Keep an eye on Arti (Tor)

Paying some attention to Arti.

“Rust is more secure than C. Despite our efforts, it’s all too simple to
mess up when using a language that does not enforce memory safety. We
estimate that at least half of our tracked security vulnerabilities would
have been impossible in Rust, and many of the others would have been very
unlikely.”

and also think of how it could replace the current Tor C implementation, in a “safe” way, eventually.

After Arti 1.1.0, we’re going to focus on onion services in Arti 1.2.0. They’re a complex and important part of the Tor protocols, and will take a significant amount of effort to build. Making onion services work securely and efficiently will require a number of related protocol features, including support for congestion control, DOS protection, vanguards, and circuit padding machines.

After that, Arti 2.0.0 will focus on feature parity with the C tor client implementation, and support for embedding Arti in different languages. (Preliminary embedding work is promising: we have the beginnings of a VPN tool for mobile, embedding Arti in Java.) When we’re done, we intend that Arti will be a suitable replacement for C tor as a client implementation in all (or nearly all) use contexts.

Until a Debian package being available from deb.torproject.org and feature support such as onions and TransPort will probably take a while.

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Quote David Goulet on Tor Project issue tracker:

It is not even clear that arti will actually have a ControlPort as we know it.

Quote Arti 1.1.5 is released: Onion Services, RPC, and a security patch | The Tor Project

work on a new RPC API (a successor to C Tor’s “control port”) that will give applications a safe and powerful way to work with Arti without having to write their code in Rust or link Arti as a library (unless they want to).

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