The Tor Project has published a release candidate for Tor, a tool that offers protection from surveillance and protects anonymity on the internet. The Tor 0.4.2.4-rc release is coming with some minor bug fixes and improvements.

Tor 0.4.2.4-rc is the first release candidate in its series and a bundled Tor Browser alpha release will be made available in the first week of December. The Tor release candidate source code is currently available from the project’s download page. The compiled packages will be made available over the coming weeks.

Highlights in Tor 0.4.2.4-rc

Tor 0.4.2.4-rc includes a set of bug fixes that resolves minor issues in the tool and also improves the overall project quality. These changes are summarized below.

• The build system is corrected. Make pkg-config use –prefix when cross-compiling, if PKG_CONFIG_PATH is not set.
• Updated geoip and geoip6 to the November 6, 2019, Maxmind GeoLite2 Country database.
• Fixed a BUG() assertion that occurs within a very small race window between when a client intro circuit opens and when its descriptor gets cleaned up from the cache. The circuit is now closed early, which will trigger a re-fetch of the descriptor and continue the connection.
• Fixed “make check-includes” so it runs correctly on out-of-tree builds. This contributes to the code quality.
• Logs the option name when skipping an obsolete option.
• When running Tor with an option like –verify-config or –dump-config that does not start the event loop, avoid crashing if we try to exit early because of an error.
• When checking if a directory connection is anonymous, test if the circuit was marked for close before looking at its channel. This avoids a BUG() stack trace if the circuit was previously closed.

For more information on Tor 0.4.2.4-rc release, read the original release announcement.