Health of the Tor network, Tor in the news, Arti 0.2.0 [HTML]

Published on 2022-05-01

Malicious relays and the health of the Tor network

https://blog.torproject.org/malicious-relays-health-tor-network/

Running relays is a significant contribution to our project and we've designed that process so that the barrier of entry is low, making it possible for a variety of people with different backgrounds to participate. This openness is important as it makes our network (and the privacy guarantees it offers) more robust and resilient to attacks. However, that low threshold of contributing to our network also makes it easier for malicious operators to attack our users, e.g. via Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks at exit nodes.

Our latest blog post explains what we're doing to detect malicious actors (and remove their relays), how we developed these strategies, and what we're working on to make it harder for bad operators to run attacks. Additionally, we want to shine some light on this part of our day-to-day work at Tor. Because this is an arms race, we have to balance being transparent with effective detection of malicious actors. In this post we hope to offer more transparency about our approach without compromising the methods we use to keep our users safe.

Tor in the news

https://blog.torproject.org/tor-media-2021/

For the past few years, we’ve shared a post summarizing media related to Tor that was published during the previous year. On our blog (https://blog.torproject.org/tor-media-2021/), take a look at the moments Tor landed in the headlines in 2021, including coverage of onion service advancements, cryptocurrency donation records, our advocacy work, and changes in the censorship arms race.

Arti 0.2.0 is released: Your somewhat-stable API is here!

https://blog.torproject.org/arti_010_released/

Arti is our ongoing project to create a working embeddable Tor client in Rust. With version 0.2.0, our focus is on making Arti production-quality, by stress-testing the code, hunting for likely bugs and adding missing features that we know from experience that users will need.

From a user's point of view, most of the changes in Arti 0.2.0 are for improved performance and reliability. For developers, the most important change to be aware of is the new configuration code.

Whether you're a user or a developer, please give Arti a try, and let us know what you think. The sooner we learn what you need, the better our chances of getting it into an early milestone! Learn about Arti 0.2.0 and how to give it a try on our blog: https://blog.torproject.org/arti_020_released/.

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Join Our Community

Getting involved with Tor is easy. Run a relay to make the network faster and more decentralized: https://community.torproject.org/relay/

Run a bridge to help censored users access Tor: https://blog.torproject.org/run-tor-bridges-defend-open-internet

Learn about more opportunities to start collaborating: https://community.torproject.org/

Donate to help keep Tor fast, strong, and secure. https://torproject.org/donate/donate-phr-tn1

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