4 - Support of Diffie-Hellman group 31 using Curve25519 for IKE as defined
7 - Support of Ed25519 digital signature algorithm for IKEv2 as defined by
8 draft-ietf-ipsecme-eddsa. Ed25519-based public key pairs, X.509 certificates
9 and CRLs can be generated and printed by the pki tool.
11 - In-place update of cached base and delta CRLs does not leave dozens
12 of stale copies in cache memory.
14 - Several new features for the VICI interface and the swanctl utility: Querying
15 specific pools, enumerating and unloading keys and shared secrets, loading
16 keys and certificates from PKCS#11 tokens, the ability to initiate, install
17 and uninstall connections and policies by their exact name (if multiple child
18 sections in different connections share the same name), a command to initiate
19 the rekeying of IKE and IPsec SAs, support for settings previously only
20 supported by the old config files (plain pubkeys, dscp, certificate policies,
21 IPv6 Transport Proxy Mode, NT Hash secrets, mediation extension).
23 Important: Due to issues with VICI bindings that map sub-sections to
24 dictionaries the CHILD_SA sections returned via list-sas now have a unique
25 name, the original name of a CHILD_SA is returned in the "name" key of its
32 - The newhope plugin implements the post-quantum NewHope key exchange algorithm
33 proposed in their 2015 paper by Erdem Alkim, Léo Ducas, Thomas Pöppelmann and
36 - The libstrongswan crypto factory now offers the registration of Extended
37 Output Functions (XOFs). Currently supported XOFs are SHAKE128 and SHAKE256
38 implemented by the sha3 plugin, ChaCHa20 implemented by the chapoly plugin
39 and the more traditional MGF1 Mask Generation Functions based on the SHA-1,
40 SHA-256 and SHA-512 hash algorithms implemented by the new mgf1 plugin.
42 - The pki tool, with help of the pkcs1 or openssl plugins, can parse private
43 keys in any of the supported formats without having to know the exact type.
44 So instead of having to specify rsa or ecdsa explicitly the keyword priv may
45 be used to indicate a private key of any type. Similarly, swanctl can load
46 any type of private key from the swanctl/private directory.
48 - The pki tool can handle RSASSA-PKCS1v1.5-with-SHA-3 signatures using the
51 - The VICI flush-certs command flushes certificates from the volatile
52 certificate cache. Optionally the type of the certificates to be
53 flushed (e.g. type = x509_crl) can be specified.
55 - Setting cache_crls = yes in strongswan.conf the vici plugin saves regular,
56 base and delta CRLs to disk.
58 - IKE fragmentation is now enabled by default with the default fragment size
59 set to 1280 bytes for both IP address families.
61 - libtpmtss: In the TSS2 API the function TeardownSocketTcti() was replaced by
68 - The new libtpmtss library offers support for both TPM 1.2 and TPM 2.0
69 Trusted Platform Modules. This allows the Attestation IMC/IMV pair to
70 do TPM 2.0 based attestation.
72 - The behavior during IKEv2 exchange collisions has been improved/fixed in
73 several corner cases and support for TEMPORARY_FAILURE and CHILD_SA_NOT_FOUND
74 notifies, as defined by RFC 7296, has been added.
76 - IPsec policy priorities can be set manually (e.g. for high-priority drop
77 policies) and outbound policies may be restricted to a network interface.
79 - The scheme for the automatically calculated default priorities has been
80 changed and now also considers port masks, which were added with 5.4.0.
82 - FWD policies are now installed in both directions in regards to the traffic
83 selectors. Because such "outbound" FWD policies could conflict with "inbound"
84 FWD policies of other SAs they are installed with a lower priority and don't
85 have a reqid set, which allows kernel plugins to distinguish between the two
86 and prefer those with a reqid.
88 - For outbound IPsec SAs no replay window is configured anymore.
90 - Enhanced the functionality of the swanctl --list-conns command by listing
91 IKE_SA and CHILD_SA reauthentication and rekeying settings, and EAP/XAuth
92 identities and EAP types.
94 - DNS servers installed by the resolve plugin are now refcounted, which should
95 fix its use with make-before-break reauthentication. Any output written to
96 stderr/stdout by resolvconf is now logged.
98 - The methods in the kernel interfaces have been changed to take structs instead
99 of long lists of arguments. Similarly the constructors for peer_cfg_t and
100 child_cfg_t now take structs.
106 - Support for IKEv2 redirection (RFC 5685) has been added. Plugins may
107 implement the redirect_provider_t interface to decide if and when to redirect
108 connecting clients. It is also possible to redirect established IKE_SAs based
109 on different selectors via VICI/swanctl. Unless disabled in strongswan.conf
110 the charon daemon will follow redirect requests received from servers.
112 - The ike: prefix enables the explicit configuration of signature scheme
113 constraints against IKEv2 authentication in rightauth, which allows the use
114 of different signature schemes for trustchain verification and authentication.
116 - The initiator of an IKEv2 make-before-break reauthentication now suspends
117 online certificate revocation checks (OCSP, CRLs) until the new IKE_SA and all
118 CHILD_SAs are established. This is required if the checks are done over the
119 CHILD_SA established with the new IKE_SA. This is not possible until the
120 initiator installs this SA and that only happens after the authentication is
121 completed successfully. So we suspend the checks during the reauthentication
122 and do them afterwards, if they fail the IKE_SA is closed. This change has no
123 effect on the behavior during the authentication of the initial IKE_SA.
125 - For the vici plugin a Vici:Session Perl CPAN module has been added to allow
126 Perl applications to control and/or monitor the IKE daemon using the VICI
127 interface, similar to the existing Python egg or Ruby gem.
129 - Traffic selectors with port ranges can now be configured in the Linux kernel:
130 e.g. remote_ts = 10.1.0.0/16[tcp/20-23] local_ts = dynamic[tcp/32768-65535].
131 The port range must map to a port mask, though since the kernel does not
132 support arbitrary ranges.
134 - The vici plugin allows the configuration of IPv4 and IPv6 address ranges
135 in local and remote traffic selectors. Since both the Linux kernel and
136 iptables cannot handle arbitrary ranges, address ranges are mapped to the next
137 larger CIDR subnet by the kernel-netlink and updown plugins, respectively.
139 - Implemented IKEv1 IPv4/IPv6 address subnet and range identities that can be
140 used as owners of shared secrets.
146 - Properly handle potential EINTR errors in sigwaitinfo(2) calls that replaced
147 sigwait(3) calls with 5.3.4.
149 - RADIUS retransmission timeouts are now configurable, courtesy of Thom Troy.
155 - Fixed an authentication bypass vulnerability in the eap-mschapv2 plugin that
156 was caused by insufficient verification of the internal state when handling
157 MSCHAPv2 Success messages received by the client.
158 This vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2015-8023.
160 - The sha3 plugin implements the SHA3 Keccak-F1600 hash algorithm family.
161 Within the strongSwan framework SHA3 is currently used for BLISS signatures
162 only because the OIDs for other signature algorithms haven't been defined
163 yet. Also the use of SHA3 for IKEv2 has not been standardized yet.
169 - Added support for the ChaCha20/Poly1305 AEAD cipher specified in RFC 7539 and
170 RFC 7634 using the chacha20poly1305 ike/esp proposal keyword. The new chapoly
171 plugin implements the cipher, if possible SSE-accelerated on x86/x64
172 architectures. It is usable both in IKEv2 and the strongSwan libipsec ESP
173 backend. On Linux 4.2 or newer the kernel-netlink plugin can configure the
176 - The vici interface now supports the configuration of auxiliary certification
177 authority information as CRL and OCSP URIs.
179 - In the bliss plugin the c_indices derivation using a SHA-512 based random
180 oracle has been fixed, generalized and standardized by employing the MGF1 mask
181 generation function with SHA-512. As a consequence BLISS signatures unsing the
182 improved oracle are not compatible with the earlier implementation.
184 - Support for auto=route with right=%any for transport mode connections has
185 been added (the ikev2/trap-any scenario provides examples).
187 - The starter daemon does not flush IPsec policies and SAs anymore when it is
188 stopped. Already existing duplicate policies are now overwritten by the IKE
189 daemon when it installs its policies.
191 - Init limits (like charon.init_limit_half_open) can now optionally be enforced
192 when initiating SAs via VICI. For this, IKE_SAs initiated by the daemon are
193 now also counted as half-open SAs, which, as a side-effect, fixes the status
194 output while connecting (e.g. in ipsec status).
196 - Symmetric configuration of EAP methods in left|rightauth is now possible when
197 mutual EAP-only authentication is used (previously, the client had to
198 configure rightauth=eap or rightauth=any, which prevented it from using this
199 same config as responder).
201 - The initiator flag in the IKEv2 header is compared again (wasn't the case
202 since 5.0.0) and packets that have the flag set incorrectly are again ignored.
204 - Implemented a demo Hardcopy Device IMC/IMV pair based on the "Hardcopy
205 Device Health Assessment Trusted Network Connect Binding" (HCD-TNC)
206 document drafted by the IEEE Printer Working Group (PWG).
208 - Fixed IF-M segmentation which failed in the presence of multiple small
209 attributes in front of a huge attribute to be segmented.
215 - Fixed a vulnerability that allowed rogue servers with a valid certificate
216 accepted by the client to trick it into disclosing its username and even
217 password (if the client accepts EAP-GTC). This was caused because constraints
218 against the responder's authentication were enforced too late.
219 This vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2015-4171.
225 - Fixed a denial-of-service and potential remote code execution vulnerability
226 triggered by IKEv1/IKEv2 messages that contain payloads for the respective
227 other IKE version. Such payload are treated specially since 5.2.2 but because
228 they were still identified by their original payload type they were used as
229 such in some places causing invalid function pointer dereferences.
230 The vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2015-3991.
232 - The new aesni plugin provides CBC, CTR, XCBC, CMAC, CCM and GCM crypto
233 primitives for AES-128/192/256. The plugin requires AES-NI and PCLMULQDQ
234 instructions and works on both x86 and x64 architectures. It provides
235 superior crypto performance in userland without any external libraries.
241 - Added support for IKEv2 make-before-break reauthentication. By using a global
242 CHILD_SA reqid allocation mechanism, charon supports overlapping CHILD_SAs.
243 This allows the use of make-before-break instead of the previously supported
244 break-before-make reauthentication, avoiding connectivity gaps during that
245 procedure. As the new mechanism may fail with peers not supporting it (such
246 as any previous strongSwan release) it must be explicitly enabled using
247 the charon.make_before_break strongswan.conf option.
249 - Support for "Signature Authentication in IKEv2" (RFC 7427) has been added.
250 This allows the use of stronger hash algorithms for public key authentication.
251 By default, signature schemes are chosen based on the strength of the
252 signature key, but specific hash algorithms may be configured in leftauth.
254 - Key types and hash algorithms specified in rightauth are now also checked
255 against IKEv2 signature schemes. If such constraints are used for certificate
256 chain validation in existing configurations, in particular with peers that
257 don't support RFC 7427, it may be necessary to disable this feature with the
258 charon.signature_authentication_constraints setting, because the signature
259 scheme used in classic IKEv2 public key authentication may not be strong
262 - The new connmark plugin allows a host to bind conntrack flows to a specific
263 CHILD_SA by applying and restoring the SA mark to conntrack entries. This
264 allows a peer to handle multiple transport mode connections coming over the
265 same NAT device for client-initiated flows. A common use case is to protect
266 L2TP/IPsec, as supported by some systems.
268 - The forecast plugin can forward broadcast and multicast messages between
269 connected clients and a LAN. For CHILD_SA using unique marks, it sets up
270 the required Netfilter rules and uses a multicast/broadcast listener that
271 forwards such messages to all connected clients. This plugin is designed for
272 Windows 7 IKEv2 clients, which announces its services over the tunnel if the
273 negotiated IPsec policy allows it.
275 - For the vici plugin a Python Egg has been added to allow Python applications
276 to control or monitor the IKE daemon using the VICI interface, similar to the
277 existing ruby gem. The Python library has been contributed by Björn Schuberg.
279 - EAP server methods now can fulfill public key constraints, such as rightcert
280 or rightca. Additionally, public key and signature constraints can be
281 specified for EAP methods in the rightauth keyword. Currently the EAP-TLS and
282 EAP-TTLS methods provide verification details to constraints checking.
284 - Upgrade of the BLISS post-quantum signature algorithm to the improved BLISS-B
285 variant. Can be used in conjunction with the SHA256, SHA384 and SHA512 hash
286 algorithms with SHA512 being the default.
288 - The IF-IMV 1.4 interface now makes the IP address of the TNC access requestor
289 as seen by the TNC server available to all IMVs. This information can be
290 forwarded to policy enforcement points (e.g. firewalls or routers).
