14 DAY TRIAL // IPFire, the open-source and free firewall distribution based on the Linux kernel, has been updated today to version 2.19 Core Update 120, a release that adds new features, improvements, and updated components.
IPFire 2.19 Core Update 120 is packed with quite a lot of new features that promise to improve the overall security of the operating system, as well as to increase the performance of various cryptographic operations. For the latter, the new release ships with the OpenSSL 1.1.0 cryptography library, which adds support for new ciphers.
"With this change, we have decided to entirely deprecate SSLv3 and the web user interface will require TLSv1.2 which is also the default for many other services. We have configured a hardened list of ciphers which only uses recent algorithms and entirely removes broken or weak algorithms like RC4, MD5 and so on," said Michael Tremer in the release notes.
IPFire 2.19 Core Update 120 also ships with the OpenVPN 2.4 open-source VPN server and client that adds support for new ciphers from the AES-GCM class to boost the throughput on operating systems with hardware acceleration enabled by default. However, net-to-net and roadwarrior connections are still supported.
Updated components and add-ons, other improvements
Updated packages in IPFire 2.19 Core Update 120 include Bind 9.11.3, cURL 7.59.0, GnuPG 1.4.22, Net-SSLeay 1.82, OpenSSH 7.6p1, hdparm 9.55, ntp 4.2.8p11, logrotate 3.14.0, dmidecode 3.1, vnstat 1.18, unbound 1.7.0, and python-m2crypto 0.27.0. Also included are the ClamAV 0.99.4, TOR 0.3.2.10, Htop 2.1.0, KRB5 1.15.2, Ncat 7.60, Rsync 3.1.3, GNU nano 2.9.4, and wio 1.3.2 add-ons.
Among other improvements implemented in this release, we can mention that Pakfire can now differentiate between HTTP and HTTPS mirrors and will connect to them automatically for better privacy and security, Path MTU Discovery is now disabled by default due to stability issues of IPsec tunnels, and QoS template can now correctly calculate bandwidth. Download IPFire 2.19 Core Update 120.