Version 5.1.0¶

• Fixed a denial-of-service vulnerability triggered by specific XAuth usernames
  and EAP identities (since 5.0.3), and PEM files (since 4.1.11). The crash
  was caused by insufficient error handling in the is_asn1() function.
  The vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2013-5018.
  Refer to our blog for details.

• The new charon-cmd command line IKE client can establish road warrior
  connections using IKEv1 or IKEv2 with different authentication profiles.
  It does not depend on any configuration files (no ipsec.conf nor ipsec.secrets
  but may use strongswan.conf options) and can be configured using a few
  simple command line options.

• The kernel-pfroute networking backend has been greatly improved. It now
  can install virtual IPs on TUN devices on Mac OS X and FreeBSD, allowing these
  systems to act as a client in common road warrior scenarios.

• The new kernel-libipsec plugin uses TUN devices and libipsec to provide IPsec
  processing in userland on Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X.

• The eap-radius plugin can now serve as an XAuth backend called xauth-radius,
  directly verifying XAuth credentials using RADIUS User-Name/User-Password
  attributes. This is more efficient than the existing xauth-eap + eap-radius
  combination, and allows RADIUS servers without EAP support to act as AAA
  backend for IKEv1.

• The new osx-attr plugin installs configuration attributes (currently DNS
  servers) via SystemConfiguration on Mac OS X. The keychain plugin provides
  certificates from the OS X keychain service.

• The sshkey plugin parses SSH public keys, which, together with the --agent
  option for charon-cmd, allows the use of ssh-agent for authentication.
  To configure SSH keys in ipsec.conf the left|rightrsasigkey options are
  replaced with left|rightsigkey, which now take public keys in one of three
  formats: SSH (RFC 4253, ssh: prefix), DNSKEY (RFC 3110, dns: prefix), and
  PKCS#1 (the default, no prefix).

• Extraction of certificates and private keys from PKCS#12 files is now provided
  by the new pkcs12 plugin or the openssl plugin. charon-cmd (--p12) as well
  as charon (via P12 token in ipsec.secrets) can make use of this.

• IKEv2 can now negotiate transport mode and IPComp in NAT situations.

• IKEv2 exchange initiators now properly close an established IKE or CHILD_SA
  on error conditions using an additional exchange, keeping state in sync
  between peers.

• Using a SQL database interface a Trusted Network Connect (TNC) Policy Manager
  can generate specific measurement workitems for an arbitrary number of
  Integrity Measurement Verifiers (IMVs) based on the history of the VPN user
  and/or device.

  The new strongTNC web application provides a frontend to manage such databases.
  This project was started by Stefan Rohner and Marco Tanner as part of their Bachelor Thesis.

• Several core classes in libstrongswan are now tested with unit tests. These
  can be enabled with --enable-unit-tests and run with make check. Coverage
  reports can be generated with --enable-coverage and make coverage (this
  disables any optimization, so it should not be enabled when building
  production releases).

• The leak-detective developer tool has been greatly improved. It works much
  faster/stabler with multiple threads, does not use deprecated malloc hooks
  anymore and has been ported to OS X.

• chunk_hash() is now based on SipHash-2-4 with a random key. This provides
  better distribution and prevents hash flooding attacks when used with
  hashtables. To generate reproducible hashes the chunk_hash_static() function
  can be used.

• All default plugins implement the get_features() method to define features
  and their dependencies. The plugin loader has been improved, so that plugins
  in a custom load statement can be ordered freely or to express preferences
  without being affected by dependencies between plugin features.

• A centralized thread can take care for watching multiple file descriptors
  concurrently. This removes the need for a dedicated listener threads in
  various plugins. The number of "reserved" threads for such tasks has been
  reduced to about five, depending on the plugin configuration.

• Plugins that can be controlled by a UNIX socket IPC mechanism gained network
  transparency. Third party applications querying these plugins now can use
  TCP connections from a different host.
  See the respective socket options in strongswan.conf.

• Protocol and port can be specified for each individual subnet specified with
  the left|rightsubnet ipsec.conf options.

• The closeaction ipsec.conf option is now also supported for IKEv1 (thanks to
  Oliver Smith for the initial patch).

• libipsec now supports AES-GCM.

• By replacing several linked lists that exist during the full lifetime of an SA with a
  simple array implementation the memory usage per tunnel is reduced by 5 KB or more.

• Responders reuse reqids of trapped policies, making auto=route on both sides more reliable.

• Instead of silently replacing a policy if the reqid changes, the kernel-netlink
  plugin now rejects such requests. This has consequences e.g. if two clients behind the
  same NAT use transport mode (see #365).

• Capability dropping has been improved. Every plugin verifies that the capabilities
  it requires are actually held and requests to keep only those that are really required at runtime.

• Support for silent rules was added to the build system, they can be enabled
  with --enable-silent-rules. make V=0 or V=1 can be used to build with a different
  verbosity than configured.

• The unique identifier of an IKE_SA is passed as PLUTO_UNIQUEID to the updown script.

• Whether the socket-default plugin uses IPv4 and/or IPv6 can be configured via strongswan.conf.

• Fixed a race-condition if the DELETE for a redundant CHILD_SA created by a responder during a
  CHILD_SA rekey collision arrives before the responder's answer to the initiator's winning
  CREATE_CHILD_SA request.

• The X.509 certificate decoder provided by the openssl plugin supports IP address blocks (patch by Michael Rossberg).

• scepclient can use a specific source address configured with the new --bind option.

• Negotiation of IKEv1 DPD with Cisco IOS devices has been fixed, if they do not send the
  DPD vendor ID in the first message.

• The ipsec stroke exportconncert and exportconnchain commands can be used to export
  either a single end entity certificate or the full trust chain for a specific connection.

• The ipsec stroke up-nb and down-nb commands do the same as up and down, respectively,
  but they do not block until the command has finished.