292 - The new mutual tnccs-20 plugin parameter activates mutual TNC measurements
293 in PB-TNC half-duplex mode between two endpoints over either a PT-EAP or
294 PT-TLS transport medium.
300 - Fixed a denial-of-service vulnerability triggered by an IKEv2 Key Exchange
301 payload that contains the Diffie-Hellman group 1025. This identifier was
302 used internally for DH groups with custom generator and prime. Because
303 these arguments are missing when creating DH objects based on the KE payload
304 an invalid pointer dereference occurred. This allowed an attacker to crash
305 the IKE daemon with a single IKE_SA_INIT message containing such a KE
306 payload. The vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2014-9221.
308 - The left/rightid options in ipsec.conf, or any other identity in strongSwan,
309 now accept prefixes to enforce an explicit type, such as email: or fqdn:.
310 Note that no conversion is done for the remaining string, refer to
311 ipsec.conf(5) for details.
313 - The post-quantum Bimodal Lattice Signature Scheme (BLISS) can be used as
314 an IKEv2 public key authentication method. The pki tool offers full support
315 for the generation of BLISS key pairs and certificates.
317 - Fixed mapping of integrity algorithms negotiated for AH via IKEv1. This could
318 cause interoperability issues when connecting to older versions of charon.
324 - The new charon-systemd IKE daemon implements an IKE daemon tailored for use
325 with systemd. It avoids the dependency on ipsec starter and uses swanctl
326 as configuration backend, building a simple and lightweight solution. It
327 supports native systemd journal logging.
329 - Support for IKEv2 fragmentation as per RFC 7383 has been added. Like IKEv1
330 fragmentation it can be enabled by setting fragmentation=yes in ipsec.conf.
332 - Support of the TCG TNC IF-M Attribute Segmentation specification proposal.
333 All attributes can be segmented. Additionally TCG/SWID Tag, TCG/SWID Tag ID
334 and IETF/Installed Packages attributes can be processed incrementally on a
337 - The new ext-auth plugin calls an external script to implement custom IKE_SA
338 authorization logic, courtesy of Vyronas Tsingaras.
340 - For the vici plugin a ruby gem has been added to allow ruby applications
341 to control or monitor the IKE daemon. The vici documentation has been updated
342 to include a description of the available operations and some simple examples
343 using both the libvici C interface and the ruby gem.
349 - strongSwan has been ported to the Windows platform. Using a MinGW toolchain,
350 many parts of the strongSwan codebase run natively on Windows 7 / 2008 R2
351 and newer releases. charon-svc implements a Windows IKE service based on
352 libcharon, the kernel-iph and kernel-wfp plugins act as networking and IPsec
353 backend on the Windows platform. socket-win provides a native IKE socket
354 implementation, while winhttp fetches CRL and OCSP information using the
357 - The new vici plugin provides a Versatile IKE Configuration Interface for
358 charon. Using the stable IPC interface, external applications can configure,
359 control and monitor the IKE daemon. Instead of scripting the ipsec tool
360 and generating ipsec.conf, third party applications can use the new interface
361 for more control and better reliability.
363 - Built upon the libvici client library, swanctl implements the first user of
364 the VICI interface. Together with a swanctl.conf configuration file,
365 connections can be defined, loaded and managed. swanctl provides a portable,
366 complete IKE configuration and control interface for the command line.
367 The first six swanctl example scenarios have been added.
369 - The SWID IMV implements a JSON-based REST API which allows the exchange
370 of SWID tags and Software IDs with the strongTNC policy manager.
372 - The SWID IMC can extract all installed packages from the dpkg (Debian,
373 Ubuntu, Linux Mint etc.), rpm (Fedora, RedHat, OpenSUSE, etc.), or
374 pacman (Arch Linux, Manjaro, etc.) package managers, respectively, using the
375 swidGenerator (https://github.com/strongswan/swidGenerator) which generates
376 SWID tags according to the new ISO/IEC 19770-2:2014 standard.
378 - All IMVs now share the access requestor ID, device ID and product info
379 of an access requestor via a common imv_session object.
381 - The Attestation IMC/IMV pair supports the IMA-NG measurement format
382 introduced with the Linux 3.13 kernel.
384 - The aikgen tool generates an Attestation Identity Key bound to a TPM.
386 - Implemented the PT-EAP transport protocol (RFC 7171) for Trusted Network
389 - The ipsec.conf replay_window option defines connection specific IPsec replay
390 windows. Original patch courtesy of Zheng Zhong and Christophe Gouault from
397 - Fixed an authentication bypass vulnerability triggered by rekeying an
398 unestablished IKEv2 SA while it gets actively initiated. This allowed an
399 attacker to trick a peer's IKE_SA state to established, without the need to
400 provide any valid authentication credentials. The vulnerability has been
401 registered as CVE-2014-2338.
403 - The acert plugin evaluates X.509 Attribute Certificates. Group membership
404 information encoded as strings can be used to fulfill authorization checks
405 defined with the rightgroups option. Attribute Certificates can be loaded
406 locally or get exchanged in IKEv2 certificate payloads.
408 - The pki command gained support to generate X.509 Attribute Certificates
409 using the --acert subcommand, while the --print command supports the ac type.
410 The openac utility has been removed in favor of the new pki functionality.
412 - The libtls TLS 1.2 implementation as used by EAP-(T)TLS and other protocols
413 has been extended by AEAD mode support, currently limited to AES-GCM.
419 - A new default configuration file layout is introduced. The new default
420 strongswan.conf file mainly includes config snippets from the strongswan.d
421 and strongswan.d/charon directories (the latter containing snippets for all
422 plugins). The snippets, with commented defaults, are automatically
423 generated and installed, if they don't exist yet. They are also installed
424 in $prefix/share/strongswan/templates so existing files can be compared to
425 the current defaults.
427 - As an alternative to the non-extensible charon.load setting, the plugins
428 to load in charon (and optionally other applications) can now be determined
429 via the charon.plugins.<name>.load setting for each plugin (enabled in the
430 new default strongswan.conf file via the charon.load_modular option).
431 The load setting optionally takes a numeric priority value that allows
432 reordering the plugins (otherwise the default plugin order is preserved).
434 - All strongswan.conf settings that were formerly defined in library specific
435 "global" sections are now application specific (e.g. settings for plugins in
436 libstrongswan.plugins can now be set only for charon in charon.plugins).
437 The old options are still supported, which now allows to define defaults for
438 all applications in the libstrongswan section.
440 - The ntru libstrongswan plugin supports NTRUEncrypt as a post-quantum
441 computer IKE key exchange mechanism. The implementation is based on the
442 ntru-crypto library from the NTRUOpenSourceProject. The supported security
443 strengths are ntru112, ntru128, ntru192, and ntru256. Since the private DH
444 group IDs 1030..1033 have been assigned, the strongSwan Vendor ID must be
445 sent (charon.send_vendor_id = yes) in order to use NTRU.
447 - Defined a TPMRA remote attestation workitem and added support for it to the
450 - Compatibility issues between IPComp (compress=yes) and leftfirewall=yes as
451 well as multiple subnets in left|rightsubnet have been fixed.
453 - When enabling its "session" strongswan.conf option, the xauth-pam plugin opens
454 and closes a PAM session for each established IKE_SA. Patch courtesy of
457 - The strongSwan unit testing framework has been rewritten without the "check"
458 dependency for improved flexibility and portability. It now properly supports
459 multi-threaded and memory leak testing and brings a bunch of new test cases.
465 - Fixed a denial-of-service vulnerability and potential authorization bypass
466 triggered by a crafted ID_DER_ASN1_DN ID payload. The cause is an insufficient
467 length check when comparing such identities. The vulnerability has been
468 registered as CVE-2013-6075.
470 - Fixed a denial-of-service vulnerability triggered by a crafted IKEv1
471 fragmentation payload. The cause is a NULL pointer dereference. The
472 vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2013-6076.
474 - The lean stand-alone pt-tls-client can set up a RFC 6876 PT-TLS session
475 with a strongSwan policy enforcement point which uses the tnc-pdp charon
478 - The new TCG TNC SWID IMC/IMV pair supports targeted SWID requests for either
479 full SWID Tag or concise SWID Tag ID inventories.
481 - The XAuth backend in eap-radius now supports multiple XAuth exchanges for
482 different credential types and display messages. All user input gets
483 concatenated and verified with a single User-Password RADIUS attribute on
484 the AAA. With an AAA supporting it, one for example can implement
485 Password+Token authentication with proper dialogs on iOS and OS X clients.
487 - charon supports IKEv1 Mode Config exchange in push mode. The ipsec.conf
488 modeconfig=push option enables it for both client and server, the same way
491 - Using the "ah" ipsec.conf keyword on both IKEv1 and IKEv2 connections,
492 charon can negotiate and install Security Associations integrity-protected by
493 the Authentication Header protocol. Supported are plain AH(+IPComp) SAs only,
494 but not the deprecated RFC2401 style ESP+AH bundles.
496 - The generation of initialization vectors for IKE and ESP (when using libipsec)
497 is now modularized and IVs for e.g. AES-GCM are now correctly allocated
498 sequentially, while other algorithms like AES-CBC still use random IVs.
500 - The left and right options in ipsec.conf can take multiple address ranges
501 and subnets. This allows connection matching against a larger set of
502 addresses, for example to use a different connection for clients connecting
503 from a internal network.
505 - For all those who have a queasy feeling about the NIST elliptic curve set,
506 the Brainpool curves introduced for use with IKE by RFC 6932 might be a
507 more trustworthy alternative.
509 - The kernel-libipsec userland IPsec backend now supports usage statistics,
510 volume based rekeying and accepts ESPv3 style TFC padded packets.
512 - With two new strongswan.conf options fwmarks can be used to implement
513 host-to-host tunnels with kernel-libipsec.
515 - load-tester supports transport mode connections and more complex traffic
516 selectors, including such using unique ports for each tunnel.
518 - The new dnscert plugin provides support for authentication via CERT RRs that
519 are protected via DNSSEC. The plugin was created by Ruslan N. Marchenko.
521 - The eap-radius plugin supports forwarding of several Cisco Unity specific
522 RADIUS attributes in corresponding configuration payloads.
524 - Database transactions are now abstracted and implemented by the two backends.
525 If you use MySQL make sure all tables use the InnoDB engine.
527 - libstrongswan now can provide an experimental custom implementation of the
528 printf family functions based on klibc if neither Vstr nor glibc style printf
529 hooks are available. This can avoid the Vstr dependency on some systems at
530 the cost of slower and less complete printf functions.
536 - Fixed a denial-of-service vulnerability triggered by specific XAuth usernames
537 and EAP identities (since 5.0.3), and PEM files (since 4.1.11). The crash
538 was caused by insufficient error handling in the is_asn1() function.
539 The vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2013-5018.
541 - The new charon-cmd command line IKE client can establish road warrior
542 connections using IKEv1 or IKEv2 with different authentication profiles.
543 It does not depend on any configuration files and can be configured using a
544 few simple command line options.
546 - The kernel-pfroute networking backend has been greatly improved. It now
547 can install virtual IPs on TUN devices on OS X and FreeBSD, allowing these
548 systems to act as a client in common road warrior scenarios.
550 - The new kernel-libipsec plugin uses TUN devices and libipsec to provide IPsec
551 processing in userland on Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X.
553 - The eap-radius plugin can now serve as an XAuth backend called xauth-radius,
554 directly verifying XAuth credentials using RADIUS User-Name/User-Password
555 attributes. This is more efficient than the existing xauth-eap+eap-radius
556 combination, and allows RADIUS servers without EAP support to act as AAA
559 - The new osx-attr plugin installs configuration attributes (currently DNS
560 servers) via SystemConfiguration on Mac OS X. The keychain plugin provides
561 certificates from the OS X keychain service.
563 - The sshkey plugin parses SSH public keys, which, together with the --agent
564 option for charon-cmd, allows the use of ssh-agent for authentication.
565 To configure SSH keys in ipsec.conf the left|rightrsasigkey options are
566 replaced with left|rightsigkey, which now take public keys in one of three
567 formats: SSH (RFC 4253, ssh: prefix), DNSKEY (RFC 3110, dns: prefix), and
568 PKCS#1 (the default, no prefix).
570 - Extraction of certificates and private keys from PKCS#12 files is now provided
571 by the new pkcs12 plugin or the openssl plugin. charon-cmd (--p12) as well
572 as charon (via P12 token in ipsec.secrets) can make use of this.
574 - IKEv2 can now negotiate transport mode and IPComp in NAT situations.
576 - IKEv2 exchange initiators now properly close an established IKE or CHILD_SA
577 on error conditions using an additional exchange, keeping state in sync
580 - Using a SQL database interface a Trusted Network Connect (TNC) Policy Manager
581 can generate specific measurement workitems for an arbitrary number of
582 Integrity Measurement Verifiers (IMVs) based on the history of the VPN user
585 - Several core classes in libstrongswan are now tested with unit tests. These
586 can be enabled with --enable-unit-tests and run with 'make check'. Coverage
587 reports can be generated with --enable-coverage and 'make coverage' (this
588 disables any optimization, so it should not be enabled when building
589 production releases).
591 - The leak-detective developer tool has been greatly improved. It works much
592 faster/stabler with multiple threads, does not use deprecated malloc hooks
593 anymore and has been ported to OS X.
