Arti Changelog¶
Arti is the Tor Project's next-generation Tor implementation written in Rust. Newest at the top. Each entry links back to the full translation.
c-tor to Rust porting progress¶
Arti is the Tor Project's effort, started in 2021, to rewrite the original C implementation of Tor (which the community calls c-tor) entirely in Rust, gaining better memory safety, a modular architecture, and embeddability. The plan is to bring the client to parity with c-tor first, then move on to the relay side. The table below is compiled from the upstream CHANGELOG and release notes, with status reflecting features that have actually shipped.
| Feature area | Status | Landed / in progress |
|---|---|---|
Client core (SOCKS proxy, arti-client embedding library) |
✅ Done, declared stable | 1.0.0 (2022-09) |
| DNS proxy | ✅ Done | 1.0.0 (2022-09) |
| Anti-censorship: bridges and pluggable transports (obfs4, Snowflake, WebTunnel) | ✅ Done | 1.1.0 (2022-11) |
| Connecting to onion services (client) | ✅ Done | 1.1.6 (2023-06) |
| Hosting onion services (service side, incl. full vanguards, restricted discovery, client auth) | ✅ Done | since 1.2.0 (2024-03) |
| RPC control interface (replaces c-tor's control port) | ✅ Done, now stable | 1.4.2 (2025-03) |
| HTTP CONNECT proxy | ✅ Done, enabled by default | 2.2.0 (2026-03) |
| Flow control and congestion control | ✅ Always on since 2.6.0; the flowctl-cc flag is gone |
Stable in 2.4.0, on by default in 2.6.0 (2026-09) |
| Counter Galois Onion cryptography (CGO) | ✅ Always on since 2.6.0 | 2.6.0 (2026-09) |
| Embedding from non-Rust languages (C FFI) | 🟡 RPC client already has a C-friendly interface; full FFI planned | In progress |
| Relay | 🟡 In development; upstream says explicitly not to point it at the public network | 2.0.0 (2026-02) through 2.6.0 |
| Directory authority | 🟡 In development; document parsing and microdescriptor generation have early shape | 2.0.0 (2026-02) through 2.6.0 |
| control-port protocol compatibility | ⬜ Not reimplemented; replaced by RPC | — |
Legend: ✅ Done 🟡 In development ⬜ Not implemented
On the client side, Arti's capabilities are now largely on par with c-tor: it works as a SOCKS proxy, connects to and hosts onion services, and runs over bridges and pluggable transports. The project's current focus is the relay side. Relay and directory authority support are still under development, so you cannot yet run a Tor relay with Arti, which still requires c-tor. Arti replaces c-tor's control port with the RPC interface, a different design approach.
How far the relay side has got¶
2.6.0 ships a README_relay.md listing what relay and directory authority support still needs, with completion marked. It is the closest thing to an official roadmap right now, and its opening line is not to run arti-relay on the public Tor network.
Per that list, as of August 2026:
| Area | Done | To do |
|---|---|---|
| Basic operations (channels, circuits, CREATE2, EXTEND2, ORPort) | 9 | 8 |
| Exit support (DNS, BEGIN, RESOLVE, exit policies) | 0 | 5 |
| Directory cache | 0 | 13 |
| Self-testing (ORPort reachability, bandwidth, DNS) | 0 | 3 |
| Onion service support (HsDir, introduction, rendezvous) | 0 | 3 |
| Security features (offline identity keys, memory and socket DoS defences) | 0 | 4 |
| Performance features (buffer tuning, circuit scheduling, conflux) | 0 | 5 |
| Directory authority | 0 | 28 |
The nine finished items sit at the lowest layer: accepting incoming channels, bidirectional channel authentication, processing and delivering relay cells, CREATE2 and CREATE_FAST, EXTEND2, and listening on ORPort. Circuits can be built, in other words, but almost everything else a relay needs to actually go live is untouched, including key generation and rotation, publishing router descriptors, and bandwidth caps.
The list notes that the team had not revisited the checkboxes since 11 August 2026, so real progress may run ahead of it: 2.6.0 alone added ntor-v3 CREATE2 handshakes and an initial design for the relay DNS resolver. For exact status, the issue tracker is authoritative.
Arti 2.6.0¶
2026-09-01 · CHANGELOG
- Congestion control and Counter Galois Onion (CGO) cryptography are now always on, and the
flowctl-ccandcounter-galois-onioncargo features have been removed. Projects usingarti-clientortor-protoneed to drop those flags when upgrading. - Relay progress: CREATE2 with
ntor-v3handshakes, unrecognised circuit IDs no longer treated as a channel protocol violation, no more DESTROY sent back on channels that received one, plus an initial design for the relay DNS resolver and cache. - Directory authority progress: microdescriptors can now be computed, Extra Info documents have initial support, and
DirMgrcan serve as aDirServerbackend for now. - Ships
README_relay.md, listing what relay and directory authority support still needs. See "How far the relay side has got" above. - Upstream does not mention active exploitation. This release lists no security fixes.
Arti 2.5.1¶
2026-08-03 · Official CHANGELOG
- Fixed an important performance bug:
XONmessages were interpreting bytes-per-second as bits-per-second, causing Arti to send 8x less data than allowed. This is now corrected. - Onion services can now be configured to connect to
AF_UNIXaddresses. - Clients and onion services can negotiate congestion control and Counter Galois Onion (CGO) encryption with each other when the experimental
hsc-negotiate-extensionsandhss-negotiate-extensionsfeatures are enabled. - Continued progress toward "Arti as a Tor relay," adding infrastructure for validating and handling incoming relay messages.
Arti 2.5.0¶
2026-06-30 · Upstream announcement
- Counter Galois Onion (CGO) cryptography is now stable (enable the
counter-galois-onionfeature, orfull), congestion control (flowctl-cc) is now on by default, relay and directory-authority development continues (added encoding/decoding for router descriptors, microdescriptors, and consensuses), and the MSRV moves to Rust 1.91. - Fixes two medium-severity denial-of-service issues: TROVE-2026-24 (a malicious directory mirror could trigger a
tor-netdocparser crash that eventually stalls thetor-dirmgrtask) and TROVE-2026-27 (an inefficient algorithm could be exploited to stall the CPU); neither has been observed in the wild.
Arti 2.4.0¶
2026-06-01 · Upstream announcement
- Continued development toward running Arti as a relay and as a directory authority, fixes for several onion service client connectivity bugs, flow control and congestion control (flowctl-cc) now stable, and multiple breaking changes to the
arti-clientTorClientAPIs.
Arti 2.2.0¶
2026-03-31 · Upstream announcement · Full translation
- HTTP CONNECT included in the full build and enabled by default, stronger RPC management capabilities, continued progress toward making Arti usable as a Tor relay.
- Security fix: one low-severity issue. An application embedding arti that also pulls in
weak-tablewithahashenabled becomes somewhat less DoS-resistant on machines without hardware AES support (TROVE-2026-005).
Earlier versions
Translations of Arti 2.3.0, 2.1.0, and 1.4.1 are currently available only in traditional Chinese. English versions will be added as the community translates them.