was crashing authorities by exhausting their memory. Fixes bug 26435; bugfix on 0.3.3.6.
Major bugfixes (rust, testing, backport from 0.3.4.3-alpha):
Make sure that failing tests in Rust will actually cause the build to fail: previously, they were ignored. Fixes bug 26258; bugfix on 0.3.3.4-alpha.
Hi! There's a new release candidate available for download. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.3.4.4-rc from the usual place on the website. Packages should be available over the coming weeks, with a new alpha Tor Browser release likely some time in MulyJuly.
Remember, this is a release candidate: you should only run this if you'd like to find and report more bugs than usual.
Tor 0.3.4.4-rc fixes several small compilation, portability, and correctness issues in previous versions of Tor. This version is a release candidate: if no serious bugs are found, we expect that the stable 0.3.4 release will be (almost) the same as this release.
Changes in version 0.3.4.4-rc - 2018-07-09
Minor features (compilation):
When building Tor, prefer to use Python 3 over Python 2, and more recent (contemplated) versions over older ones. Closes ticket 26372.
Minor features (geoip):
Update geoip and geoip6 to the July 3 2018 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country database. Closes ticket 26674.
