[tor-talk] Tor 0.2.7.1-alpha is released

[Nick Mathewson <nickm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tor 0.2.7.1-alpha is the first alpha release in its series. It
includes numerous small features and bugfixes against previous Tor
versions, and numerous small infrastructure improvements. The most
notable features are several new ways for controllers to interact with
the hidden services subsystem.

You can download the source from the usual place on the website.
Packages should be up in a few days.

NOTE: This is an alpha release. Please expect bugs.


Changes in version 0.2.7.1-alpha - 2015-05-12

  o New system requirements:
    - Tor no longer includes workarounds to support Libevent versions
      before 1.3e. Libevent 2.0 or later is recommended. Closes
      ticket 15248.

  o Major features (controller):
    - Add the ADD_ONION and DEL_ONION commands that allow the creation
      and management of hidden services via the controller. Closes
      ticket 6411.
    - New "GETINFO onions/current" and "GETINFO onions/detached"
      commands to get information about hidden services created via the
      controller. Part of ticket 6411.
    - New HSFETCH command to launch a request for a hidden service
      descriptor. Closes ticket 14847.
    - New HSPOST command to upload a hidden service descriptor. Closes
      ticket 3523. Patch by "DonnchaC".

  o Major bugfixes (hidden services):
    - Revert commit that made directory authorities assign the HSDir
      flag to relay without a DirPort; this was bad because such relays
      can't handle BEGIN_DIR cells. Fixes bug 15850; bugfix
      on tor-0.2.6.3-alpha.

  o Minor features (clock-jump tolerance):
    - Recover better when our clock jumps back many hours, like might
      happen for Tails or Whonix users who start with a very wrong
      hardware clock, use Tor to discover a more accurate time, and then
      fix their clock. Resolves part of ticket 8766.

  o Minor features (command-line interface):
    - Make --hash-password imply --hush to prevent unnecessary noise.
      Closes ticket 15542. Patch from "cypherpunks".
    - Print a warning whenever we find a relative file path being used
      as torrc option. Resolves issue 14018.

  o Minor features (controller):
    - Add DirAuthority lines for default directory authorities to the
      output of the "GETINFO config/defaults" command if not already
      present. Implements ticket 14840.
    - Controllers can now use "GETINFO hs/client/desc/id/..." to
      retrieve items from the client's hidden service descriptor cache.
      Closes ticket 14845.
    - Implement a new controller command "GETINFO status/fresh-relay-
      descs" to fetch a descriptor/extrainfo pair that was generated on
      demand just for the controller's use. Implements ticket 14784.

  o Minor features (DoS-resistance):
    - Make it harder for attackers to overload hidden services with
      introductions, by blocking multiple introduction requests on the
      same circuit. Resolves ticket 15515.

  o Minor features (geoip):
    - Update geoip to the April 8 2015 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country database.
    - Update geoip6 to the April 8 2015 Maxmind GeoLite2
      Country database.

  o Minor features (HS popularity countermeasure):
    - To avoid leaking HS popularity, don't cycle the introduction point
      when we've handled a fixed number of INTRODUCE2 cells but instead
      cycle it when a random number of introductions is reached, thus
      making it more difficult for an attacker to find out the amount of
      clients that have used the introduction point for a specific HS.
      Closes ticket 15745.

  o Minor features (logging):
    - Include the Tor version in all LD_BUG log messages, since people
      tend to cut and paste those into the bugtracker. Implements
      ticket 15026.

  o Minor features (pluggable transports):
    - When launching managed pluggable transports on Linux systems,
      attempt to have the kernel deliver a SIGTERM on tor exit if the
      pluggable transport process is still running. Resolves
      ticket 15471.
    - When launching managed pluggable transports, setup a valid open
      stdin in the child process that can be used to detect if tor has
      terminated. The "TOR_PT_EXIT_ON_STDIN_CLOSE" environment variable
      can be used by implementations to detect this new behavior.
      Resolves ticket 15435.

  o Minor features (testing):
    - Add a test to verify that the compiler does not eliminate our
      memwipe() implementation. Closes ticket 15377.
    - Add make rule `check-changes` to verify the format of changes
      files. Closes ticket 15180.
    - Add unit tests for control_event_is_interesting(). Add a compile-
      time check that the number of events doesn't exceed the capacity
      of control_event_t.event_mask. Closes ticket 15431, checks for
      bugs similar to 13085. Patch by "teor".
    - Command-line argument tests moved to Stem. Resolves ticket 14806.
    - Integrate the ntor, backtrace, and zero-length keys tests into the
      automake test suite. Closes ticket 15344.
    - Remove assertions during builds to determine Tor's test coverage.
      We don't want to trigger these even in assertions, so including
      them artificially makes our branch coverage look worse than it is.
      This patch provides the new test-stem-full and coverage-html-full
      configure options. Implements ticket 15400.

  o Minor bugfixes (build):
    - Improve out-of-tree builds by making non-standard rules work and
      clean up additional files and directories. Fixes bug 15053; bugfix
      on 0.2.7.0-alpha.

  o Minor bugfixes (command-line interface):
    - When "--quiet" is provided along with "--validate-config", do not
      write anything to stdout on success. Fixes bug 14994; bugfix
      on 0.2.3.3-alpha.
    - When complaining about bad arguments to "--dump-config", use
      stderr, not stdout.

