Tor: "Experimental Fix" Might Make Tor Usable Again

A Tor patch is available for testing that might fix the ongoing consensus issues and general network degradation.

For a qrd, DarkDotFail covered the outage through their Twitter account:

“Ongoing Tor consensus issues caused all v3 .onions to be offline for ~3 of the past 12hrs. I believe it is an intentional attack on Tor. It began on Jan 6th.

Dark Market remains offline for no technical reason. White House Market launched two temporary v2 .onions.”

HugBunter and DarkDotFail are some of the only people covering the ongoing consensus issues.

Roger Dingledine, through the Tor-Talk mailing list, pointed users to an experimental patch that could fix the consensus issue primarily impacting v3 onion services.

Hi people-who-enjoy-building-their-Tor-from-source,

We have an experimental fix for making v3 onion services work, both
client-side and service-side, even while the network is in a degraded
state.

(More background:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40237
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/network-health/2021-January/000659.html
)

You'll need to apply the patch to both the service side and the client
side. (But it might work just to apply it on the client side -- if the
service side still has its introduction points open and hasn't tried to
publish a new hsdesc that lists different introduction points.)

And you're in luck, the network is running in degraded mode right now,
so it is the perfect time to try the patch. :) :/

You can find it as a git branch at
https://gitlab.torproject.org/dgoulet/tor/-/tree/ticket40237_046_01

or as a Tor diff which you can apply to your git checkout:
https://www.freehaven.net/~arma/40237-patch-046.txt

or as a Tor tarball I just made, at
https://www.freehaven.net/~arma/tor-0.4.6.0-alpha-dev.tar.gz
$ sha256sum tor-0.4.6.0-alpha-dev.tar.gz
0e66ef42e048551acdabdc27ac2510bc4230be56fb4574f31a6827eb650e1c77 tor-0.4.6.0-alpha-dev.tar.gz

If you don't like building from source, that's fine. But if you do,
please test, and help find problems! Our current plan is to get this
patch into Tor 0.4.5.3-rc, which will come out tomorrow-ish, and that
will work its way into an upcoming Tor Browser alpha at some point.b

Ablative Hosting, on Reddit, wrote that they had tested the patch earlier today.

As per https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2021-January/045681.html there is an alpha build available that has the patches to resolve the v3 / consensus issues.

If you can please help test it.

I compiled it successfully on OpenBSD and deployed it for our blog .onion a little while ago - all seems good (note that without a client running the patches you still might not be able to reach a working 0.4.6.0-alpha .onion).

The dev ticket for the fix is https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40237