14 DAY TRIAL // Michael Tremer, a developer for the ipfire.org team, has announced that IPFire 2.13 Core 77, a new stable build of the popular Linux-based firewall distribution, has been released and is now available for download.
IPFire is a modular Linux distribution, which means that it can be deployed as a firewall, a proxy server, or a VPN gateway. One of the main concerns of the IPFire developers is security, and every step has been taken to ensure the complete security of the users.
According to the developers, the IPFire Linux kernel is patched with the grsecurity patchset, which proactively hardens the kernel against various forms of attacks and provides protection against zero-day exploits by eliminating entire bug classes and exploit vectors.
A few of the previous updates for IPFire have been rather small and most of them took care of some maintenance work, but the Core 77 build is quite impressive, to say the least.
“It is the release with the most changes since the beginning of the IPFire 2 series. Those changes of course include major work on the base of the system, security has been improved in lots of ways and there are many changes regarding the user interface, that introduce new functionality and make managing the firewall easier.”
“The firewall GUI has been in development for over a year now and has been massively extended so that almost everything is possible now. There are groups which make creating rules for multiple hosts or services very easy and help you to hold your nerves, even with complex rule sets. All your rules will be automatically converted, but we recommend to double check that everything works as it is intended,” said the developers in the official announcement.
The changes for IPFire 2.13 Core 77 are too many to count, but some of them really stand out. For example, the connection tracking has been improved, the Linux kernel has been updated to version 3.10, the support for the synthetic drivers of Microsoft’s Hyper-V has been enabled, support for the Geos router has been added, and the support for the PC Engines APU has been added.
Also, strongswan has been updated to version 5.1.2, the Camellia cipher has been added with supported key lengths of 256, 192, and 128 bits, experimental ARM support has been added, and a new Web User Interface style is now used.
The developers recommend all users of IPFire to upgrade their distributions. More details can be found on the official website. You can download IPFire 2.13 Core 77 right now from Softpedia.