595 - chunk_hash() is now based on SipHash-2-4 with a random key. This provides
596 better distribution and prevents hash flooding attacks when used with
599 - All default plugins implement the get_features() method to define features
600 and their dependencies. The plugin loader has been improved, so that plugins
601 in a custom load statement can be ordered freely or to express preferences
602 without being affected by dependencies between plugin features.
604 - A centralized thread can take care for watching multiple file descriptors
605 concurrently. This removes the need for a dedicated listener threads in
606 various plugins. The number of "reserved" threads for such tasks has been
607 reduced to about five, depending on the plugin configuration.
609 - Plugins that can be controlled by a UNIX socket IPC mechanism gained network
610 transparency. Third party applications querying these plugins now can use
611 TCP connections from a different host.
613 - libipsec now supports AES-GCM.
619 - Fixed a security vulnerability in the openssl plugin which was reported by
620 Kevin Wojtysiak. The vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2013-2944.
621 Before the fix, if the openssl plugin's ECDSA signature verification was used,
622 due to a misinterpretation of the error code returned by the OpenSSL
623 ECDSA_verify() function, an empty or zeroed signature was accepted as a
626 - The handling of a couple of other non-security relevant openssl return codes
629 - The tnc_ifmap plugin now publishes virtual IPv4 and IPv6 addresses via its
630 TCG TNC IF-MAP 2.1 interface.
632 - The charon.initiator_only option causes charon to ignore IKE initiation
635 - The openssl plugin can now use the openssl-fips library.
641 - The new ipseckey plugin enables authentication based on trustworthy public
642 keys stored as IPSECKEY resource records in the DNS and protected by DNSSEC.
643 To do so it uses a DNSSEC enabled resolver, like the one provided by the new
644 unbound plugin, which is based on libldns and libunbound. Both plugins were
645 created by Reto Guadagnini.
647 - Implemented the TCG TNC IF-IMV 1.4 draft making access requestor identities
648 available to an IMV. The OS IMV stores the AR identity together with the
649 device ID in the attest database.
651 - The openssl plugin now uses the AES-NI accelerated version of AES-GCM
652 if the hardware supports it.
654 - The eap-radius plugin can now assign virtual IPs to IKE clients using the
655 Framed-IP-Address attribute by using the "%radius" named pool in the
656 rightsourceip ipsec.conf option. Cisco Banner attributes are forwarded to
657 Unity-capable IKEv1 clients during mode config. charon now sends Interim
658 Accounting updates if requested by the RADIUS server, reports
659 sent/received packets in Accounting messages, and adds a Terminate-Cause
662 - The recently introduced "ipsec listcounters" command can report connection
663 specific counters by passing a connection name, and global or connection
664 counters can be reset by the "ipsec resetcounters" command.
666 - The strongSwan libpttls library provides an experimental implementation of
667 PT-TLS (RFC 6876), a Posture Transport Protocol over TLS.
669 - The charon systime-fix plugin can disable certificate lifetime checks on
670 embedded systems if the system time is obviously out of sync after bootup.
671 Certificates lifetimes get checked once the system time gets sane, closing
672 or reauthenticating connections using expired certificates.
674 - The "ikedscp" ipsec.conf option can set DiffServ code points on outgoing
677 - The new xauth-noauth plugin allows to use basic RSA or PSK authentication with
678 clients that cannot be configured without XAuth authentication. The plugin
679 simply concludes the XAuth exchange successfully without actually performing
680 any authentication. Therefore, to use this backend it has to be selected
681 explicitly with rightauth2=xauth-noauth.
683 - The new charon-tkm IKEv2 daemon delegates security critical operations to a
684 separate process. This has the benefit that the network facing daemon has no
685 knowledge of keying material used to protect child SAs. Thus subverting
686 charon-tkm does not result in the compromise of cryptographic keys.
687 The extracted functionality has been implemented from scratch in a minimal TCB
688 (trusted computing base) in the Ada programming language. Further information
689 can be found at http://www.codelabs.ch/tkm/.
694 - Implemented all IETF Standard PA-TNC attributes and an OS IMC/IMV
695 pair using them to transfer operating system information.
697 - The new "ipsec listcounters" command prints a list of global counter values
698 about received and sent IKE messages and rekeyings.
700 - A new lookip plugin can perform fast lookup of tunnel information using a
701 clients virtual IP and can send notifications about established or deleted
702 tunnels. The "ipsec lookip" command can be used to query such information
703 or receive notifications.
705 - The new error-notify plugin catches some common error conditions and allows
706 an external application to receive notifications for them over a UNIX socket.
708 - IKE proposals can now use a PRF algorithm different to that defined for
709 integrity protection. If an algorithm with a "prf" prefix is defined
710 explicitly (such as prfsha1 or prfsha256), no implicit PRF algorithm based on
711 the integrity algorithm is added to the proposal.
713 - The pkcs11 plugin can now load leftcert certificates from a smartcard for a
714 specific ipsec.conf conn section and cacert CA certificates for a specific ca
717 - The load-tester plugin gained additional options for certificate generation
718 and can load keys and multiple CA certificates from external files. It can
719 install a dedicated outer IP address for each tunnel and tunnel initiation
720 batches can be triggered and monitored externally using the
721 "ipsec load-tester" tool.
723 - PKCS#7 container parsing has been modularized, and the openssl plugin
724 gained an alternative implementation to decrypt and verify such files.
725 In contrast to our own DER parser, OpenSSL can handle BER files, which is
726 required for interoperability of our scepclient with EJBCA.
728 - Support for the proprietary IKEv1 fragmentation extension has been added.
729 Fragments are always handled on receipt but only sent if supported by the peer
730 and if enabled with the new fragmentation ipsec.conf option.
732 - IKEv1 in charon can now parse certificates received in PKCS#7 containers and
733 supports NAT traversal as used by Windows clients. Patches courtesy of
736 - The new rdrand plugin provides a high quality / high performance random
737 source using the Intel rdrand instruction found on Ivy Bridge processors.
739 - The integration test environment was updated and now uses KVM and reproducible
740 guest images based on Debian.
746 - Introduced the sending of the standard IETF Assessment Result
747 PA-TNC attribute by all strongSwan Integrity Measurement Verifiers.
749 - Extended PTS Attestation IMC/IMV pair to provide full evidence of
750 the Linux IMA measurement process. All pertinent file information
751 of a Linux OS can be collected and stored in an SQL database.
753 - The PA-TNC and PB-TNC protocols can now process huge data payloads
754 >64 kB by distributing PA-TNC attributes over multiple PA-TNC messages
755 and these messages over several PB-TNC batches. As long as no
756 consolidated recommandation from all IMVs can be obtained, the TNC
757 server requests more client data by sending an empty SDATA batch.
759 - The rightgroups2 ipsec.conf option can require group membership during
760 a second authentication round, for example during XAuth authentication
761 against a RADIUS server.
763 - The xauth-pam backend can authenticate IKEv1 XAuth and Hybrid authenticated
764 clients against any PAM service. The IKEv2 eap-gtc plugin does not use
765 PAM directly anymore, but can use any XAuth backend to verify credentials,
768 - The new unity plugin brings support for some parts of the IKEv1 Cisco Unity
769 Extension. As client, charon narrows traffic selectors to the received
770 Split-Include attributes and automatically installs IPsec bypass policies
771 for received Local-LAN attributes. As server, charon sends Split-Include
772 attributes for leftsubnet definitions containing multiple subnets to Unity-
775 - An EAP-Nak payload is returned by clients if the gateway requests an EAP
776 method that the client does not support. Clients can also request a specific
777 EAP method by configuring that method with leftauth.
779 - The eap-dynamic plugin handles EAP-Nak payloads returned by clients and uses
780 these to select a different EAP method supported/requested by the client.
781 The plugin initially requests the first registered method or the first method
782 configured with charon.plugins.eap-dynamic.preferred.
784 - The new left/rightdns options specify connection specific DNS servers to
785 request/respond in IKEv2 configuration payloads or IKEv2 mode config. leftdns
786 can be any (comma separated) combination of %config4 and %config6 to request
787 multiple servers, both for IPv4 and IPv6. rightdns takes a list of DNS server
788 IP addresses to return.
790 - The left/rightsourceip options now accept multiple addresses or pools.
791 leftsourceip can be any (comma separated) combination of %config4, %config6
792 or fixed IP addresses to request. rightsourceip accepts multiple explicitly
793 specified or referenced named pools.
795 - Multiple connections can now share a single address pool when they use the
796 same definition in one of the rightsourceip pools.
798 - The options charon.interfaces_ignore and charon.interfaces_use allow one to
799 configure the network interfaces used by the daemon.
801 - The kernel-netlink plugin supports the charon.install_virtual_ip_on option,
802 which specifies the interface on which virtual IP addresses will be installed.
803 If it is not specified the current behavior of using the outbound interface
806 - The kernel-netlink plugin tries to keep the current source address when
807 looking for valid routes to reach other hosts.
809 - The autotools build has been migrated to use a config.h header. strongSwan
810 development headers will get installed during "make install" if
811 --with-dev-headers has been passed to ./configure.
813 - All crypto primitives gained return values for most operations, allowing
814 crypto backends to fail, for example when using hardware accelerators.
820 - The charon IKE daemon gained experimental support for the IKEv1 protocol.
821 Pluto has been removed from the 5.x series, and unless strongSwan is
822 configured with --disable-ikev1 or --disable-ikev2, charon handles both
823 keying protocols. The feature-set of IKEv1 in charon is almost on par with
824 pluto, but currently does not support AH or bundled AH+ESP SAs. Beside
825 RSA/ECDSA, PSK and XAuth, charon also supports the Hybrid authentication
826 mode. Informations for interoperability and migration is available at
827 http://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/CharonPlutoIKEv1.
829 - Charon's bus_t has been refactored so that loggers and other listeners are
830 now handled separately. The single lock was previously cause for deadlocks
831 if extensive listeners, such as the one provided by the updown plugin, wanted
832 to acquire locks that were held by other threads which in turn tried to log
833 messages, and thus were waiting to acquire the same lock currently held by
834 the thread calling the listener.
835 The implemented changes also allow the use of a read/write-lock for the
836 loggers which increases performance if multiple loggers are registered.
837 Besides several interface changes this last bit also changes the semantics
838 for loggers as these may now be called by multiple threads at the same time.
840 - Source routes are reinstalled if interfaces are reactivated or IP addresses
843 - The thread pool (processor_t) now has more control over the lifecycle of
844 a job (see job.h for details). In particular, it now controls the destruction
845 of jobs after execution and the cancellation of jobs during shutdown. Due to
846 these changes the requeueing feature, previously available to callback_job_t
847 only, is now available to all jobs (in addition to a new rescheduling
850 - In addition to trustchain key strength definitions for different public key
851 systems, the rightauth option now takes a list of signature hash algorithms
852 considered save for trustchain validation. For example, the setting
853 rightauth=rsa-2048-ecdsa-256-sha256-sha384-sha512 requires a trustchain
854 that uses at least RSA-2048 or ECDSA-256 keys and certificate signatures
855 using SHA-256 or better.
861 - Fixed a security vulnerability in the gmp plugin. If this plugin was used
862 for RSA signature verification an empty or zeroed signature was handled as
865 - Fixed several issues with reauthentication and address updates.
871 - The tnc-pdp plugin implements a RADIUS server interface allowing
872 a strongSwan TNC server to act as a Policy Decision Point.
874 - The eap-radius authentication backend enforces Session-Timeout attributes
875 using RFC4478 repeated authentication and acts upon RADIUS Dynamic
876 Authorization extensions, RFC 5176. Currently supported are disconnect
877 requests and CoA messages containing a Session-Timeout.
879 - The eap-radius plugin can forward arbitrary RADIUS attributes from and to
880 clients using custom IKEv2 notify payloads. The new radattr plugin reads
881 attributes to include from files and prints received attributes to the
884 - Added support for untruncated MD5 and SHA1 HMACs in ESP as used in
887 - The cmac plugin implements the AES-CMAC-96 and AES-CMAC-PRF-128 algorithms
888 as defined in RFC 4494 and RFC 4615, respectively.
890 - The resolve plugin automatically installs nameservers via resolvconf(8),
891 if it is installed, instead of modifying /etc/resolv.conf directly.
893 - The IKEv2 charon daemon supports now raw RSA public keys in RFC 3110
894 DNSKEY and PKCS#1 file format.
900 - Upgraded the TCG IF-IMC and IF-IMV C API to the upcoming version 1.3
901 which supports IF-TNCCS 2.0 long message types, the exclusive flags
902 and multiple IMC/IMV IDs. Both the TNC Client and Server as well as
903 the "Test", "Scanner", and "Attestation" IMC/IMV pairs were updated.
905 - Fully implemented the "TCG Attestation PTS Protocol: Binding to IF-M"
906 standard (TLV-based messages only). TPM-based remote attestation of
907 Linux IMA (Integrity Measurement Architecture) possible. Measurement
908 reference values are automatically stored in an SQLite database.
