The release of the Tor 0.4.5.6 toolkit used to organize the work of the anonymous Tor network is presented. 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 maintained as part of the regular maintenance cycle - updates will be discontinued 9 months or 3 months after the release of the 0.4.6.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, 0.4.2.x and 0.4.3 are no longer supported. Support for the 0.4.1.x branch will end on May 20, and the 0.4.4 branch in June 2021.
Main innovations:
- Implemented the ability to build Tor as a statically linked library for embedding in applications.
- Significantly improved detection of relays that support IPv6. In torrc, the Address option allows specifying IPv6 addresses. Relays provide automatic binding to IPv6 for ports specified via ORPort, except for those that are explicitly marked with the IPv4Only flag. ORPort with IPv6 reachability is now monitored by a relay separately from ORPort with IPv4. Relays with IPv6 support, when connected to another relay, include both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in the cell list, and randomly select the one that will be used for the connection.
- For relay operators, the MetricsPort mechanism is proposed to monitor node performance. Access to statistics about the operation of the node is provided through the HTTP interface. Prometheus output is currently supported.
- Added support for the LTTng tracing system and user-space tracing in USDT (User-space Statically Defined Tracing) mode, which implies building programs with the inclusion of special static control points.
- Resolved performance issues with relays running on the Windows platform.
Source: opennet.ru