The release of Tor 0.4.5.6 has been announced, which is used to organize the work of the anonymous Tor network. Version Tor 0.4.5.6 is recognized as the first stable release of the 0.4.5 branch, which has been in development for the past five months. The 0.4.5 branch will be supported under the standard maintenance cycle - updates will cease 9 months after or 3 months after the release of branch 0.4.6.x. Long-Term Support (LTS) is provided for branch 0.3.5, with updates released until February 1, 2022. Support for branches 0.4.0.x, 0.2.9.x, 0.4.2.x, and 0.4.3 has been discontinued. Support for branch 0.4.1.x will be discontinued on May 20, and branch 0.4.4 in June 2021.
Key innovations:
- The ability to build Tor as a statically linkable library for embedding in applications has been implemented.
- Significantly improved detection of relays supporting IPv6. In torrc, the Address option now allows specification of IPv6 addresses. Relays automatically attach to IPv6 for ports specified via ORPort, except those explicitly marked with the IPv4Only flag. The reachability of ORPort with IPv6 is now tracked separately from ORPort with IPv4 by the relay. Relays supporting IPv6 include both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in the list of cells when connecting to another relay, randomly selecting which will be used for the connection.
- A 'MetricsPort' mechanism has been offered for relay operators to monitor node performance. Access to node statistics is provided via an HTTP interface. Currently, output in Prometheus format is supported.
- Support for LTTng tracing and user-space tracing in USDT (User-space Statically Defined Tracing) mode has been added, which involves building programs with inclusion of special static checkpoints.
- Performance issues with relays running on the Windows platform have been resolved.
Source: opennet.ru
