Changelog for 4.2.x¶

Version 4.2.14¶

• The new server-side EAP RADIUS plugin (--enable-eap-radius)
  relays EAP messages to and from a RADIUS server. Succesfully
  tested with with a freeradius server using EAP-MD5 and EAP-SIM.

• A vulnerability in the Dead Peer Detection (RFC 3706) code was found by
  Gerd v. Egidy <gerd.von.egidy AT intra2net DOT com> of Intra2net AG affecting
  all Openswan and strongSwan releases. A malicious (or expired ISAKMP)
  R_U_THERE or R_U_THERE_ACK Dead Peer Detection packet can cause the
  pluto IKE daemon to crash and restart. No authentication or encryption
  is required to trigger this bug. One spoofed UDP packet can cause the
  pluto IKE daemon to restart and be unresponsive for a few seconds while
  restarting. This DPD null state vulnerability has been officially
  registered as CVE-2009-0790 and is fixed by this release.

• ASN.1 to time_t conversion caused a time wrap-around for
  dates after Jan 18 03:14:07 UTC 2038 on 32-bit platforms.
  As a workaround such dates are set to the maximum representable
  time, i.e. Jan 19 03:14:07 UTC 2038.

• Distinguished Names containing wildcards (*) are not sent in the
  IDr payload anymore.

Version 4.2.13¶

• Fixed a use-after-free bug in the DPD timeout section of the
  IKEv1 pluto daemon which sporadically caused a segfault.

• Fixed a crash in the IKEv2 charon daemon occuring with
  mixed RAM-based and SQL-based virtual IP address pools.

• Fixed ASN.1 parsing of algorithmIdentifier objects where the
  parameters field is optional.

• Ported nm plugin to NetworkManager 7.1.

Version 4.2.12¶

• Support of the EAP-MSCHAPv2 protocol enabled by the option
  --enable-eap-mschapv2. Requires the MD4 hash algorithm enabled
  either by --enable-md4 or --enable-openssl.

• Assignment of up to two DNS and up to two WINS servers to peers via
  the IKEv2 Configuration Payload (CP). The IPv4 or IPv6 nameserver
  addresses are defined in strongswan.conf.

• The strongSwan applet for the Gnome NetworkManager is now built and
  distributed as a separate tarball under the name NetworkManager-strongswan.

Version 4.2.11¶

• Fixed ESP NULL encryption broken by the refactoring of keymat.c.
  Also introduced proper initialization and disposal of keying material.

• Fixed the missing listing of connection definitions in ipsec statusall
  broken by an unfortunate local variable overload.

Version 4.2.10¶

• Several performance improvements to handle thousands of tunnels with almost
  linear upscaling. All relevant data structures have been replaced by faster
  counterparts with better lookup times.

• Better parallelization to run charon on multiple cores. Due to improved
  ressource locking and other optimizations the daemon can take full
  advantage of 16 or even more cores.

• The load-tester plugin can use a NULL Diffie-Hellman group and simulate
  unique identities and certificates by signing peer certificates using a CA
  on the fly.

• The redesigned stroke in-memory IP pool handles leases. The "ipsec leases"
  command queries assigned leases.

• Added support for smartcards in charon by using the ENGINE API provided by
  OpenSSL, based on patches by Michael Roßberg.

• The Padlock plugin supports the hardware RNG found on VIA CPUs to provide a
  reliable source of randomness.

Version 4.2.9¶

• Flexible configuration of logging subsystem allowing to log to multiple
  syslog facilities or to files using fine-grained log levels for each target.

• Load testing plugin to do stress testing of the IKEv2 daemon against self
  or another host. Found and fixed issues during tests in the multi-threaded
  use of the OpenSSL plugin.

• Added profiling code to synchronization primitives to find bottlenecks if
  running on multiple cores. Found and fixed an issue where parts of the
  Diffie-Hellman calculation acquired an exclusive lock. This greatly improves
  parallelization to multiple cores.

• updown script invocation has been separated into a plugin of its own to
  further slim down the daemon core.

• Separated IKE_SA/CHILD_SA key derivation process into a closed system,
  allowing future implementations to use a secured environment in e.g. kernel
  memory or hardware.

• The kernel interface of charon has been modularized. XFRM NETLINK (default)
  and PFKEY (--enable-kernel-pfkey) interface plugins for the native IPsec
  stack of the Linux 2.6 kernel as well as a PFKEY interface for the KLIPS
  IPsec stack (--enable-kernel-klips) are provided.

