14 DAY TRIAL // A developer of the ipfire.org team, Michael Tremer, has announced that the IPFire 2.15 Core 84 Linux-based firewall distribution has been released and comes with a long list of fixes, some of them for the latest security issues.
The new IPFire release has been prompted by a number of important issues that have been found since the previous update, and the developers used this opportunity to also integrate a number of other features. Not all of them are glamourous, but it's still a good idea to update as soon as possible.
Just like in all the other IPFire releases until now, users don't have to re-install the system, they can just update via the normal channels and everything will be in place. This is a pretty important update, despite the fact that it's rather small and packs quite a punch.
Latest IPFire brings important features
"This is a release that fixes some security issues in the GNU bash package which are commonly known as 'Shellshock' and comes with more fixes and minor feature enhancements."
"As you may have already seen on the news, the Shellshock issues made more people look into the code of the default shell of many *nix systems. Those people found many more programming errors and provided fixes for them which have been applied in this release. IPFire is now shipping GNU bash 4.3.30 and the companion library readline in version 6.3. There have been some Denial-of-Service issues in the squid web proxy which have been fixed in release 3.4.8. Those are of minor severity only and quite possibly cannot be exploited to inject code," reads the official announcement.
The developers have also said that the Firewall function has been upgraded and it should now be much better insulated against DDOS attacks, which is done by limiting the number of active connections to a certain host.
Also, blocking unwanted P2P protocols from the network is a much more efficient process, the DNS proxy used in the distribution has been upgraded, and the parted package is now at version 3.1.
Where to get it
IPFire is a modular Linux distribution and it works either as a firewall, a proxy server, or a VPN gateway, depending on the users’ needs.
More details can be found on the official website. You can download IPFire 2.15 Core 84 right now from Softpedia.