910 - The EAP-RADIUS authentication backend supports RADIUS accounting. It sends
911 start/stop messages containing Username, Framed-IP and Input/Output-Octets
912 attributes and has been tested against FreeRADIUS and Microsoft NPS.
914 - Added support for PKCS#8 encoded private keys via the libstrongswan
915 pkcs8 plugin. This is the default format used by some OpenSSL tools since
916 version 1.0.0 (e.g. openssl req with -keyout).
918 - Added session resumption support to the strongSwan TLS stack.
924 - Because of changing checksums before and after installation which caused
925 the integrity tests to fail we avoided directly linking libsimaka, libtls and
926 libtnccs to those libcharon plugins which make use of these dynamic libraries.
927 Instead we linked the libraries to the charon daemon. Unfortunately Ubuntu
928 11.10 activated the --as-needed ld option which discards explicit links
929 to dynamic libraries that are not actually used by the charon daemon itself,
930 thus causing failures during the loading of the plugins which depend on these
931 libraries for resolving external symbols.
933 - Therefore our approach of computing integrity checksums for plugins had to be
934 changed radically by moving the hash generation from the compilation to the
935 post-installation phase.
941 - The new libstrongswan certexpire plugin collects expiration information of
942 all used certificates and exports them to CSV files. It either directly
943 exports them or uses cron style scheduling for batch exports.
945 - starter passes unresolved hostnames to charon, allowing it to do name
946 resolution not before the connection attempt. This is especially useful with
947 connections between hosts using dynamic IP addresses. Thanks to Mirko Parthey
948 for the initial patch.
950 - The android plugin can now be used without the Android frontend patch and
951 provides DNS server registration and logging to logcat.
953 - Pluto and starter (plus stroke and whack) have been ported to Android.
955 - Support for ECDSA private and public key operations has been added to the
956 pkcs11 plugin. The plugin now also provides DH and ECDH via PKCS#11 and can
957 use tokens as random number generators (RNG). By default only private key
958 operations are enabled, more advanced features have to be enabled by their
959 option in strongswan.conf. This also applies to public key operations (even
960 for keys not stored on the token) which were enabled by default before.
962 - The libstrongswan plugin system now supports detailed plugin dependencies.
963 Many plugins have been extended to export its capabilities and requirements.
964 This allows the plugin loader to resolve plugin loading order automatically,
965 and in future releases, to dynamically load the required features on demand.
966 Existing third party plugins are source (but not binary) compatible if they
967 properly initialize the new get_features() plugin function to NULL.
969 - The tnc-ifmap plugin implements a TNC IF-MAP 2.0 client which can deliver
970 metadata about IKE_SAs via a SOAP interface to a MAP server. The tnc-ifmap
971 plugin requires the Apache Axis2/C library.
977 - Our private libraries (e.g. libstrongswan) are not installed directly in
978 prefix/lib anymore. Instead a subdirectory is used (prefix/lib/ipsec/ by
979 default). The plugins directory is also moved from libexec/ipsec/ to that
982 - The dynamic IMC/IMV libraries were moved from the plugins directory to
983 a new imcvs directory in the prefix/lib/ipsec/ subdirectory.
985 - Job priorities were introduced to prevent thread starvation caused by too
986 many threads handling blocking operations (such as CRL fetching). Refer to
987 strongswan.conf(5) for details.
989 - Two new strongswan.conf options allow to fine-tune performance on IKEv2
990 gateways by dropping IKE_SA_INIT requests on high load.
992 - IKEv2 charon daemon supports start PASS and DROP shunt policies
993 preventing traffic to go through IPsec connections. Installation of the
994 shunt policies either via the XFRM netfilter or PFKEYv2 IPsec kernel
997 - The history of policies installed in the kernel is now tracked so that e.g.
998 trap policies are correctly updated when reauthenticated SAs are terminated.
1000 - IMC/IMV Scanner pair implementing the RFC 5792 PA-TNC (IF-M) protocol.
1001 Using "netstat -l" the IMC scans open listening ports on the TNC client
1002 and sends a port list to the IMV which based on a port policy decides if
1003 the client is admitted to the network.
1004 (--enable-imc-scanner/--enable-imv-scanner).
1006 - IMC/IMV Test pair implementing the RFC 5792 PA-TNC (IF-M) protocol.
1007 (--enable-imc-test/--enable-imv-test).
1009 - The IKEv2 close action does not use the same value as the ipsec.conf dpdaction
1010 setting, but the value defined by its own closeaction keyword. The action
1011 is triggered if the remote peer closes a CHILD_SA unexpectedly.
1017 - The whitelist plugin for the IKEv2 daemon maintains an in-memory identity
1018 whitelist. Any connection attempt of peers not whitelisted will get rejected.
1019 The 'ipsec whitelist' utility provides a simple command line frontend for
1020 whitelist administration.
1022 - The duplicheck plugin provides a specialized form of duplicate checking,
1023 doing a liveness check on the old SA and optionally notify a third party
1024 application about detected duplicates.
1026 - The coupling plugin permanently couples two or more devices by limiting
1027 authentication to previously used certificates.
1029 - In the case that the peer config and child config don't have the same name
1030 (usually in SQL database defined connections), ipsec up|route <peer config>
1031 starts|routes all associated child configs and ipsec up|route <child config>
1032 only starts|routes the specific child config.
1034 - fixed the encoding and parsing of X.509 certificate policy statements (CPS).
1036 - Duncan Salerno contributed the eap-sim-pcsc plugin implementing a
1037 pcsc-lite based SIM card backend.
1039 - The eap-peap plugin implements the EAP PEAP protocol. Interoperates
1040 successfully with a FreeRADIUS server and Windows 7 Agile VPN clients.
1042 - The IKEv2 daemon charon rereads strongswan.conf on SIGHUP and instructs
1043 all plugins to reload. Currently only the eap-radius and the attr plugins
1044 support configuration reloading.
1046 - Added userland support to the IKEv2 daemon for Extended Sequence Numbers
1047 support coming with Linux 2.6.39. To enable ESN on a connection, add
1048 the 'esn' keyword to the proposal. The default proposal uses 32-bit sequence
1049 numbers only ('noesn'), and the same value is used if no ESN mode is
1050 specified. To negotiate ESN support with the peer, include both, e.g.
1051 esp=aes128-sha1-esn-noesn.
1053 - In addition to ESN, Linux 2.6.39 gained support for replay windows larger
1054 than 32 packets. The new global strongswan.conf option 'charon.replay_window'
1055 configures the size of the replay window, in packets.
1061 - Sansar Choinyambuu implemented the RFC 5793 Posture Broker Protocol (BP)
1062 compatible with Trusted Network Connect (TNC). The TNCCS 2.0 protocol
1063 requires the tnccs_20, tnc_imc and tnc_imv plugins but does not depend
1064 on the libtnc library. Any available IMV/IMC pairs conforming to the
1065 Trusted Computing Group's TNC-IF-IMV/IMC 1.2 interface specification
1066 can be loaded via /etc/tnc_config.
1068 - Re-implemented the TNCCS 1.1 protocol by using the tnc_imc and tnc_imv
1069 in place of the external libtnc library.
1071 - The tnccs_dynamic plugin loaded on a TNC server in addition to the
1072 tnccs_11 and tnccs_20 plugins, dynamically detects the IF-TNCCS
1073 protocol version used by a TNC client and invokes an instance of
1074 the corresponding protocol stack.
1076 - IKE and ESP proposals can now be stored in an SQL database using a
1077 new proposals table. The start_action field in the child_configs
1078 tables allows the automatic starting or routing of connections stored
1081 - The new certificate_authorities and certificate_distribution_points
1082 tables make it possible to store CRL and OCSP Certificate Distribution
1083 points in an SQL database.
1085 - The new 'include' statement allows to recursively include other files in
1086 strongswan.conf. Existing sections and values are thereby extended and
1087 replaced, respectively.
1089 - Due to the changes in the parser for strongswan.conf, the configuration
1090 syntax for the attr plugin has changed. Previously, it was possible to
1091 specify multiple values of a specific attribute type by adding multiple
1092 key/value pairs with the same key (e.g. dns) to the plugins.attr section.
1093 Because values with the same key now replace previously defined values
1094 this is not possible anymore. As an alternative, multiple values can be
1095 specified by separating them with a comma (e.g. dns = 1.2.3.4, 2.3.4.5).
1097 - ipsec listalgs now appends (set in square brackets) to each crypto
1098 algorithm listed the plugin that registered the function.
1100 - Traffic Flow Confidentiality padding supported with Linux 2.6.38 can be used
1101 by the IKEv2 daemon. The ipsec.conf 'tfc' keyword pads all packets to a given
1102 boundary, the special value '%mtu' pads all packets to the path MTU.
1104 - The new af-alg plugin can use various crypto primitives of the Linux Crypto
1105 API using the AF_ALG interface introduced with 2.6.38. This removes the need
1106 for additional userland implementations of symmetric cipher, hash, hmac and
1109 - The IKEv2 daemon supports the INITIAL_CONTACT notify as initiator and
1110 responder. The notify is sent when initiating configurations with a unique
1111 policy, set in ipsec.conf via the global 'uniqueids' option.
1113 - The conftest conformance testing framework enables the IKEv2 stack to perform
1114 many tests using a distinct tool and configuration frontend. Various hooks
1115 can alter reserved bits, flags, add custom notifies and proposals, reorder
1116 or drop messages and much more. It is enabled using the --enable-conftest
1119 - The new libstrongswan constraints plugin provides advanced X.509 constraint
1120 checking. In addition to X.509 pathLen constraints, the plugin checks for
1121 nameConstraints and certificatePolicies, including policyMappings and
1122 policyConstraints. The x509 certificate plugin and the pki tool have been
1123 enhanced to support these extensions. The new left/rightcertpolicy ipsec.conf
1124 connection keywords take OIDs a peer certificate must have.
1126 - The left/rightauth ipsec.conf keywords accept values with a minimum strength
1127 for trustchain public keys in bits, such as rsa-2048 or ecdsa-256.
1129 - The revocation and x509 libstrongswan plugins and the pki tool gained basic
1130 support for delta CRLs.
1136 - IMPORTANT: the default keyexchange mode 'ike' is changing with release 4.5
1137 from 'ikev1' to 'ikev2', thus commemorating the five year anniversary of the
1138 IKEv2 RFC 4306 and its mature successor RFC 5996. The time has definitively
1139 come for IKEv1 to go into retirement and to cede its place to the much more
1140 robust, powerful and versatile IKEv2 protocol!
1142 - Added new ctr, ccm and gcm plugins providing Counter, Counter with CBC-MAC
1143 and Galois/Counter Modes based on existing CBC implementations. These
1144 new plugins bring support for AES and Camellia Counter and CCM algorithms
1145 and the AES GCM algorithms for use in IKEv2.
1147 - The new pkcs11 plugin brings full Smartcard support to the IKEv2 daemon and
1148 the pki utility using one or more PKCS#11 libraries. It currently supports
1149 RSA private and public key operations and loads X.509 certificates from
1152 - Implemented a general purpose TLS stack based on crypto and credential
1153 primitives of libstrongswan. libtls supports TLS versions 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2,
1154 ECDHE-ECDSA/RSA, DHE-RSA and RSA key exchange algorithms and RSA/ECDSA based
1155 client authentication.
1157 - Based on libtls, the eap-tls plugin brings certificate based EAP
1158 authentication for client and server. It is compatible to Windows 7 IKEv2
1159 Smartcard authentication and the OpenSSL based FreeRADIUS EAP-TLS backend.
1161 - Implemented the TNCCS 1.1 Trusted Network Connect protocol using the
1162 libtnc library on the strongSwan client and server side via the tnccs_11
1163 plugin and optionally connecting to a TNC@FHH-enhanced FreeRADIUS AAA server.
1164 Depending on the resulting TNC Recommendation, strongSwan clients are granted
1165 access to a network behind a strongSwan gateway (allow), are put into a
1166 remediation zone (isolate) or are blocked (none), respectively. Any number
1167 of Integrity Measurement Collector/Verifier pairs can be attached
1168 via the tnc-imc and tnc-imv charon plugins.
1170 - The IKEv1 daemon pluto now uses the same kernel interfaces as the IKEv2
1171 daemon charon. As a result of this, pluto now supports xfrm marks which
1172 were introduced in charon with 4.4.1.
1174 - Applets for Maemo 5 (Nokia) allow to easily configure and control IKEv2
1175 based VPN connections with EAP authentication on supported devices.
1177 - The RADIUS plugin eap-radius now supports multiple RADIUS servers for
1178 redundant setups. Servers are selected by a defined priority, server load and
1181 - The simple led plugin controls hardware LEDs through the Linux LED subsystem.
1182 It currently shows activity of the IKE daemon and is a good example how to
1183 implement a simple event listener.
1185 - Improved MOBIKE behavior in several corner cases, for instance, if the
1186 initial responder moves to a different address.
1188 - Fixed left-/rightnexthop option, which was broken since 4.4.0.
1190 - Fixed a bug not releasing a virtual IP address to a pool if the XAUTH
1191 identity was different from the IKE identity.
