TOR Development Team Will Stop Support Onion Service v2 Next Year

The development team behind TOR has announced the timeline for the complete migration from Onion Service v2 to v3. In a year’s time, the development team will end support and in October 2021, a new client version will disable v2 completely.

According to the developers of Tor, the time is right to retire v2 because v3 has become the standard when creating an onion service and every relay in the TOR network now supports v3.

With the release of Tor 0.4.4.x on September 15, the developers would like to inform administrators and clients that Onion Service v2 in version 0.4.6 is considered to be passé. In that release with version number 0.4.6, which is scheduled for July 15, v2 will therefore be removed from the code. Finally, a Tor client should appear on October 15 that will disable v2 for good.

Version 3 of Onion Service was released in early 2018 after three years of development. The reason was that the security of v2 was compromised due to advancing understanding of the encryption used and the advent of more powerful hardware to crack encryption. V2 uses rsa1024 and 80bit sha1 addresses, resulting in a sixteen-character onion address. V3 uses Ed25519 with 56 characters for Onion Services.

With Tor, in full The Onion Router, internet traffic is routed through various tunnels to make it more difficult to trace the internet traffic.