Some very exciting features in the Tor 0.3.1.1 alpha. Besides supporting Rust components and efficient SHA-3 use, the long awaited netflow padding has made a grand entrance:
Major features (traffic analysis resistance):
- Connections between clients and relays now send a padding cell in
each direction every 1.5 to 9.5 seconds (tunable via consensus
parameters). This padding will not resist specialized
eavesdroppers, but it should be enough to make many ISPs’ routine
network flow logging less useful in traffic analysis against
Tor users.
Padding is negotiated using Tor's link protocol, so both relays and clients must upgrade for this to take effect. Clients may still send padding despite the relay's version by setting ConnectionPadding 1 in torrc, and may disable padding by setting ConnectionPadding 0 in torrc. Padding may be minimized for mobile users with the torrc option ReducedConnectionPadding. Implements Proposal 251 and Section 2 of Proposal 254; closes ticket 16861. - Relays will publish 24 hour totals of padding and non-padding cell counts to their extra-info descriptors, unless PaddingStatistics 0 is set in torrc. These 24 hour totals are also rounded to multiples of 10000.
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2017-May/043217.html