1193 - Fixed the alignment of ModeConfig messages on 4-byte boundaries in the
1194 case where the attributes are not a multiple of 4 bytes (e.g. Cisco's
1197 - Fixed the interoperability of the socket_raw and socket_default
1200 - Added man page for strongswan.conf
1206 - Support of xfrm marks in IPsec SAs and IPsec policies introduced
1207 with the Linux 2.6.34 kernel. For details see the example scenarios
1208 ikev2/nat-two-rw-mark, ikev2/rw-nat-mark-in-out and ikev2/net2net-psk-dscp.
1210 - The PLUTO_MARK_IN and PLUTO_ESP_ENC environment variables can be used
1211 in a user-specific updown script to set marks on inbound ESP or
1214 - The openssl plugin now supports X.509 certificate and CRL functions.
1216 - OCSP/CRL checking in IKEv2 has been moved to the revocation plugin, enabled
1217 by default. Plase update manual load directives in strongswan.conf.
1219 - RFC3779 ipAddrBlock constraint checking has been moved to the addrblock
1220 plugin, disabled by default. Enable it and update manual load directives
1221 in strongswan.conf, if required.
1223 - The pki utility supports CRL generation using the --signcrl command.
1225 - The ipsec pki --self, --issue and --req commands now support output in
1226 PEM format using the --outform pem option.
1228 - The major refactoring of the IKEv1 Mode Config functionality now allows
1229 the transport and handling of any Mode Config attribute.
1231 - The RADIUS proxy plugin eap-radius now supports multiple servers. Configured
1232 servers are chosen randomly, with the option to prefer a specific server.
1233 Non-responding servers are degraded by the selection process.
1235 - The ipsec pool tool manages arbitrary configuration attributes stored
1236 in an SQL database. ipsec pool --help gives the details.
1238 - The new eap-simaka-sql plugin acts as a backend for EAP-SIM and EAP-AKA,
1239 reading triplets/quintuplets from an SQL database.
1241 - The High Availability plugin now supports a HA enabled in-memory address
1242 pool and Node reintegration without IKE_SA rekeying. The latter allows
1243 clients without IKE_SA rekeying support to keep connected during
1244 reintegration. Additionally, many other issues have been fixed in the ha
1247 - Fixed a potential remote code execution vulnerability resulting from
1248 the misuse of snprintf(). The vulnerability is exploitable by
1249 unauthenticated users.
1255 - The IKEv2 High Availability plugin has been integrated. It provides
1256 load sharing and failover capabilities in a cluster of currently two nodes,
1257 based on an extend ClusterIP kernel module. More information is available at
1258 http://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/HighAvailability.
1259 The development of the High Availability functionality was sponsored by
1260 secunet Security Networks AG.
1262 - Added IKEv1 and IKEv2 configuration support for the AES-GMAC
1263 authentication-only ESP cipher. Our aes_gmac kernel patch or a Linux
1264 2.6.34 kernel is required to make AES-GMAC available via the XFRM
1267 - Added support for Diffie-Hellman groups 22, 23 and 24 to the gmp, gcrypt
1268 and openssl plugins, usable by both pluto and charon. The new proposal
1269 keywords are modp1024s160, modp2048s224 and modp2048s256. Thanks to Joy Latten
1270 from IBM for his contribution.
1272 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon supports RAM-based virtual IP pools using
1273 the rightsourceip directive with a subnet from which addresses
1276 - The ipsec pki --gen and --pub commands now allow the output of
1277 private and public keys in PEM format using the --outform pem
1278 command line option.
1280 - The new DHCP plugin queries virtual IP addresses for clients from a DHCP
1281 server using broadcasts, or a defined server using the
1282 charon.plugins.dhcp.server strongswan.conf option. DNS/WINS server information
1283 is additionally served to clients if the DHCP server provides such
1284 information. The plugin is used in ipsec.conf configurations having
1285 rightsourceip set to %dhcp.
1287 - A new plugin called farp fakes ARP responses for virtual IP addresses
1288 handed out to clients from the IKEv2 daemon charon. The plugin lets a
1289 road-warrior act as a client on the local LAN if it uses a virtual IP
1290 from the responders subnet, e.g. acquired using the DHCP plugin.
1292 - The existing IKEv2 socket implementations have been migrated to the
1293 socket-default and the socket-raw plugins. The new socket-dynamic plugin
1294 binds sockets dynamically to ports configured via the left-/rightikeport
1295 ipsec.conf connection parameters.
1297 - The android charon plugin stores received DNS server information as "net.dns"
1298 system properties, as used by the Android platform.
1304 - The IKEv2 daemon supports RFC 3779 IP address block constraints
1305 carried as a critical X.509v3 extension in the peer certificate.
1307 - The ipsec pool --add|del dns|nbns command manages DNS and NBNS name
1308 server entries that are sent via the IKEv1 Mode Config or IKEv2
1309 Configuration Payload to remote clients.
1311 - The Camellia cipher can be used as an IKEv1 encryption algorithm.
1313 - The IKEv1 and IKEV2 daemons now check certificate path length constraints.
1315 - The new ipsec.conf conn option "inactivity" closes a CHILD_SA if no traffic
1316 was sent or received within the given interval. To close the complete IKE_SA
1317 if its only CHILD_SA was inactive, set the global strongswan.conf option
1318 "charon.inactivity_close_ike" to yes.
1320 - More detailed IKEv2 EAP payload information in debug output
1322 - IKEv2 EAP-SIM and EAP-AKA share joint libsimaka library
1324 - Added required userland changes for proper SHA256 and SHA384/512 in ESP that
1325 will be introduced with Linux 2.6.33. The "sha256"/"sha2_256" keyword now
1326 configures the kernel with 128 bit truncation, not the non-standard 96
1327 bit truncation used by previous releases. To use the old 96 bit truncation
1328 scheme, the new "sha256_96" proposal keyword has been introduced.
1330 - Fixed IPComp in tunnel mode, stripping out the duplicated outer header. This
1331 change makes IPcomp tunnel mode connections incompatible with previous
1332 releases; disable compression on such tunnels.
1334 - Fixed BEET mode connections on recent kernels by installing SAs with
1335 appropriate traffic selectors, based on a patch by Michael Rossberg.
1337 - Using extensions (such as BEET mode) and crypto algorithms (such as twofish,
1338 serpent, sha256_96) allocated in the private use space now require that we
1339 know its meaning, i.e. we are talking to strongSwan. Use the new
1340 "charon.send_vendor_id" option in strongswan.conf to let the remote peer know
1343 - Experimental support for draft-eronen-ipsec-ikev2-eap-auth, where the
1344 responder omits public key authentication in favor of a mutual authentication
1345 method. To enable EAP-only authentication, set rightauth=eap on the responder
1346 to rely only on the MSK constructed AUTH payload. This not-yet standardized
1347 extension requires the strongSwan vendor ID introduced above.
1349 - The IKEv1 daemon ignores the Juniper SRX notification type 40001, thus
1350 allowing interoperability.
1356 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon can now use SQL-based address pools to deal out
1357 virtual IP addresses as a Mode Config server. The pool capability has been
1358 migrated from charon's sql plugin to a new attr-sql plugin which is loaded
1359 by libstrongswan and which can be used by both daemons either with a SQLite
1360 or MySQL database and the corresponding plugin.
1362 - Plugin names have been streamlined: EAP plugins now have a dash after eap
1363 (e.g. eap-sim), as it is used with the --enable-eap-sim ./configure option.
1364 Plugin configuration sections in strongswan.conf now use the same name as the
1365 plugin itself (i.e. with a dash). Make sure to update "load" directives and
1366 the affected plugin sections in existing strongswan.conf files.
1368 - The private/public key parsing and encoding has been split up into
1369 separate pkcs1, pgp, pem and dnskey plugins. The public key implementation
1370 plugins gmp, gcrypt and openssl can all make use of them.
1372 - The EAP-AKA plugin can use different backends for USIM/quintuplet
1373 calculations, very similar to the EAP-SIM plugin. The existing 3GPP2 software
1374 implementation has been migrated to a separate plugin.
1376 - The IKEv2 daemon charon gained basic PGP support. It can use locally installed
1377 peer certificates and can issue signatures based on RSA private keys.
1379 - The new 'ipsec pki' tool provides a set of commands to maintain a public
1380 key infrastructure. It currently supports operations to create RSA and ECDSA
1381 private/public keys, calculate fingerprints and issue or verify certificates.
1383 - Charon uses a monotonic time source for statistics and job queueing, behaving
1384 correctly if the system time changes (e.g. when using NTP).
1386 - In addition to time based rekeying, charon supports IPsec SA lifetimes based
1387 on processed volume or number of packets. They new ipsec.conf paramaters
1388 'lifetime' (an alias to 'keylife'), 'lifebytes' and 'lifepackets' handle
1389 SA timeouts, while the parameters 'margintime' (an alias to rekeymargin),
1390 'marginbytes' and 'marginpackets' trigger the rekeying before a SA expires.
1391 The existing parameter 'rekeyfuzz' affects all margins.
1393 - If no CA/Gateway certificate is specified in the NetworkManager plugin,
1394 charon uses a set of trusted root certificates preinstalled by distributions.
1395 The directory containing CA certificates can be specified using the
1396 --with-nm-ca-dir=path configure option.
1398 - Fixed the encoding of the Email relative distinguished name in left|rightid
1401 - Fixed the broken parsing of PKCS#7 wrapped certificates by the pluto daemon.
1403 - Fixed smartcard-based authentication in the pluto daemon which was broken by
1404 the ECDSA support introduced with the 4.3.2 release.
1406 - A patch contributed by Heiko Hund fixes mixed IPv6 in IPv4 and vice versa
1407 tunnels established with the IKEv1 pluto daemon.
1409 - The pluto daemon now uses the libstrongswan x509 plugin for certificates and
1410 CRls and the struct id type was replaced by identification_t used by charon
1411 and the libstrongswan library.
1417 - IKEv2 charon daemon ported to FreeBSD and Mac OS X. Installation details can
1418 be found on wiki.strongswan.org.
1420 - ipsec statusall shows the number of bytes transmitted and received over
1421 ESP connections configured by the IKEv2 charon daemon.
1423 - The IKEv2 charon daemon supports include files in ipsec.secrets.
1429 - The configuration option --enable-integrity-test plus the strongswan.conf
1430 option libstrongswan.integrity_test = yes activate integrity tests
1431 of the IKE daemons charon and pluto, libstrongswan and all loaded
1432 plugins. Thus dynamic library misconfigurations and non-malicious file
1433 manipulations can be reliably detected.
1435 - The new default setting libstrongswan.ecp_x_coordinate_only=yes allows
1436 IKEv1 interoperability with MS Windows using the ECP DH groups 19 and 20.
1438 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon now supports the AES-CCM and AES-GCM ESP
1439 authenticated encryption algorithms.
1441 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon now supports V4 OpenPGP keys.
1443 - The RDN parser vulnerability discovered by Orange Labs research team
1444 was not completely fixed in version 4.3.2. Some more modifications
1445 had to be applied to the asn1_length() function to make it robust.
1451 - The new gcrypt plugin provides symmetric cipher, hasher, RNG, Diffie-Hellman
1452 and RSA crypto primitives using the LGPL licensed GNU gcrypt library.
1454 - libstrongswan features an integrated crypto selftest framework for registered
1455 algorithms. The test-vector plugin provides a first set of test vectors and
1456 allows pluto and charon to rely on tested crypto algorithms.
1458 - pluto can now use all libstrongswan plugins with the exception of x509 and xcbc.
1459 Thanks to the openssl plugin, the ECP Diffie-Hellman groups 19, 20, 21, 25, and
1460 26 as well as ECDSA-256, ECDSA-384, and ECDSA-521 authentication can be used
1463 - Applying their fuzzing tool, the Orange Labs vulnerability research team found
1464 another two DoS vulnerabilities, one in the rather old ASN.1 parser of Relative
1465 Distinguished Names (RDNs) and a second one in the conversion of ASN.1 UTCTIME
1466 and GENERALIZEDTIME strings to a time_t value.
1472 - The nm plugin now passes DNS/NBNS server information to NetworkManager,
1473 allowing a gateway administrator to set DNS/NBNS configuration on clients
1476 - The nm plugin also accepts CA certificates for gateway authentication. If
1477 a CA certificate is configured, strongSwan uses the entered gateway address
1478 as its idenitity, requiring the gateways certificate to contain the same as
1479 subjectAltName. This allows a gateway administrator to deploy the same
1480 certificates to Windows 7 and NetworkManager clients.
1482 - The command ipsec purgeike deletes IKEv2 SAs that don't have a CHILD SA.
1483 The command ipsec down <conn>{n} deletes CHILD SA instance n of connection
1484 <conn> whereas ipsec down <conn>{*} deletes all CHILD SA instances.
1485 The command ipsec down <conn>[n] deletes IKE SA instance n of connection
1486 <conn> plus dependent CHILD SAs whereas ipsec down <conn>[*] deletes all
1487 IKE SA instances of connection <conn>.
1489 - Fixed a regression introduced in 4.3.0 where EAP authentication calculated
1490 the AUTH payload incorrectly. Further, the EAP-MSCHAPv2 MSK key derivation
1491 has been updated to be compatible with the Windows 7 Release Candidate.
