Release of the new stable branch Tor 0.4.3

Introduced release of the toolkit Tor 0.4.3.5, used for organizing the work of the anonymous Tor network. Tor 0.4.3.5 is recognized as the first stable release of branch 0.4.3, which has developed over the last five months. The 0.4.3 branch will be supported within the standard maintenance cycle — updates will cease after 9 months or 3 months after the release of branch 0.4.4.x. Long-term support (LTS) is provided for branch 0.3.5, with updates being released until February 1, 2022. Support for branches 0.4.0.x and 0.2.9.x has been discontinued. Support for branch 0.4.1.x will end on May 20, and for 0.4.2.x — on September 15.

Key innovations:

• The ability to build without including the relay and directory server code has been implemented. Disabling is done using the option "—disable-module-relay" when running the configure script, which also disables the building of the "dirauth" module;
• Functionality essential for the operation of hidden services based on the third version of the protocol with a balancer OnionBalance, allowing the creation of scalable hidden services operating on multiple backends with their own Tor instances;
• New commands have been added for managing credentials used for authorizing hidden services: ONION_CLIENT_AUTH_ADD for adding credentials, ONION_CLIENT_AUTH_REMOVE for removing credentials, and
  ONION_CLIENT_AUTH_VIEW for outputting the list of credentials. A new flag "ExtendedErrors" has been added for SocksPort, allowing for more detailed error information;
• In addition to the already supported proxy types (HTTP CONNECT,
  SOCKS4 and SOCKS5) has added the ability to connect through an HAProxy server has been added. Configuration is done via the parameter "TCPProxy :" in torrc, specifying "haproxy" as the protocol;
• Directory servers have added support for blocking ed25519 relay keys using the approved-routers file (previously only RSA keys could be blocked);
• Significantly redesigned capabilities related to configuration handling and controller operation;
• Increased system requirements for building — to run tests, Python 3 is now required (Python 2 is no longer supported).

Source: opennet.ru