Tor, the anonymity network was in need of an upgrade, as the world started raising concerns about its reliability. It was this year only when a hacker managed to take down almost 1/5th of the onion network.
The possible applications of Tor have reached far ahead than calling it a grey market for drugs and other illegal things. It’s already actively used for the exchange of confidential information, file transfer, and cryptocurrency transactions with an expectation that nobody can track it.
The Tor project has now announced a significant set of changes to their anonymity network which involves next-generation crypto algorithms, improved authentication schemes, and redesigned directory. It’ll help them better combat against leaks and cyber attacks.
In their blog post, Tor team says it took them four years to build an improved version of Tor. It will replace the legacy onion system which has started to show its age. However, they won’t be pulling off the existing onion system which fuels the network for the users right now. The transition will take place eventually over time.
They have blown the size of the onion addresses and also made them completely private. Earlier, it was possible for the network to know ones onion address.
Once the code stabilizes, the Tor Project has further planned to slowly add more features including offline key services, advanced client authentication, improved guard algorithms, control port interface, etc.
The latest changes are a part of Tor Browser’s alpha release (0.3.2.1-alpha) which is now available for download.
Source:https://fossbytes.com/tor-browser-algorithm-0321-alpha/
Working as a cyber security solutions architect, Alisa focuses on application and network security. Before joining us she held a cyber security researcher positions within a variety of cyber security start-ups. She also experience in different industry domains like finance, healthcare and consumer products.
