Tor Project ships Arti 2.8, moving the next-gen Tor client closer to a full Rust rewrite

The Tor Project has announced the release of Arti 2.8, the latest version of its next-generation Tor client written in Rust. The November 3 release marks continued progress toward an ambitious goal: transforming Arti from a client-side tool into a full replacement for the original C-based Tor implementation, capable of running both as a relay and as a directory authority.

Much of the development work in this release centers on that transition, with improvements to computing the network consensus from votes, bootstrapping router descriptors and microdescriptors, and implementing relay bandwidth rate-limiting, descriptor encoding, and a relay DNS cache. The team also made a number of cleanups and clarifications to the Tor specification itself. Notably, version 2.8 includes security fixes for several low-severity vulnerabilities, and the project is urging users of the arti and arti-client libraries, particularly those operating onion services, to upgrade promptly.

Beyond the headline improvements, the release brings routine maintenance under the hood, including infrastructure and testing enhancements, documentation updates, bug fixes, and internal cleanups.