Few days ago the release of the new version of Tor 0.4.7.7 was announced, used to organize the work of the anonymous Tor network.
Tor 0.4.7.7 en recognized as the first stable release of the 0.4.7 branch, which has been in development for the last ten months. The 0.4.7 branch will be maintained as part of the regular maintenance cycle: updates will be discontinued after 9 months or 3 months after the release of the 0.4.8.x branch.
Tor has released 0.4.7.7 , the first stable version of Tor with support for congestion control. Congestion control will remove the current Tor rate limit, as well as reduce latency by minimizing the length of queues in relays. It will result in significant improvements in Tor performance, as well as higher utilization of our network capacity.
Main new features of Tor 0.4.7.7
In this new version of Tor that is presented, added an implementation of the RTT Congestion Control protocol which regulates traffic routed through the Tor network (client-side flow control, exit nodes, and onion services, but no delay correlation on different sides). The protocol aims to overcome current bandwidth limitations and reduce the size of retransmission queues. Until now, the speed of a single download stream through exit nodes and onion services was limited to 1 MB/s, as the sending window has a fixed size of 1000 cells per stream and 512 cells can be sent. bytes of data in each cell (stream) with a chain delay of 0,5 sec = 1000*512/0,5 = ~1 MB/sec).
To predict the available bandwidth and determine the total size of the packet queue, the new protocol uses an estimate of the round trip time (RTT), which serves as a criterion to limit the sending of data.
The simulation showed that the use of the new protocol on exit nodes and onion services will lead to decreased queue delays, removal of flow rate restrictions, increased performance of the Tor network and Optimum use of available bandwidth. On the client side, flow control support will be offered on May 31 in the next major version of Tor Browser, built on the Tor 0.4.7 branch.
Added simplified Vanguards-lite protection against anonymization attacks of short-lived onion services, which reduces the risk of detecting guard nodes of an onion service or onion client when the service has been running for less than a month (for onion services running more than a month, it is recommended use vanguards plugin).
The essence of the method is that onion clients and services automatically select 4 long-running protection nodes (“layer 2 protection relay”) to use in the middle of the chain, and these nodes are stored for a random time (in average, one week).
Another change that stands out in the new version is for directory servers, in which the ability to assign the MiddleOnly indicator to relays through a new consensus method has been implemented. The new approach involves moving the logic of setting the MiddleOnly flag from the client level to the directory servers side. For relays marked MiddleOnly, the Exit, Guard, HSDir, and V2Dir flags are automatically removed and the BadExit flag is set.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it about this new version, you can check the details in the following link.
How to get Tor 0.4.7?
In order to get this new version, just go to the official website of the project and in its download section we can obtain the source code for its compilation. You can get the source code from the following link
While for the special case of Arch Linux users we can obtain it from the AUR repository. Only at the moment the package has not been updated, you can monitor it from the following link and as soon as it is available you can perform the installation by typing the following command:
yay -S tor-git