Pierluigi Paganini July 08, 2021

The Tor Project has released Tor Browser 10.5 which enhances an anti-censorship feature and warns of V2 onion URL deprecation.

The Tor Project has released Tor Browser 10.5 which implements an improved anti-censorship feature and warns users of V2 onion URL deprecation in favor of the newer V3 URLs.

The first version supporting V3 URLs is Tor version 0.3.2.9, which was released on January 9 2018. The v3 onion URL uses addresses with a greater length compared with V2, better cryptography, and an improved hidden service directory protocol.

Every time users will visit hidden services using version 2 they will display a message informing them that Version 2 Onion sites will be deprecated soon. Administrators are urged to upgrade the sites to version 3 to make them accessible.

“As we announced last year, v2 onion services will be completely unreachable once Tor Browser moves to Tor 0.4.6.x in October 2021. From now until then, the Browser will warn you when visiting a v2 onion site of its upcoming deprecation.” reads the post published by the Tor Project.

Using Snowflake, users can rely on proxies run by a network of volunteers to bypass government censorship and connect to the internet.

Bridges operated by volunteers are not added to the public Tor directory, normally users can set up in the browser a bridge that allows bypassing censorship.

With the new version of the browser, Tor users can simply configure the Bridges features to utilize the SnowFlake proxy network to bypass censorship.

Tor users could test the latest Browser version upgrading their installs to version 10.5 or downloading the software from the download page of the Tor Project.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Tor Project)

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