• Basic Mobile IPv6 support has been introduced, securing Binding Update
  messages as well as tunneled traffic between Mobile Node and Home Agent.
  The installpolicy=no option allows peaceful cooperation with a dominant
  mip6d daemon and the new type=transport_proxy implements the special MIPv6
  IPsec transport proxy mode where the IKEv2 daemon uses the Care-of-Address
  but the IPsec SA is set up for the Home Adress.

• Implemented migration of Mobile IPv6 connections using the KMADDRESS
  field contained in XFRM_MSG_MIGRATE messages sent by the mip6d daemon
  via the Linux 2.6.28 (or appropriately patched) kernel.

Version 4.2.8¶

• IKEv2 charon daemon supports authentication based on raw public keys
  stored in the SQL database backend. The ipsec listpubkeys command
  lists the available raw public keys via the stroke interface.

• Several MOBIKE improvements: Detect changes in NAT mappings in DPD exchanges,
  handle events if kernel detects NAT mapping changes in UDP-encapsulated
  ESP packets (requires kernel patch), reuse old addesses in MOBIKE updates as
  long as possible and other fixes.

• Fixed a bug in addr_in_subnet() which caused insertion of wrong source
  routes for destination subnets having netwmasks not being a multiple of 8 bits.
  Thanks go to Wolfgang Steudel, TU Ilmenau for reporting this bug.

Version 4.2.7¶

• Fixed a Denial-of-Service vulnerability where an IKE_SA_INIT message with
  a KE payload containing zeroes only can cause a crash of the IKEv2 charon
  daemon due to a NULL pointer returned by the mpz_export() function of the
  GNU Multiprecision Library (GMP). Thanks go to Mu Dynamics Research Labs
  for making us aware of this problem.

• The new agent plugin provides a private key implementation on top of an
  ssh-agent.

• The NetworkManager plugin has been extended to support certificate client
  authentication using RSA keys loaded from a file or using ssh-agent.

• Daemon capability dropping has been ported to libcap and must be enabled
  explicitly --with-capabilities=libcap. Future version will support the
  newer libcap2 library.

• ipsec listalgs lists the IKEv2 cryptografic algorithms registered with the
  charon keying daemon.

Version 4.2.6¶

• A NetworkManager plugin allows GUI-based configuration of road-warrior
  clients in a simple way. It features X509 based gateway authentication
  and EAP client authentication, tunnel setup/teardown and storing passwords
  in the Gnome Keyring.

• A new EAP-GTC plugin implements draft-sheffer-ikev2-gtc-00.txt and allows
  username/password authentication against any PAM service on the gateway.
  The new EAP method interacts nicely with the NetworkManager plugin and allows
  client authentication against e.g. LDAP.

• Improved support for the EAP-Identity method. The new ipsec.conf eap_identity
  parameter defines an additional identity to pass to the server in EAP
  authentication.

• The "ipsec statusall" command now lists CA restrictions, EAP
  authentication types and EAP identities.

• Fixed two multithreading deadlocks occurring when starting up
  several hundred tunnels concurrently.

• Fixed the --enable-integrity-test configure option which
  computes a SHA-1 checksum over the libstrongswan library.

Version 4.2.5¶

• Consistent logging of IKE and CHILD SAs at the audit (AUD) level.

• Improved the performance of the SQL-based virtual IP address pool
  by introducing an additional addresses table. The leases table
  storing only history information has become optional and can be
  disabled by setting charon.plugins.sql.lease_history = no in
  strongswan.conf.

• The XFRM_STATE_AF_UNSPEC flag added to xfrm.h allows IPv4-over-IPv6
  and IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnels with the 2.6.26 and later Linux kernels.

• management of different virtual IP pools for different
  network interfaces have become possible.

• fixed a bug which prevented the assignment of more than 256
  virtual IP addresses from a pool managed by an sql database.

• fixed a bug which did not delete own IPCOMP SAs in the kernel.

Version 4.2.4¶

• Added statistics functions to ipsec pool --status and ipsec pool --leases
  and input validation checks to various ipsec pool commands.

• ipsec statusall now lists all loaded charon plugins and displays
  the negotiated IKEv2 cipher suite proposals.

• The openssl plugin supports the elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman groups
  19, 20, 21, 25, and 26.

• The openssl plugin supports ECDSA authentication using elliptic curve
  X.509 certificates.

• Fixed a bug in stroke which caused multiple charon threads to close
  the file descriptors during packet transfers over the stroke socket.

• ESP sequence numbers are now migrated in IPsec SA updates handled by
  MOBIKE. Works only with Linux kernels >= 2.6.17.

