[tor-talk] Tor 0.2.4.1-alpha is out

[Roger Dingledine]

Tor 0.2.4.1-alpha lets bridges publish their pluggable transports to
bridgedb; lets relays use IPv6 addresses and directory authorities
advertise them; and switches to a cleaner build interface.

This is the first alpha release in a new series, so expect there to
be bugs. Users who would rather test out a more stable branch should
stay with 0.2.3.x for now.

https://www.torproject.org/download/download

(Packages coming eventually.)

Changes in version 0.2.4.1-alpha - 2012-09-05
  o Major features (bridges):
    - Bridges now report the pluggable transports they support to the
      bridge authority, so it can pass the supported transports on to
      bridgedb and/or eventually do reachability testing. Implements
      ticket 3589.

  o Major features (IPv6):
    - Bridge authorities now accept IPv6 bridge addresses and include
      them in network status documents. Implements ticket 5534.
    - Clients who set "ClientUseIPv6 1" may connect to entry nodes over
      IPv6. Set "ClientPreferIPv6ORPort 1" to make this even more likely
      to happen. Implements ticket 5535.
    - All kind of relays, not just bridges, can now advertise an IPv6
      OR port. Implements ticket 6362.
    - Directory authorities vote on IPv6 OR ports using the new consensus
      method 14. Implements ticket 6363.

  o Major features (build):
    - Switch to a nonrecursive Makefile structure. Now instead of each
      Makefile.am invoking other Makefile.am's, there is a master
      Makefile.am that includes the others. This change makes our build
      process slightly more maintainable, and improves parallelism for
      building with make -j. Original patch by Stewart Smith; various
      fixes by Jim Meyering.
    - Where available, we now use automake's "silent" make rules by
      default, so that warnings are easier to spot. You can get the old
      behavior with "make V=1". Patch by Stewart Smith for ticket 6522.

  o Minor features (code security and spec conformance):
    - Clear keys and key-derived material left on the stack in
      rendservice.c and rendclient.c. Check return value of
      crypto_pk_write_private_key_to_string() in end_service_load_keys().
      These fixes should make us more forward-secure against cold-boot
      attacks and the like. Fixes bug 2385.
    - Reject EXTEND cells sent to nonexistent streams. According to the
      spec, an EXTEND cell sent to _any_ nonzero stream ID is invalid, but
      we were only checking for stream IDs that were currently in use.
      Found while hunting for more instances of bug 6271. Bugfix on
      0.0.2pre8, which introduced incremental circuit construction.

  o Minor features (streamlining);
    - No longer include the "opt" prefix when generating routerinfos
      or v2 directories: it has been needless since Tor 0.1.2. Closes
      ticket 5124.
    - Remove some now-needless code that tried to aggressively flush
      OR connections as data was added to them. Since 0.2.0.1-alpha, our
      cell queue logic has saved us from the failure mode that this code
      was supposed to prevent. Removing this code will limit the number
      of baroque control flow paths through Tor's network logic. Reported
      pseudonymously on IRC. Fixes bug 6468; bugfix on 0.2.0.1-alpha.

  o Minor features (controller):
    - Add a "GETINFO signal/names" control port command. Implements
      ticket 3842.
    - Provide default values for all options via "GETINFO config/defaults".
      Implements ticket 4971.

  o Minor features (IPv6):
    - New config option "AuthDirHasIPv6Connectivity 1" that directory
      authorities should set if they have IPv6 connectivity and want to
      do reachability tests for IPv6 relays. Implements feature 5974.
    - A relay with an IPv6 OR port now sends that address in NETINFO
      cells (in addition to its other address). Implements ticket 6364.

  o Minor features (log messages):
    - Omit the first heartbeat log message, because it never has anything
      useful to say, and it clutters up the bootstrapping messages.
      Resolves ticket 6758.
    - Don't log about reloading the microdescriptor cache at startup. Our
      bootstrap warnings are supposed to tell the user when there's a
      problem, and our bootstrap notices say when there isn't. Resolves
      ticket 6759; bugfix on 0.2.2.6-alpha.
    - Don't log "I learned some more directory information" when we're
      reading cached directory information. Reserve it for when new
      directory information arrives in response to a fetch. Resolves
      ticket 6760.
    - Prevent rounding error in path bias counts when scaling
      them down, and use the correct scale factor default. Also demote
      some path bias related log messages down a level and make others
      less scary sounding. Fixes bug 6647. Bugfix against 0.2.3.17-beta.
    - We no longer warn so much when generating manpages from their
      asciidoc source.

  o Code simplifications and refactoring:
    - Enhance our internal sscanf replacement so that we can eliminate
      the last remaining uses of the system sscanf. (Though those uses
      of sscanf were safe, sscanf itself is generally error prone, so
      we want to eliminate when we can.) Fixes ticket 4195 and Coverity
      CID 448.
    - Move ipv6_preferred from routerinfo_t to node_t. Addresses bug 4620.
    - Move last_reachable and testing_since from routerinfo_t to node_t.
      Implements ticket 5529.
    - Add replaycache_t structure, functions and unit tests, then refactor
      rend_service_introduce() to be more clear to read, improve, debug,
      and test. Resolves bug 6177.
    - Finally remove support for malloc_good_size and malloc_usable_size.
      We had hoped that these functions would let us eke a little more
      memory out of our malloc implementation. Unfortunately, the only
      implementations that provided these functions are also ones that
      are already efficient about not overallocation: they never got us
      more than 7 or so bytes per allocation. Removing them saves us a
      little code complexity and a nontrivial amount of build complexity.

  o New requirements:
    - Tor maintainers now require Automake version 1.9 or later to build
      Tor from the Git repository. (Automake is not required when building
      from a source distribution.)

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