Tor browser — well know for accessing the dark web in a secure and private environment has been around for over 10 years and now the Tor Project announced the Next Generation of Onion Services to strengthen the anonymity of users on the internet.
Tor Project in their official blog post made the announcement — “We are hyped to present the next generation of onion services! We’ve been working on this project non-stop for the past 4 years and we officially launched it two weeks ago by publishing our first alpha releases.”
Tor’s Next Generation Onion Services features:
Tor’s Next Generation Onion Services features many improvements over the legacy system, including:
- Better crypto (replaced SHA1/DH/RSA1024 with SHA3/ed25519/curve25519)
- Improved directory protocol, leaking much less information to directory servers.
- Improved directory protocol, with the smaller surface for targeted attacks.
- Better onion address security against impersonation.
- More extensible introduction/rendezvous protocol.
- A cleaner and more modular codebase.
According to Tor Project, this is just a beginning, once the code stabilizes, team is planning slowly roll out more features like offline service keys, advanced client authorization, a control port interface, improved guard algorithms, secure naming systems, statistics, mixed-latency routing, blockchain support, AI logic and a VR interface (j/k about some of these).
Tor Project also noted that the legacy system of Tor will remain the default option for some more time, while the userbase migrates to the next generation and as they kill bugs and write features.
Even though users can still download and try out Tor’s Next Generation Onion Services by downloading Tor Browser’s alpha release (0.3.2.1-alpha).