  o Minor bugfixes (configuration, unit tests):
    - Only add the default fallback directories when the DirAuthorities,
      AlternateDirAuthority, and FallbackDir directory config options
      are set to their defaults. The default fallback directory list is
      currently empty, this fix will only change tor's behavior when it
      has default fallback directories. Includes unit tests for
      consider_adding_dir_servers(). Fixes bug 15642; bugfix on
      90f6071d8dc0 in 0.2.4.7-alpha. Patch by "teor".

  o Minor bugfixes (correctness):
    - For correctness, avoid modifying a constant string in
      handle_control_postdescriptor. Fixes bug 15546; bugfix
      on 0.1.1.16-rc.
    - Remove side-effects from tor_assert() calls. This was harmless,
      because we never disable assertions, but it is bad style and
      unnecessary. Fixes bug 15211; bugfix on 0.2.5.5, 0.2.2.36,
      and 0.2.0.10.

  o Minor bugfixes (hidden service):
    - Fix an out-of-bounds read when parsing invalid INTRODUCE2 cells on
      a client authorized hidden service. Fixes bug 15823; bugfix
      on 0.2.1.6-alpha.
    - Remove an extraneous newline character from the end of hidden
      service descriptors. Fixes bug 15296; bugfix on 0.2.0.10-alpha.

  o Minor bugfixes (interface):
    - Print usage information for --dump-config when it is used without
      an argument. Also, fix the error message to use different wording
      and add newline at the end. Fixes bug 15541; bugfix
      on 0.2.5.1-alpha.

  o Minor bugfixes (logs):
    - When building Tor under Clang, do not include an extra set of
      parentheses in log messages that include function names. Fixes bug
      15269; bugfix on every released version of Tor when compiled with
      recent enough Clang.

  o Minor bugfixes (network):
    - When attempting to use fallback technique for network interface
      lookup, disregard loopback and multicast addresses since they are
      unsuitable for public communications.

  o Minor bugfixes (statistics):
    - Disregard the ConnDirectionStatistics torrc options when Tor is
      not a relay since in that mode of operation no sensible data is
      being collected and because Tor might run into measurement hiccups
      when running as a client for some time, then becoming a relay.
      Fixes bug 15604; bugfix on 0.2.2.35.

  o Minor bugfixes (test networks):
    - When self-testing reachability, use ExtendAllowPrivateAddresses to
      determine if local/private addresses imply reachability. The
      previous fix used TestingTorNetwork, which implies
      ExtendAllowPrivateAddresses, but this excluded rare configurations
      where ExtendAllowPrivateAddresses is set but TestingTorNetwork is
      not. Fixes bug 15771; bugfix on 0.2.6.1-alpha. Patch by "teor",
      issue discovered by CJ Ess.

  o Minor bugfixes (testing):
    - Check for matching value in server response in ntor_ref.py. Fixes
      bug 15591; bugfix on 0.2.4.8-alpha. Reported and fixed
      by "joelanders".
    - Set the severity correctly when testing
      get_interface_addresses_ifaddrs() and
      get_interface_addresses_win32(), so that the tests fail gracefully
      instead of triggering an assertion. Fixes bug 15759; bugfix on
      0.2.6.3-alpha. Reported by Nicolas Derive.

  o Code simplification and refactoring:
    - Move the hacky fallback code out of get_interface_address6() into
      separate function and get it covered with unit-tests. Resolves
      ticket 14710.
    - Refactor hidden service client-side cache lookup to intelligently
      report its various failure cases, and disentangle failure cases
      involving a lack of introduction points. Closes ticket 14391.
    - Use our own Base64 encoder instead of OpenSSL's, to allow more
      control over the output. Part of ticket 15652.

  o Documentation:
    - Improve the descriptions of statistics-related torrc options in
      the manpage to describe rationale and possible uses cases. Fixes
      issue 15550.
    - Improve the layout and formatting of ./configure --help messages.
      Closes ticket 15024. Patch from "cypherpunks".
    - Standardize on the term "server descriptor" in the manual page.
      Previously, we had used "router descriptor", "server descriptor",
      and "relay descriptor" interchangeably. Part of ticket 14987.

  o Removed code:
    - Remove `USE_OPENSSL_BASE64` and the corresponding fallback code
      and always use the internal Base64 decoder. The internal decoder
      has been part of tor since tor-0.2.0.10-alpha, and no one should
      be using the OpenSSL one. Part of ticket 15652.
    - Remove the 'tor_strclear()' function; use memwipe() instead.
      Closes ticket 14922.

  o Removed features:
    - Remove the (seldom-used) DynamicDHGroups feature. For anti-
      fingerprinting we now recommend pluggable transports; for forward-
      secrecy in TLS, we now use the P-256 group. Closes ticket 13736.
    - Remove the undocumented "--digests" command-line option. It
      complicated our build process, caused subtle build issues on
      multiple platforms, and is now redundant since we started
      including git version identifiers. Closes ticket 14742.
    - Tor no longer contains checks for ancient directory cache versions
      that didn't know about microdescriptors.
    - Tor no longer contains workarounds for stat files generated by
      super-old versions of Tor that didn't choose guards sensibly.
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