1493 - Refactored installation of triggering policies. Routed policies are handled
1494 outside of IKE_SAs to keep them installed in any case. A tunnel gets
1495 established only once, even if initiation is delayed due network outages.
1497 - Improved the handling of multiple acquire signals triggered by the kernel.
1499 - Fixed two DoS vulnerabilities in the charon daemon that were discovered by
1500 fuzzing techniques: 1) Sending a malformed IKE_SA_INIT request leaved an
1501 incomplete state which caused a null pointer dereference if a subsequent
1502 CREATE_CHILD_SA request was sent. 2) Sending an IKE_AUTH request with either
1503 a missing TSi or TSr payload caused a null pointer derefence because the
1504 checks for TSi and TSr were interchanged. The IKEv2 fuzzer used was
1505 developed by the Orange Labs vulnerability research team. The tool was
1506 initially written by Gabriel Campana and is now maintained by Laurent Butti.
1508 - Added support for AES counter mode in ESP in IKEv2 using the proposal
1509 keywords aes128ctr, aes192ctr and aes256ctr.
1511 - Further progress in refactoring pluto: Use of the curl and ldap plugins
1512 for fetching crls and OCSP. Use of the random plugin to get keying material
1513 from /dev/random or /dev/urandom. Use of the openssl plugin as an alternative
1514 to the aes, des, sha1, sha2, and md5 plugins. The blowfish, twofish, and
1515 serpent encryption plugins are now optional and are not enabled by default.
1521 - Support for the IKEv2 Multiple Authentication Exchanges extension (RFC4739).
1522 Initiators and responders can use several authentication rounds (e.g. RSA
1523 followed by EAP) to authenticate. The new ipsec.conf leftauth/rightauth and
1524 leftauth2/rightauth2 parameters define own authentication rounds or setup
1525 constraints for the remote peer. See the ipsec.conf man page for more detials.
1527 - If glibc printf hooks (register_printf_function) are not available,
1528 strongSwan can use the vstr string library to run on non-glibc systems.
1530 - The IKEv2 charon daemon can now configure the ESP CAMELLIA-CBC cipher
1531 (esp=camellia128|192|256).
1533 - Refactored the pluto and scepclient code to use basic functions (memory
1534 allocation, leak detective, chunk handling, printf_hooks, strongswan.conf
1535 attributes, ASN.1 parser, etc.) from the libstrongswan library.
1537 - Up to two DNS and WINS servers to be sent via IKEv1 ModeConfig can be
1538 configured in the pluto section of strongswan.conf.
1544 - The new server-side EAP RADIUS plugin (--enable-eap-radius)
1545 relays EAP messages to and from a RADIUS server. Successfully
1546 tested with with a freeradius server using EAP-MD5 and EAP-SIM.
1548 - A vulnerability in the Dead Peer Detection (RFC 3706) code was found by
1549 Gerd v. Egidy <gerd.von.egidy@intra2net.com> of Intra2net AG affecting
1550 all Openswan and strongSwan releases. A malicious (or expired ISAKMP)
1551 R_U_THERE or R_U_THERE_ACK Dead Peer Detection packet can cause the
1552 pluto IKE daemon to crash and restart. No authentication or encryption
1553 is required to trigger this bug. One spoofed UDP packet can cause the
1554 pluto IKE daemon to restart and be unresponsive for a few seconds while
1555 restarting. This DPD null state vulnerability has been officially
1556 registered as CVE-2009-0790 and is fixed by this release.
1558 - ASN.1 to time_t conversion caused a time wrap-around for
1559 dates after Jan 18 03:14:07 UTC 2038 on 32-bit platforms.
1560 As a workaround such dates are set to the maximum representable
1561 time, i.e. Jan 19 03:14:07 UTC 2038.
1563 - Distinguished Names containing wildcards (*) are not sent in the
1564 IDr payload anymore.
1570 - Fixed a use-after-free bug in the DPD timeout section of the
1571 IKEv1 pluto daemon which sporadically caused a segfault.
1573 - Fixed a crash in the IKEv2 charon daemon occurring with
1574 mixed RAM-based and SQL-based virtual IP address pools.
1576 - Fixed ASN.1 parsing of algorithmIdentifier objects where the
1577 parameters field is optional.
1579 - Ported nm plugin to NetworkManager 7.1.
1585 - Support of the EAP-MSCHAPv2 protocol enabled by the option
1586 --enable-eap-mschapv2. Requires the MD4 hash algorithm enabled
1587 either by --enable-md4 or --enable-openssl.
1589 - Assignment of up to two DNS and up to two WINS servers to peers via
1590 the IKEv2 Configuration Payload (CP). The IPv4 or IPv6 nameserver
1591 addresses are defined in strongswan.conf.
1593 - The strongSwan applet for the Gnome NetworkManager is now built and
1594 distributed as a separate tarball under the name NetworkManager-strongswan.
1600 - Fixed ESP NULL encryption broken by the refactoring of keymat.c.
1601 Also introduced proper initialization and disposal of keying material.
1603 - Fixed the missing listing of connection definitions in ipsec statusall
1604 broken by an unfortunate local variable overload.
1610 - Several performance improvements to handle thousands of tunnels with almost
1611 linear upscaling. All relevant data structures have been replaced by faster
1612 counterparts with better lookup times.
1614 - Better parallelization to run charon on multiple cores. Due to improved
1615 ressource locking and other optimizations the daemon can take full
1616 advantage of 16 or even more cores.
1618 - The load-tester plugin can use a NULL Diffie-Hellman group and simulate
1619 unique identities and certificates by signing peer certificates using a CA
1622 - The redesigned stroke in-memory IP pool handles leases. The "ipsec leases"
1623 command queries assigned leases.
1625 - Added support for smartcards in charon by using the ENGINE API provided by
1626 OpenSSL, based on patches by Michael Roßberg.
1628 - The Padlock plugin supports the hardware RNG found on VIA CPUs to provide a
1629 reliable source of randomness.
1634 - Flexible configuration of logging subsystem allowing to log to multiple
1635 syslog facilities or to files using fine-grained log levels for each target.
1637 - Load testing plugin to do stress testing of the IKEv2 daemon against self
1638 or another host. Found and fixed issues during tests in the multi-threaded
1639 use of the OpenSSL plugin.
1641 - Added profiling code to synchronization primitives to find bottlenecks if
1642 running on multiple cores. Found and fixed an issue where parts of the
1643 Diffie-Hellman calculation acquired an exclusive lock. This greatly improves
1644 parallelization to multiple cores.
1646 - updown script invocation has been separated into a plugin of its own to
1647 further slim down the daemon core.
1649 - Separated IKE_SA/CHILD_SA key derivation process into a closed system,
1650 allowing future implementations to use a secured environment in e.g. kernel
1653 - The kernel interface of charon has been modularized. XFRM NETLINK (default)
1654 and PFKEY (--enable-kernel-pfkey) interface plugins for the native IPsec
1655 stack of the Linux 2.6 kernel as well as a PFKEY interface for the KLIPS
1656 IPsec stack (--enable-kernel-klips) are provided.
1658 - Basic Mobile IPv6 support has been introduced, securing Binding Update
1659 messages as well as tunneled traffic between Mobile Node and Home Agent.
1660 The installpolicy=no option allows peaceful cooperation with a dominant
1661 mip6d daemon and the new type=transport_proxy implements the special MIPv6
1662 IPsec transport proxy mode where the IKEv2 daemon uses the Care-of-Address
1663 but the IPsec SA is set up for the Home Address.
1665 - Implemented migration of Mobile IPv6 connections using the KMADDRESS
1666 field contained in XFRM_MSG_MIGRATE messages sent by the mip6d daemon
1667 via the Linux 2.6.28 (or appropriately patched) kernel.
1673 - IKEv2 charon daemon supports authentication based on raw public keys
1674 stored in the SQL database backend. The ipsec listpubkeys command
1675 lists the available raw public keys via the stroke interface.
1677 - Several MOBIKE improvements: Detect changes in NAT mappings in DPD exchanges,
1678 handle events if kernel detects NAT mapping changes in UDP-encapsulated
1679 ESP packets (requires kernel patch), reuse old addesses in MOBIKE updates as
1680 long as possible and other fixes.
1682 - Fixed a bug in addr_in_subnet() which caused insertion of wrong source
1683 routes for destination subnets having netwmasks not being a multiple of 8 bits.
1684 Thanks go to Wolfgang Steudel, TU Ilmenau for reporting this bug.
1690 - Fixed a Denial-of-Service vulnerability where an IKE_SA_INIT message with
1691 a KE payload containing zeroes only can cause a crash of the IKEv2 charon
1692 daemon due to a NULL pointer returned by the mpz_export() function of the
1693 GNU Multiprecision Library (GMP). Thanks go to Mu Dynamics Research Labs
1694 for making us aware of this problem.
1696 - The new agent plugin provides a private key implementation on top of an
1699 - The NetworkManager plugin has been extended to support certificate client
1700 authentication using RSA keys loaded from a file or using ssh-agent.
1702 - Daemon capability dropping has been ported to libcap and must be enabled
1703 explicitly --with-capabilities=libcap. Future version will support the
1704 newer libcap2 library.
1706 - ipsec listalgs lists the IKEv2 cryptografic algorithms registered with the
1707 charon keying daemon.
1713 - A NetworkManager plugin allows GUI-based configuration of road-warrior
1714 clients in a simple way. It features X509 based gateway authentication
1715 and EAP client authentication, tunnel setup/teardown and storing passwords
1716 in the Gnome Keyring.
1718 - A new EAP-GTC plugin implements draft-sheffer-ikev2-gtc-00.txt and allows
1719 username/password authentication against any PAM service on the gateway.
1720 The new EAP method interacts nicely with the NetworkManager plugin and allows
1721 client authentication against e.g. LDAP.
1723 - Improved support for the EAP-Identity method. The new ipsec.conf eap_identity
1724 parameter defines an additional identity to pass to the server in EAP
1727 - The "ipsec statusall" command now lists CA restrictions, EAP
1728 authentication types and EAP identities.
1730 - Fixed two multithreading deadlocks occurring when starting up
1731 several hundred tunnels concurrently.
1733 - Fixed the --enable-integrity-test configure option which
1734 computes a SHA-1 checksum over the libstrongswan library.
1740 - Consistent logging of IKE and CHILD SAs at the audit (AUD) level.
1742 - Improved the performance of the SQL-based virtual IP address pool
1743 by introducing an additional addresses table. The leases table
1744 storing only history information has become optional and can be
1745 disabled by setting charon.plugins.sql.lease_history = no in
1748 - The XFRM_STATE_AF_UNSPEC flag added to xfrm.h allows IPv4-over-IPv6
1749 and IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnels with the 2.6.26 and later Linux kernels.
1751 - management of different virtual IP pools for different
1752 network interfaces have become possible.
1754 - fixed a bug which prevented the assignment of more than 256
1755 virtual IP addresses from a pool managed by an sql database.
1757 - fixed a bug which did not delete own IPCOMP SAs in the kernel.
1763 - Added statistics functions to ipsec pool --status and ipsec pool --leases
1764 and input validation checks to various ipsec pool commands.
1766 - ipsec statusall now lists all loaded charon plugins and displays
1767 the negotiated IKEv2 cipher suite proposals.
1769 - The openssl plugin supports the elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman groups
1770 19, 20, 21, 25, and 26.
1772 - The openssl plugin supports ECDSA authentication using elliptic curve
1775 - Fixed a bug in stroke which caused multiple charon threads to close
1776 the file descriptors during packet transfers over the stroke socket.
1778 - ESP sequence numbers are now migrated in IPsec SA updates handled by
1779 MOBIKE. Works only with Linux kernels >= 2.6.17.
1785 - Fixed the strongswan.conf path configuration problem that occurred when
1786 --sysconfig was not set explicitly in ./configure.
1788 - Fixed a number of minor bugs that where discovered during the 4th
1789 IKEv2 interoperability workshop in San Antonio, TX.
1795 - Plugins for libstrongswan and charon can optionally be loaded according
1796 to a configuration in strongswan.conf. Most components provide a
1797 "load = " option followed by a space separated list of plugins to load.
1798 This allows e.g. the fallback from a hardware crypto accelerator to
1799 to software-based crypto plugins.
1801 - Charons SQL plugin has been extended by a virtual IP address pool.
1802 Configurations with a rightsourceip=%poolname setting query a SQLite or
1803 MySQL database for leases. The "ipsec pool" command helps in administrating
1804 the pool database. See ipsec pool --help for the available options
1806 - The Authenticated Encryption Algorithms AES-CCM-8/12/16 and AES-GCM-8/12/16
1807 for ESP are now supported starting with the Linux 2.6.25 kernel. The
1808 syntax is e.g. esp=aes128ccm12 or esp=aes256gcm16.
