release of tools , used to organize the work of the anonymous Tor network. Tor 0.4.0.5 is recognized as the first stable release of the 0.4.0 branch, which has been in development for the past four months. The 0.4.0 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 0.4.1.x branch. Long Cycle Support (LTS) is provided for the 0.3.5 branch, which will receive updates until February 1, 2022.
Main innovations:
- In the implementation of the client side power-saving mode - when inactive for a long time (24 hours or more), the client goes into a sleep state, which stops network activity and does not consume CPU resources. Return to normal mode occurs after a user request or when a control command is received. A DormantOnFirstStartup setting has been proposed to control the resumption of sleep mode after a restart (to return to sleep mode immediately, without waiting for another 24 hours of inactivity);
- Detailed information about the Tor launch process (bootstrap) has been implemented, allowing you to evaluate the reasons for delays during launch without waiting for the connection process to complete. Previously, information was displayed only after the connection was completed, but the startup process would hang for certain problems or could take hours, which created a feeling of uncertainty. Currently, messages about emerging problems and the status of the launch are displayed as the progress of the various stages progresses. Separately, information about the state of the connection using a proxy and connected transports is displayed;
- initial support (WTF-PAD - Adaptive Padding) to combat indirect methods for determining the facts of access to sites and hidden services through the analysis of the features of packet flows and the delays between them that are characteristic of specific sites and services. The implementation includes state machines that operate on a statistical probability distribution to substitute delays between packets in order to smooth traffic. The new mode is currently only in experimental mode. Currently only padding at the chain level is implemented;
- Added an explicit list of Tor subsystems called on initialization and shutdown. Previously, these subsystems were managed from different places in the codebase and their use was not structured;
- A new API for managing child processes has been implemented to provide a bi-directional communication channel between child processes on Unix-like systems and on Windows.
Source: opennet.ru