Arti version 1.0.0 is the official Rust client of the Tor project. He should replace the C version.
The Tor project has been working on a Tor version in Rust since 2020. Now Arti (A Rust Tor Implementation) has reached version 1.0.0. The reason given by the team for the relaunch in Rust is that the Tor implementation in C shows the age of the programming language. However, since the important program parts of C-Tor are so closely intertwined that they cannot be replaced in a modular way by Rust components, Tor project member nickm started work on a complete Rust version.
Arti 1.0.0 ready to take off
The goal for version 1.0.0 of Arti was to be ready for production use. The team sees this as achieved: According to the Tor project, Arti should be just as stable, usable and secure as the Tor client written in C. The APIs are also ready for embedders.
In version 1.0.0, Arti includes four innovations in addition to various updates. These are omitting sensitive information from the logs and deleting keys from memory after they have been used. In addition, the development team added the arti, hardened debugger-based attacks and made channels more resistant to Netflow-based traffic analysis.
Anti-censorship features and onion services are coming
In version 1.1.0, planned for the end of October, the Tors team wants to implement tools against censorship. This includes Tor bridges and pluggable transports. The bridges are unlisted Tor relays, so their addresses are less easily blocked by censors. The interchangeable transmission types obfuscate the Tor protocol, making it look a bit like regular HTTP. For the following version 1.2.0, the focus of the developers should be on Tor’s onion services, i.e. the network protocol specially developed for the Tor browser, which is based on TCP/IP and promises special security and privacy.
Rust as a future foundation
With version 2.0.0 of Arti, the development team wants to be functionally on a par with the existing Tor C client. Then the Rust implementation should gradually replace the C version. In the announcement of version 1.0.0, however, the team plans several years of development time.
Most recently, the Tor project overhauled the bridges in version 11.5 of the Tor browser, which also added an anti-censorship button. c’t 3003 explains exactly how Tor works and what the associated Darknet is all about. Those who are curious and want to test Arti in the current Tor browser should follow the Tor project’s instructions.
The original message for version 1.0.0 can be found on the Tor project blog. There is also a GitLab repository for Arti.