1814 - Support for "Hash and URL" encoded certificate payloads has been implemented
1815 in the IKEv2 daemon charon. Using the "certuribase" option of a CA section
1816 allows to assign a base URL to all certificates issued by the specified CA.
1817 The final URL is then built by concatenating that base and the hex encoded
1818 SHA1 hash of the DER encoded certificate. Note that this feature is disabled
1819 by default and must be enabled using the option "charon.hash_and_url".
1821 - The IKEv2 daemon charon now supports the "uniqueids" option to close multiple
1822 IKE_SAs with the same peer. The option value "keep" prefers existing
1823 connection setups over new ones, where the value "replace" replaces existing
1826 - The crypto factory in libstrongswan additionally supports random number
1827 generators, plugins may provide other sources of randomness. The default
1828 plugin reads raw random data from /dev/(u)random.
1830 - Extended the credential framework by a caching option to allow plugins
1831 persistent caching of fetched credentials. The "cachecrl" option has been
1834 - The new trustchain verification introduced in 4.2.0 has been parallelized.
1835 Threads fetching CRL or OCSP information no longer block other threads.
1837 - A new IKEv2 configuration attribute framework has been introduced allowing
1838 plugins to provide virtual IP addresses, and in the future, other
1839 configuration attribute services (e.g. DNS/WINS servers).
1841 - The stroke plugin has been extended to provide virtual IP addresses from
1842 a pool defined in ipsec.conf. The "rightsourceip" parameter now accepts
1843 address pools in CIDR notation (e.g. 10.1.1.0/24). The parameter also accepts
1844 the value "%poolname", where "poolname" identifies a pool provided by a
1847 - Fixed compilation on uClibc and a couple of other minor bugs.
1849 - Set DPD defaults in ipsec starter to dpd_delay=30s and dpd_timeout=150s.
1851 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon now supports the ESP encryption algorithm CAMELLIA
1852 with key lengths of 128, 192, and 256 bits, as well as the authentication
1853 algorithm AES_XCBC_MAC. Configuration example: esp=camellia192-aesxcbc.
1859 - libstrongswan has been modularized to attach crypto algorithms,
1860 credential implementations (keys, certificates) and fetchers dynamically
1861 through plugins. Existing code has been ported to plugins:
1862 - RSA/Diffie-Hellman implementation using the GNU Multi Precision library
1863 - X509 certificate system supporting CRLs, OCSP and attribute certificates
1864 - Multiple plugins providing crypto algorithms in software
1865 - CURL and OpenLDAP fetcher
1867 - libstrongswan gained a relational database API which uses pluggable database
1868 providers. Plugins for MySQL and SQLite are available.
1870 - The IKEv2 keying daemon charon is more extensible. Generic plugins may provide
1871 connection configuration, credentials and EAP methods or control the daemon.
1872 Existing code has been ported to plugins:
1873 - EAP-AKA, EAP-SIM, EAP-MD5 and EAP-Identity
1874 - stroke configuration, credential and control (compatible to pluto)
1875 - XML bases management protocol to control and query the daemon
1876 The following new plugins are available:
1877 - An experimental SQL configuration, credential and logging plugin on
1878 top of either MySQL or SQLite
1879 - A unit testing plugin to run tests at daemon startup
1881 - The authentication and credential framework in charon has been heavily
1882 refactored to support modular credential providers, proper
1883 CERTREQ/CERT payload exchanges and extensible authorization rules.
1885 - The framework of strongSwan Manager has envolved to the web application
1886 framework libfast (FastCGI Application Server w/ Templates) and is usable
1887 by other applications.
1893 - IKE rekeying in NAT situations did not inherit the NAT conditions
1894 to the rekeyed IKE_SA so that the UDP encapsulation was lost with
1895 the next CHILD_SA rekeying.
1897 - Wrong type definition of the next_payload variable in id_payload.c
1898 caused an INVALID_SYNTAX error on PowerPC platforms.
1900 - Implemented IKEv2 EAP-SIM server and client test modules that use
1901 triplets stored in a file. For details on the configuration see
1902 the scenario 'ikev2/rw-eap-sim-rsa'.
1908 - Fixed error in the ordering of the certinfo_t records in the ocsp cache that
1909 caused multiple entries of the same serial number to be created.
1911 - Implementation of a simple EAP-MD5 module which provides CHAP
1912 authentication. This may be interesting in conjunction with certificate
1913 based server authentication, as weak passwords can't be brute forced
1914 (in contradiction to traditional IKEv2 PSK).
1916 - A complete software based implementation of EAP-AKA, using algorithms
1917 specified in 3GPP2 (S.S0055). This implementation does not use an USIM,
1918 but reads the secrets from ipsec.secrets. Make sure to read eap_aka.h
1921 - Support for vendor specific EAP methods using Expanded EAP types. The
1922 interface to EAP modules has been slightly changed, so make sure to
1923 check the changes if you're already rolling your own modules.
1929 - The default _updown script now dynamically inserts and removes ip6tables
1930 firewall rules if leftfirewall=yes is set in IPv6 connections. New IPv6
1931 net-net and roadwarrior (PSK/RSA) scenarios for both IKEv1 and IKEV2 were
1934 - Implemented RFC4478 repeated authentication to force EAP/Virtual-IP clients
1935 to reestablish an IKE_SA within a given timeframe.
1937 - strongSwan Manager supports configuration listing, initiation and termination
1938 of IKE and CHILD_SAs.
1940 - Fixes and improvements to multithreading code.
1942 - IKEv2 plugins have been renamed to libcharon-* to avoid naming conflicts.
1943 Make sure to remove the old plugins in $libexecdir/ipsec, otherwise they get
1950 - Removed recursive pthread mutexes since uClibc doesn't support them.
1956 - In NAT traversal situations and multiple queued Quick Modes,
1957 those pending connections inserted by auto=start after the
1958 port floating from 500 to 4500 were erronously deleted.
1960 - Added a "forceencaps" connection parameter to enforce UDP encapsulation
1961 to surmount restrictive firewalls. NAT detection payloads are faked to
1962 simulate a NAT situation and trick the other peer into NAT mode (IKEv2 only).
1964 - Preview of strongSwan Manager, a web based configuration and monitoring
1965 application. It uses a new XML control interface to query the IKEv2 daemon
1966 (see http://wiki.strongswan.org/wiki/Manager).
1968 - Experimental SQLite configuration backend which will provide the configuration
1969 interface for strongSwan Manager in future releases.
1971 - Further improvements to MOBIKE support.
1977 - Since some third party IKEv2 implementations run into
1978 problems with strongSwan announcing MOBIKE capability per
1979 default, MOBIKE can be disabled on a per-connection-basis
1980 using the mobike=no option. Whereas mobike=no disables the
1981 sending of the MOBIKE_SUPPORTED notification and the floating
1982 to UDP port 4500 with the IKE_AUTH request even if no NAT
1983 situation has been detected, strongSwan will still support
1984 MOBIKE acting as a responder.
1986 - the default ipsec routing table plus its corresponding priority
1987 used for inserting source routes has been changed from 100 to 220.
1988 It can be configured using the --with-ipsec-routing-table and
1989 --with-ipsec-routing-table-prio options.
1991 - the --enable-integrity-test configure option tests the
1992 integrity of the libstrongswan crypto code during the charon
1995 - the --disable-xauth-vid configure option disables the sending
1996 of the XAUTH vendor ID. This can be used as a workaround when
1997 interoperating with some Windows VPN clients that get into
1998 trouble upon reception of an XAUTH VID without eXtended
1999 AUTHentication having been configured.
2001 - ipsec stroke now supports the rereadsecrets, rereadaacerts,
2002 rereadacerts, and listacerts options.
2008 - If a DNS lookup failure occurs when resolving right=%<FQDN>
2009 or right=<FQDN> combined with rightallowany=yes then the
2010 connection is not updated by ipsec starter thus preventing
2011 the disruption of an active IPsec connection. Only if the DNS
2012 lookup successfully returns with a changed IP address the
2013 corresponding connection definition is updated.
2015 - Routes installed by the keying daemons are now in a separate
2016 routing table with the ID 100 to avoid conflicts with the main
2017 table. Route lookup for IKEv2 traffic is done in userspace to ignore
2018 routes installed for IPsec, as IKE traffic shouldn't get encapsulated.
2024 - The pluto IKEv1 daemon now exhibits the same behaviour as its
2025 IKEv2 companion charon by inserting an explicit route via the
2026 _updown script only if a sourceip exists. This is admissible
2027 since routing through the IPsec tunnel is handled automatically
2028 by NETKEY's IPsec policies. As a consequence the left|rightnexthop
2029 parameter is not required any more.
2031 - The new IKEv1 parameter right|leftallowany parameters helps to handle
2032 the case where both peers possess dynamic IP addresses that are
2033 usually resolved using DynDNS or a similar service. The configuration
2038 can be used by the initiator to start up a connection to a peer
2039 by resolving peer.foo.bar into the currently allocated IP address.
2040 Thanks to the rightallowany flag the connection behaves later on
2045 so that the peer can rekey the connection as an initiator when his
2046 IP address changes. An alternative notation is
2050 which will implicitly set rightallowany=yes.
2052 - ipsec starter now fails more gracefully in the presence of parsing
2053 errors. Flawed ca and conn section are discarded and pluto is started
2054 if non-fatal errors only were encountered. If right=%peer.foo.bar
2055 cannot be resolved by DNS then right=%any will be used so that passive
2056 connections as a responder are still possible.
2058 - The new pkcs11initargs parameter that can be placed in the
2059 setup config section of /etc/ipsec.conf allows the definition
2060 of an argument string that is used with the PKCS#11 C_Initialize()
2061 function. This non-standard feature is required by the NSS softoken
2062 library. This patch was contributed by Robert Varga.
2064 - Fixed a bug in ipsec starter introduced by strongswan-2.8.5
2065 which caused a segmentation fault in the presence of unknown
2066 or misspelt keywords in ipsec.conf. This bug fix was contributed
2069 - Partial support for MOBIKE in IKEv2. The initiator acts on interface/
2070 address configuration changes and updates IKE and IPsec SAs dynamically.
2076 - IKEv2 peer configuration selection now can be based on a given
2077 certification authority using the rightca= statement.
2079 - IKEv2 authentication based on RSA signatures now can handle multiple
2080 certificates issued for a given peer ID. This allows a smooth transition
2081 in the case of a peer certificate renewal.
2083 - IKEv2: Support for requesting a specific virtual IP using leftsourceip on the
2084 client and returning requested virtual IPs using rightsourceip=%config
2085 on the server. If the server does not support configuration payloads, the
2086 client enforces its leftsourceip parameter.
2088 - The ./configure options --with-uid/--with-gid allow pluto and charon
2089 to drop their privileges to a minimum and change to an other UID/GID. This
2090 improves the systems security, as a possible intruder may only get the
2091 CAP_NET_ADMIN capability.
2093 - Further modularization of charon: Pluggable control interface and
2094 configuration backend modules provide extensibility. The control interface
2095 for stroke is included, and further interfaces using DBUS (NetworkManager)
2096 or XML are on the way. A backend for storing configurations in the daemon
2097 is provided and more advanced backends (using e.g. a database) are trivial
2100 - Fixed a compilation failure in libfreeswan occurring with Linux kernel
2107 - Support for an additional Diffie-Hellman exchange when creating/rekeying
2108 a CHILD_SA in IKEv2 (PFS). PFS is enabled when the proposal contains a
2109 DH group (e.g. "esp=aes128-sha1-modp1536"). Further, DH group negotiation
2110 is implemented properly for rekeying.
2112 - Support for the AES-XCBC-96 MAC algorithm for IPsec SAs when using IKEv2
2113 (requires linux >= 2.6.20). It is enabled using e.g. "esp=aes256-aesxcbc".
2115 - Working IPv4-in-IPv6 and IPv6-in-IPv4 tunnels for linux >= 2.6.21.
2117 - Added support for EAP modules which do not establish an MSK.
2119 - Removed the dependencies from the /usr/include/linux/ headers by
2120 including xfrm.h, ipsec.h, and pfkeyv2.h in the distribution.
2122 - crlNumber is now listed by ipsec listcrls
2124 - The xauth_modules.verify_secret() function now passes the
2131 - Server side cookie support. If to may IKE_SAs are in CONNECTING state,
2132 cookies are enabled and protect against DoS attacks with faked source
2133 addresses. Number of IKE_SAs in CONNECTING state is also limited per
2134 peer address to avoid resource exhaustion. IKE_SA_INIT messages are
2135 compared to properly detect retransmissions and incoming retransmits are
2136 detected even if the IKE_SA is blocked (e.g. doing OCSP fetches).
2138 - The IKEv2 daemon charon now supports dynamic http- and ldap-based CRL
2139 fetching enabled by crlcheckinterval > 0 and caching fetched CRLs
2140 enabled by cachecrls=yes.
