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[tor-talk] Tor 0.2.4.8-alpha is out



Tor 0.2.4.8-alpha introduces directory guards to reduce user enumeration
risks, adds a new stronger and faster circuit handshake, and offers
stronger and faster link encryption when both sides support it.

https://www.torproject.org/download

Changes in version 0.2.4.8-alpha - 2013-01-14
  o Major features:
    - Preliminary support for directory guards (proposal 207): when
      possible, clients now use their entry guards for non-anonymous
      directory requests. This can help prevent client enumeration. Note
      that this behavior only works when we have a usable consensus
      directory, and when options about what to download are more or less
      standard. In the future we should re-bootstrap from our guards,
      rather than re-bootstrapping from the preconfigured list of
      directory sources that ships with Tor. Resolves ticket 6526.
    - Tor relays and clients now support a better CREATE/EXTEND cell
      format, allowing the sender to specify multiple address, identity,
      and handshake types. Implements Robert Ransom's proposal 200;
      closes ticket 7199.

  o Major features (new circuit handshake):
    - Tor now supports a new circuit extension handshake designed by Ian
      Goldberg, Douglas Stebila, and Berkant Ustaoglu. Our original
      circuit extension handshake, later called "TAP", was a bit slow
      (especially on the relay side), had a fragile security proof, and
      used weaker keys than we'd now prefer. The new circuit handshake
      uses Dan Bernstein's "curve25519" elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman
      function, making it significantly more secure than the older
      handshake, and significantly faster. Tor can use one of two built-in
      pure-C curve25519-donna implementations by Adam Langley, or it
      can link against the "nacl" library for a tuned version if present.

      The built-in version is very fast for 64-bit systems when building
      with GCC. The built-in 32-bit version is still faster than the
      old TAP protocol, but using libnacl is better on most such hosts.

      Clients don't currently use this protocol by default, since
      comparatively few clients support it so far. To try it, set
      UseNTorHandshake to 1.

      Implements proposal 216; closes ticket 7202.

  o Major features (better link encryption):
    - Relays can now enable the ECDHE TLS ciphersuites when available
      and appropriate. These ciphersuites let us negotiate forward-secure
      TLS secret keys more safely and more efficiently than with our
      previous use of Diffie-Hellman modulo a 1024-bit prime. By default,
      public relays prefer the (faster) P224 group, and bridges prefer
      the (more common) P256 group; you can override this with the
      TLSECGroup option.

      Enabling these ciphers was a little tricky, since for a long time,
      clients had been claiming to support them without actually doing
      so, in order to foil fingerprinting. But with the client-side
      implementation of proposal 198 in 0.2.3.17-beta, clients can now
      match the ciphers from recent Firefox versions *and* list the
      ciphers they actually mean, so relays can believe such clients
      when they advertise ECDHE support in their TLS ClientHello messages.

      This feature requires clients running 0.2.3.17-beta or later,
      and requires both sides to be running OpenSSL 1.0.0 or later
      with ECC support. OpenSSL 1.0.1, with the compile-time option
      "enable-ec_nistp_64_gcc_128", is highly recommended.

      Implements the relay side of proposal 198; closes ticket 7200.

  o Major bugfixes:
    - Avoid crashing when, as a relay without IPv6-exit support, a
      client insists on getting an IPv6 address or nothing. Fixes bug
      7814; bugfix on 0.2.4.7-alpha.

  o Minor features:
    - Improve circuit build timeout handling for hidden services.
      In particular: adjust build timeouts more accurately depending
      upon the number of hop-RTTs that a particular circuit type
      undergoes. Additionally, launch intro circuits in parallel
      if they timeout, and take the first one to reply as valid.
    - Work correctly on Unix systems where EAGAIN and EWOULDBLOCK are
      separate error codes; or at least, don't break for that reason.
      Fixes bug 7935. Reported by "oftc_must_be_destroyed".
    - Update to the January 2 2013 Maxmind GeoLite Country database.

  o Minor features (testing):
    - Add benchmarks for DH (1024-bit multiplicative group) and ECDH
      (P-256) Diffie-Hellman handshakes to src/or/bench.
    - Add benchmark functions to test onion handshake performance.

  o Minor features (path bias detection):
    - Alter the Path Bias log messages to be more descriptive in terms
      of reporting timeouts and other statistics.
    - Create three levels of Path Bias log messages, as opposed to just
      two. These are configurable via consensus as well as via the torrc
      options PathBiasNoticeRate, PathBiasWarnRate, PathBiasExtremeRate.
      The default values are 0.70, 0.50, and 0.30 respectively.
    - Separate the log message levels from the decision to drop guards,
      which also is available via torrc option PathBiasDropGuards.
      PathBiasDropGuards still defaults to 0 (off).
    - Deprecate PathBiasDisableRate in favor of PathBiasDropGuards
      in combination with PathBiasExtremeRate.
    - Increase the default values for PathBiasScaleThreshold and
      PathBiasCircThreshold from (200, 20) to (300, 150).
    - Add in circuit usage accounting to path bias. If we try to use a
      built circuit but fail for any reason, it counts as path bias.
      Certain classes of circuits where the adversary gets to pick your
      destination node are exempt from this accounting. Usage accounting
      can be specifically disabled via consensus parameter or torrc.
    - Convert all internal path bias state to double-precision floating
      point, to avoid roundoff error and other issues.
    - Only record path bias information for circuits that have completed
      *two* hops. Assuming end-to-end tagging is the attack vector, this
      makes us more resilient to ambient circuit failure without any
      detection capability loss.

  o Minor bugfixes (log messages):
    - Rate-limit the "No circuits are opened. Relaxed timeout for a
      circuit with channel state open..." message to once per hour to
      keep it from filling the notice logs. Mitigates bug 7799 but does
      not fix the underlying cause. Bugfix on 0.2.4.7-alpha.
    - Avoid spurious warnings when configuring multiple client ports of
      which only some are nonlocal. Previously, we had claimed that some
      were nonlocal when in fact they weren't. Fixes bug 7836; bugfix on
      0.2.3.3-alpha.

  o Code simplifications and refactoring:
    - Get rid of a couple of harmless clang warnings, where we compared
      enums to ints. These warnings are newly introduced in clang 3.2.
    - Split the onion.c file into separate modules for the onion queue
      and the different handshakes it supports.
    - Remove the marshalling/unmarshalling code for sending requests to
      cpuworkers over a socket, and instead just send structs. The
      recipient will always be the same Tor binary as the sender, so
      any encoding is overkill.

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