This is excellent news, if accurate!
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: [tor-talk] Questions on the coming next-gen onion services
Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2017 09:26:54 -0500
From: David Goulet
Hi
Hello!
I have some questions about the coming switch to next-gen onion services:
o What will happen to current onion services? Will they all be simply discontinued or will there be a process by which they will be automatically built again to form next-gen onions?
The current services will still function for a while before we actually remove the support from tor. And that "while" will be few years at least. Both versions will live in parallel so you'll be able to have current service and next-gen service on the same tor instance. Currently, we do not plan to have an automatic transition to a next-gen address so if you want to create a next-gen address for your service, you'll have to simply configure a second service in the torrc indicating that you want the new version. We'll be documenting that process upon release.
o What will happen to all the relays that are running versions of Tor that don't support next-gen onion services?
Good question. Onion services need basically three different type of relays, HSDir (directory), Intro point (IP) and Rendezvous Point (RP). The tor 0.3.0 release has the next-gen support for HSDir and IP. For the RP, the all current relays will work with next-gen. And for IP, next-gen services have a legacy option to use old IPs (<= 0.2.9). It has been put there for this transition period where we expect to have unfortunately a lot more tor out there that don't support next-gen. What is left is the HSDir that will have to be selected based on the protocol version advertised by the relay. So at first, there might be very few of those so there will be a period of time before we reached what we call "network maturity" which will allow us to switch from the current service protocol to the next-gen for all newly created services. This post on tor-dev@ kind of explain our intentions (but that might change overtime of course): https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-December/011725.html Cheers! David
Thx --Jeff -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk@lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
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