[tor-talk] Tor 0.2.4.10-alpha is out

[Roger Dingledine]

Tor 0.2.4.10-alpha adds defenses at the directory authority level from
certain attacks that flood the network with relays; changes the queue
for circuit create requests from a sized-based limit to a time-based
limit; resumes building with MSVC on Windows; and fixes a wide variety
of other issues.

https://www.torproject.org/dist/

Changes in version 0.2.4.10-alpha - 2013-02-04
  o Major bugfixes (directory authority):
    - When computing directory thresholds, ignore any rejected-as-sybil
      nodes during the computation so that they can't influence Fast,
      Guard, etc. (We should have done this for proposal 109.) Fixes
      bug 8146.
    - When marking a node as a likely sybil, reset its uptime metrics
      to zero, so that it cannot time towards getting marked as Guard,
      Stable, or HSDir. (We should have done this for proposal 109.) Fixes
      bug 8147.

  o Major bugfixes:
    - When a TLS write is partially successful but incomplete, remember
      that the flushed part has been flushed, and notice that bytes were
      actually written. Reported and fixed pseudonymously. Fixes bug
      7708; bugfix on Tor 0.1.0.5-rc.
    - Reject bogus create and relay cells with 0 circuit ID or 0 stream
      ID: these could be used to create unexpected streams and circuits
      which would count as "present" to some parts of Tor but "absent"
      to others, leading to zombie circuits and streams or to a bandwidth
      denial-of-service. Fixes bug 7889; bugfix on every released version
      of Tor. Reported by "oftc_must_be_destroyed".
    - Rename all macros in our local copy of queue.h to begin with "TOR_".
      This change seems the only good way to permanently prevent conflicts
      with queue.h on various operating systems. Fixes bug 8107; bugfix
      on 0.2.4.6-alpha.

  o Major features (relay):
    - Instead of limiting the number of queued onionskins (aka circuit
      create requests) to a fixed, hard-to-configure number, we limit
      the size of the queue based on how many we expect to be able to
      process in a given amount of time. We estimate the time it will
      take to process an onionskin based on average processing time
      of previous onionskins. Closes ticket 7291. You'll never have to
      configure MaxOnionsPending again.

  o Major features (portability):
    - Resume building correctly with MSVC and Makefile.nmake. This patch
      resolves numerous bugs and fixes reported by ultramage, including
      7305, 7308, 7309, 7310, 7312, 7313, 7315, 7316, and 7669.
    - Make the ntor and curve25519 code build correctly with MSVC.
      Fix on 0.2.4.8-alpha.

  o Minor features:
    - When directory authorities are computing thresholds for flags,
      never let the threshold for the Fast flag fall below 4096
      bytes. Also, do not consider nodes with extremely low bandwidths
      when deciding thresholds for various directory flags. This change
      should raise our threshold for Fast relays, possibly in turn
      improving overall network performance; see ticket 1854. Resolves
      ticket 8145.
    - The Tor client now ignores sub-domain components of a .onion
      address. This change makes HTTP "virtual" hosting
      possible: http://foo.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.onion/ and
      http://bar.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.onion/ can be two different websites
      hosted on the same hidden service. Implements proposal 204.
    - We compute the overhead from passing onionskins back and forth to
      cpuworkers, and report it when dumping statistics in response to
      SIGUSR1. Supports ticket 7291.

  o Minor features (path selection):
    - When deciding whether we have enough descriptors to build circuits,
      instead of looking at raw relay counts, look at which fraction
      of (bandwidth-weighted) paths we're able to build. This approach
      keeps clients from building circuits if their paths are likely to
      stand out statistically. The default fraction of paths needed is
      taken from the consensus directory; you can override it with the
      new PathsNeededToBuildCircuits option. Fixes ticket 5956.
    - When any country code is listed in ExcludeNodes or ExcludeExitNodes,
      and we have GeoIP information, also exclude all nodes with unknown
      countries "??" and "A1". This behavior is controlled by the
      new GeoIPExcludeUnknown option: you can make such nodes always
      excluded with "GeoIPExcludeUnknown 1", and disable the feature
      with "GeoIPExcludeUnknown 0". Setting "GeoIPExcludeUnknown auto"
      gets you the default behavior. Implements feature 7706.
    - Path Use Bias: Perform separate accounting for successful circuit
      use. Keep separate statistics on stream attempt rates versus stream
      success rates for each guard. Provide configurable thresholds to
      determine when to emit log messages or disable use of guards that
      fail too many stream attempts. Resolves ticket 7802.

  o Minor features (log messages):
    - When learning a fingerprint for a bridge, log its corresponding
      transport type. Implements ticket 7896.
    - Improve the log message when "Bug/attack: unexpected sendme cell
      from client" occurs, to help us track bug 8093.

  o Minor bugfixes:
    - Remove a couple of extraneous semicolons that were upsetting the
      cparser library. Patch by Christian Grothoff. Fixes bug 7115;
      bugfix on 0.2.2.1-alpha.
    - Remove a source of rounding error during path bias count scaling;
      don't count cannibalized circuits as used for path bias until we
      actually try to use them; and fix a circuit_package_relay_cell()
      warning message about n_chan==NULL. Fixes bug 7802.
    - Detect nacl when its headers are in a nacl/ subdirectory. Also,
      actually link against nacl when we're configured to use it. Fixes
      bug 7972; bugfix on 0.2.4.8-alpha.
    - Compile correctly with the --disable-curve25519 option. Fixes
      bug 8153; bugfix on 0.2.4.8-alpha.

  o Build improvements:
    - Do not report status verbosely from autogen.sh unless the -v flag
      is specified. Fixes issue 4664. Patch from Onizuka.
    - Replace all calls to snprintf() outside of src/ext with
      tor_snprintf(). Also remove the #define to replace snprintf with
      _snprintf on Windows; they have different semantics, and all of
      our callers should be using tor_snprintf() anyway. Fixes bug 7304.
    - Try to detect if we are ever building on a platform where
      memset(...,0,...) does not set the value of a double to 0.0. Such
      platforms are permitted by the C standard, though in practice
      they're pretty rare (since IEEE 754 is nigh-ubiquitous). We don't
      currently support them, but it's better to detect them and fail
      than to perform erroneously.

  o Removed features:
    - Stop exporting estimates of v2 and v3 directory traffic shares
      in extrainfo documents. They were unneeded and sometimes inaccurate.
      Also stop exporting any v2 directory request statistics. Resolves
      ticket 5823.
    - Drop support for detecting and warning about versions of Libevent
      before 1.3e. Nothing reasonable ships with them any longer;
      warning the user about them shouldn't be needed. Resolves ticket
      6826.

  o Code simplifications and refactoring:
    - Rename "isin" functions to "contains", for grammar. Resolves
      ticket 5285.
    - Rename Tor's logging function log() to tor_log(), to avoid conflicts
      with the natural logarithm function from the system libm. Resolves
      ticket 7599.

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