release of tools , used to organize the work of the anonymous Tor network. Tor 0.4.4.5 is recognized as the first stable release of the 0.4.4 branch, which has been in development for the past five months. The 0.4.4 branch will be maintained as part of the regular maintenance cycle - updates will be discontinued after 9 months (in June 2021) or 3 months after the release of the 0.4.5.x branch. Long Cycle Support (LTS) is provided for the 0.3.5 branch, which will receive updates until February 1, 2022. Branches 0.4.0.x, 0.2.9.x and 0.4.2.x are no longer supported. The 0.4.1.x branch will be deprecated on May 20, and 0.4.3 on February 15, 2021.
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- Improved algorithm for selecting sentinel nodes (), which addresses a load balancing issue and improves performance and security. In the new algorithm, a newly elected guard node cannot be promoted to primary unless all previously elected guard nodes are unreachable.
- Implemented load balancing for onion services. A service based on the third version of the protocol can now act as an OnionBalance backend, configured using the HiddenServiceOnionBalanceInstance option.
- The list of spare directory servers has been updated, which has not been updated since last year, and out of 148 servers, 105 remained operational (the new list includes 144 entries generated in July).
- On relays, work with cells is allowed , accessible only by IPv6 address, and it is also allowed to perform a chain extension operation over IPv6 if the client and the relay support IPv6. If the cell is reachable via IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time when expanding chains of nodes, then the IPv4 or IPv6 address is chosen randomly. The chain extension is allowed to use an existing IPv6 connection. The use of internal IPv4 and IPv6 addresses is prohibited.
- Expanded the amount of code that can be disabled when running Tor without relay support.
Source: opennet.ru