Version 4.2.3¶

• Fixed the strongswan.conf path configuration problem that occurred when
  --sysconfig was not set explicitly in ./configure.

• Fixed a number of minor bugs that where discovered during the 4th
  IKEv2 interoperability workshop in San Antonio, TX.

Version 4.2.2¶

• Plugins for libstrongswan and charon can optionally be loaded according
  to a configuration in strongswan.conf. Most components provide a
  "load = " option followed by a space separated list of plugins to load.
  This allows e.g. the fallback from a hardware crypto accelerator to
  to software-based crypto plugins.

• Charons SQL plugin has been extended by a virtual IP address pool.
  Configurations with a rightsourceip=%poolname setting query a SQLite or
  MySQL database for leases. The "ipsec pool" command helps in administrating
  the pool database. See ipsec pool --help for the available options

• The Authenticated Encryption Algorithms AES-CCM-8/12/16 and AES-GCM-8/12/16
  for ESP are now supported starting with the Linux 2.6.25 kernel. The
  syntax is e.g. esp=aes128ccm12 or esp=aes256gcm16.

Version 4.2.1¶

• Support for "Hash and URL" encoded certificate payloads has been implemented
  in the IKEv2 daemon charon. Using the "certuribase" option of a CA section
  allows to assign a base URL to all certificates issued by the specified CA.
  The final URL is then built by concatenating that base and the hex encoded
  SHA1 hash of the DER encoded certificate. Note that this feature is disabled
  by default and must be enabled using the option "charon.hash_and_url".

• The IKEv2 daemon charon now supports the "uniqueids" option to close multiple
  IKE_SAs with the same peer. The option value "keep" prefers existing
  connection setups over new ones, where the value "replace" replaces existing
  connections.

• The crypto factory in libstrongswan additionaly supports random number
  generators, plugins may provide other sources of randomness. The default
  plugin reads raw random data from /dev/(u)random.

• Extended the credential framework by a caching option to allow plugins
  persistent caching of fetched credentials. The "cachecrl" option has been
  re-implemented.

• The new trustchain verification introduced in 4.2.0 has been parallelized.
  Threads fetching CRL or OCSP information no longer block other threads.

• A new IKEv2 configuration attribute framework has been introduced allowing
  plugins to provide virtual IP addresses, and in the future, other
  configuration attribute services (e.g. DNS/WINS servers).

• The stroke plugin has been extended to provide virtual IP addresses from
  a pool defined in ipsec.conf. The "rightsourceip" parameter now accepts
  address pools in CIDR notation (e.g. 10.1.1.0/24). The parameter also accepts
  the value "%poolname", where "poolname" identifies a pool provided by a
  separate plugin.

• Fixed compilation on uClibc and a couple of other minor bugs.

• Set DPD defaults in ipsec starter to dpd_delay=30s and dpd_timeout=150s.

• The IKEv1 pluto daemon now supports the ESP encryption algorithm CAMELLIA
  with key lengths of 128, 192, and 256 bits, as well as the authentication
  algorithm AES_XCBC_MAC. Configuration example: esp=camellia192-aesxcbc.

Version 4.2.0¶

• libstrongswan has been modularized to attach crypto algorithms,
  credential implementations (keys, certificates) and fetchers dynamically
  through plugins. Existing code has been ported to plugins:
  • RSA/Diffie-Hellman implementation using the GNU Multi Precision library
  • X509 certificate system supporting CRLs, OCSP and attribute certificates
  • Multiple plugins providing crypto algorithms in software
  • CURL and OpenLDAP fetcher

• libstrongswan gained a relational database API which uses pluggable database
  providers. Plugins for MySQL and SQLite are available.

• The IKEv2 keying daemon charon is more extensible. Generic plugins may provide
  connection configuration, credentials and EAP methods or control the daemon.
  Existing code has been ported to plugins:
  • EAP-AKA, EAP-SIM, EAP-MD5 and EAP-Identity
  • stroke configuration, credential and control (compatible to pluto)
  • XML based management protocol to control and query the daemon

  The following new plugins are available:

  • An experimental SQL configuration, credential and logging plugin on
    top of either MySQL or SQLite
  • A unit testing plugin to run tests at daemon startup

• The authentication and credential framework in charon has been heavily
  refactored to support modular credential providers, proper
  CERTREQ/CERT payload exchanges and extensible authorization rules.

• The framework of strongSwan Manager has envolved to the web application
  framework libfast (FastCGI Application Server w/ Templates) and is usable
  by other applications.