Happy Families: new certificates for faster and easier relay management
Relay Families are Tor’s way of grouping together relays run by the same operator, providing security and operational transparency. But the current 20-year-old design bloats directory info and becomes a maintenance headache as families grow. Tor 0.4.9 (currently in alpha) introduces cryptographic family certificates to help save up to 50% of the bandwidth cost for initial connections to the Tor network. Here's how it works, and what you can do to speed up the transition.