2142 - Added the configuration options --enable-nat-transport which enables
2143 the potentially insecure NAT traversal for IPsec transport mode and
2144 --disable-vendor-id which disables the sending of the strongSwan
2147 - Fixed a long-standing bug in the pluto IKEv1 daemon which caused
2148 a segmentation fault if a malformed payload was detected in the
2149 IKE MR2 message and pluto tried to send an encrypted notification
2152 - Added the NATT_IETF_02_N Vendor ID in order to support IKEv1 connections
2153 with Windows 2003 Server which uses a wrong VID hash.
2159 - Support of SHA2_384 hash function for protecting IKEv1
2160 negotiations and support of SHA2 signatures in X.509 certificates.
2162 - Fixed a serious bug in the computation of the SHA2-512 HMAC
2163 function. Introduced automatic self-test of all IKEv1 hash
2164 and hmac functions during pluto startup. Failure of a self-test
2165 currently issues a warning only but does not exit pluto [yet].
2167 - Support for SHA2-256/384/512 PRF and HMAC functions in IKEv2.
2169 - Full support of CA information sections. ipsec listcainfos
2170 now shows all collected crlDistributionPoints and OCSP
2173 - Support of the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) for IKEv2.
2174 This feature requires the HTTP fetching capabilities of the libcurl
2175 library which must be enabled by setting the --enable-http configure
2178 - Refactored core of the IKEv2 message processing code, allowing better
2179 code reuse and separation.
2181 - Virtual IP support in IKEv2 using INTERNAL_IP4/6_ADDRESS configuration
2182 payload. Additionally, the INTERNAL_IP4/6_DNS attribute is interpreted
2183 by the requestor and installed in a resolv.conf file.
2185 - The IKEv2 daemon charon installs a route for each IPsec policy to use
2186 the correct source address even if an application does not explicitly
2189 - Integrated the EAP framework into charon which loads pluggable EAP library
2190 modules. The ipsec.conf parameter authby=eap initiates EAP authentication
2191 on the client side, while the "eap" parameter on the server side defines
2192 the EAP method to use for client authentication.
2193 A generic client side EAP-Identity module and an EAP-SIM authentication
2194 module using a third party card reader implementation are included.
2196 - Added client side support for cookies.
2198 - Integrated the fixes done at the IKEv2 interoperability bakeoff, including
2199 strict payload order, correct INVALID_KE_PAYLOAD rejection and other minor
2200 fixes to enhance interoperability with other implementations.
2206 - strongSwan now interoperates with the NCP Secure Entry Client,
2207 the Shrew Soft VPN Client, and the Cisco VPN client, doing both
2208 XAUTH and Mode Config.
2210 - UNITY attributes are now recognized and UNITY_BANNER is set
2211 to a default string.
2217 - IKEv1: Support for extended authentication (XAUTH) in combination
2218 with ISAKMP Main Mode RSA or PSK authentication. Both client and
2219 server side were implemented. Handling of user credentials can
2220 be done by a run-time loadable XAUTH module. By default user
2221 credentials are stored in ipsec.secrets.
2223 - IKEv2: Support for reauthentication when rekeying
2225 - IKEv2: Support for transport mode
2227 - fixed a lot of bugs related to byte order
2229 - various other bugfixes
2235 - IKEv1: Implementation of ModeConfig push mode via the new connection
2236 keyword modeconfig=push allows interoperability with Cisco VPN gateways.
2238 - IKEv1: The command ipsec statusall now shows "DPD active" for all
2239 ISAKMP SAs that are under active Dead Peer Detection control.
2241 - IKEv2: Charon's logging and debugging framework has been completely rewritten.
2242 Instead of logger, special printf() functions are used to directly
2243 print objects like hosts (%H) identifications (%D), certificates (%Q),
2244 etc. The number of debugging levels have been reduced to:
2246 0 (audit), 1 (control), 2 (controlmore), 3 (raw), 4 (private)
2248 The debugging levels can either be specified statically in ipsec.conf as
2251 charondebug="lib 1, cfg 3, net 2"
2253 or changed at runtime via stroke as
2255 ipsec stroke loglevel cfg 2
2261 - Implemented full support for IPv6-in-IPv6 tunnels.
2263 - Added configuration options for dead peer detection in IKEv2. dpd_action
2264 types "clear", "hold" and "restart" are supported. The dpd_timeout
2265 value is not used, as the normal retransmission policy applies to
2266 detect dead peers. The dpd_delay parameter enables sending of empty
2267 informational message to detect dead peers in case of inactivity.
2269 - Added support for preshared keys in IKEv2. PSK keys configured in
2270 ipsec.secrets are loaded. The authby parameter specifies the authentication
2271 method to authentificate ourself, the other peer may use PSK or RSA.
2273 - Changed retransmission policy to respect the keyingtries parameter.
2275 - Added private key decryption. PEM keys encrypted with AES-128/192/256
2276 or 3DES are supported.
2278 - Implemented DES/3DES algorithms in libstrongswan. 3DES can be used to
2279 encrypt IKE traffic.
2281 - Implemented SHA-256/384/512 in libstrongswan, allows usage of certificates
2282 signed with such a hash algorithm.
2284 - Added initial support for updown scripts. The actions up-host/client and
2285 down-host/client are executed. The leftfirewall=yes parameter
2286 uses the default updown script to insert dynamic firewall rules, a custom
2287 updown script may be specified with the leftupdown parameter.
2293 - Added support for the auto=route ipsec.conf parameter and the
2294 ipsec route/unroute commands for IKEv2. This allows to set up IKE_SAs and
2295 CHILD_SAs dynamically on demand when traffic is detected by the
2298 - Added support for rekeying IKE_SAs in IKEv2 using the ikelifetime parameter.
2299 As specified in IKEv2, no reauthentication is done (unlike in IKEv1), only
2300 new keys are generated using perfect forward secrecy. An optional flag
2301 which enforces reauthentication will be implemented later.
2303 - "sha" and "sha1" are now treated as synonyms in the ike= and esp=
2304 algorithm configuration statements.
2310 - Full X.509 certificate trust chain verification has been implemented.
2311 End entity certificates can be exchanged via CERT payloads. The current
2312 default is leftsendcert=always, since CERTREQ payloads are not supported
2313 yet. Optional CRLs must be imported locally into /etc/ipsec.d/crls.
2315 - Added support for leftprotoport/rightprotoport parameters in IKEv2. IKEv2
2316 would offer more possibilities for traffic selection, but the Linux kernel
2317 currently does not support it. That's why we stick with these simple
2318 ipsec.conf rules for now.
2320 - Added Dead Peer Detection (DPD) which checks liveliness of remote peer if no
2321 IKE or ESP traffic is received. DPD is currently hardcoded (dpdaction=clear,
2324 - Initial NAT traversal support in IKEv2. Charon includes NAT detection
2325 notify payloads to detect NAT routers between the peers. It switches
2326 to port 4500, uses UDP encapsulated ESP packets, handles peer address
2327 changes gracefully and sends keep alive message periodically.
2329 - Reimplemented IKE_SA state machine for charon, which allows simultaneous
2330 rekeying, more shared code, cleaner design, proper retransmission
2331 and a more extensible code base.
2333 - The mixed PSK/RSA roadwarrior detection capability introduced by the
2334 strongswan-2.7.0 release necessitated the pre-parsing of the IKE proposal
2335 payloads by the responder right before any defined IKE Main Mode state had
2336 been established. Although any form of bad proposal syntax was being correctly
2337 detected by the payload parser, the subsequent error handler didn't check
2338 the state pointer before logging current state information, causing an
2339 immediate crash of the pluto keying daemon due to a NULL pointer.
2345 - Added algorithm selection to charon: New default algorithms for
2346 ike=aes128-sha-modp2048, as both daemons support it. The default
2347 for IPsec SAs is now esp=aes128-sha,3des-md5. charon handles
2348 the ike/esp parameter the same way as pluto. As this syntax does
2349 not allow specification of a pseudo random function, the same
2350 algorithm as for integrity is used (currently sha/md5). Supported
2352 Encryption: aes128, aes192, aes256
2353 Integrity/PRF: md5, sha (using hmac)
2354 DH-Groups: modp768, 1024, 1536, 2048, 4096, 8192
2356 Encryption: aes128, aes192, aes256, 3des, blowfish128,
2357 blowfish192, blowfish256
2358 Integrity: md5, sha1
2359 More IKE encryption algorithms will come after porting libcrypto into
2362 - initial support for rekeying CHILD_SAs using IKEv2. Currently no
2363 perfect forward secrecy is used. The rekeying parameters rekey,
2364 rekeymargin, rekeyfuzz and keylife from ipsec.conf are now supported
2365 when using IKEv2. WARNING: charon currently is unable to handle
2366 simultaneous rekeying. To avoid such a situation, use a large
2367 rekeyfuzz, or even better, set rekey=no on one peer.
2369 - support for host2host, net2net, host2net (roadwarrior) tunnels
2370 using predefined RSA certificates (see uml scenarios for
2371 configuration examples).
2373 - new build environment featuring autotools. Features such
2374 as HTTP, LDAP and smartcard support may be enabled using
2375 the ./configure script. Changing install directories
2376 is possible, too. See ./configure --help for more details.
2378 - better integration of charon with ipsec starter, which allows
2379 (almost) transparent operation with both daemons. charon
2380 handles ipsec commands up, down, status, statusall, listall,
2381 listcerts and allows proper load, reload and delete of connections
2388 - initial support of the IKEv2 protocol. Connections in
2389 ipsec.conf designated by keyexchange=ikev2 are negotiated
2390 by the new IKEv2 charon keying daemon whereas those marked
2391 by keyexchange=ikev1 or the default keyexchange=ike are
2392 handled thy the IKEv1 pluto keying daemon. Currently only
2393 a limited subset of functions are available with IKEv2
2394 (Default AES encryption, authentication based on locally
2395 imported X.509 certificates, unencrypted private RSA keys
2396 in PKCS#1 file format, limited functionality of the ipsec
2403 - the dynamic iptables rules from the _updown_x509 template
2404 for KLIPS and the _updown_policy template for NETKEY have
2405 been merged into the default _updown script. The existing
2406 left|rightfirewall keyword causes the automatic insertion
2407 and deletion of ACCEPT rules for tunneled traffic upon
2408 the successful setup and teardown of an IPsec SA, respectively.
2409 left|rightfirwall can be used with KLIPS under any Linux 2.4
2410 kernel or with NETKEY under a Linux kernel version >= 2.6.16
2411 in conjunction with iptables >= 1.3.5. For NETKEY under a Linux
2412 kernel version < 2.6.16 which does not support IPsec policy
2413 matching yet, please continue to use a copy of the _updown_espmark
2414 template loaded via the left|rightupdown keyword.
2416 - a new left|righthostaccess keyword has been introduced which
2417 can be used in conjunction with left|rightfirewall and the
2418 default _updown script. By default leftfirewall=yes inserts
2419 a bi-directional iptables FORWARD rule for a local client network
2420 with a netmask different from 255.255.255.255 (single host).
2421 This does not allow to access the VPN gateway host via its
2422 internal network interface which is part of the client subnet
2423 because an iptables INPUT and OUTPUT rule would be required.
2424 lefthostaccess=yes will cause this additional ACCEPT rules to
2427 - mixed PSK|RSA roadwarriors are now supported. The ISAKMP proposal
2428 payload is preparsed in order to find out whether the roadwarrior
2429 requests PSK or RSA so that a matching connection candidate can
2436 - the new _updown_policy template allows ipsec policy based
2437 iptables firewall rules. Required are iptables version
2438 >= 1.3.5 and linux kernel >= 2.6.16. This script obsoletes
2439 the _updown_espmark template, so that no INPUT mangle rules
2440 are required any more.
2442 - added support of DPD restart mode
2444 - ipsec starter now allows the use of wildcards in include
2445 statements as e.g. in "include /etc/my_ipsec/*.conf".
2446 Patch courtesy of Matthias Haas.
2448 - the Netscape OID 'employeeNumber' is now recognized and can be
2449 used as a Relative Distinguished Name in certificates.
2455 - /etc/init.d/ipsec or /etc/rc.d/ipsec is now a copy of the ipsec
2456 command and not of ipsec setup any more.
2458 - ipsec starter now supports AH authentication in conjunction with
2459 ESP encryption. AH authentication is configured in ipsec.conf
2460 via the auth=ah parameter.
2462 - The command ipsec scencrypt|scdecrypt <args> is now an alias for
2463 ipsec whack --scencrypt|scdecrypt <args>.
2465 - get_sa_info() now determines for the native netkey IPsec stack
2466 the exact time of the last use of an active eroute. This information
2467 is used by the Dead Peer Detection algorithm and is also displayed by
2468 the ipsec status command.
2474 - running under the native Linux 2.6 IPsec stack, the function
2475 get_sa_info() is called by ipsec auto --status to display the current
2476 number of transmitted bytes per IPsec SA.
2478 - get_sa_info() is also used by the Dead Peer Detection process to detect
2479 recent ESP activity. If ESP traffic was received from the peer within
2480 the last dpd_delay interval then no R_Y_THERE notification must be sent.
2482 - strongSwan now supports the Relative Distinguished Name "unstructuredName"
2483 in ID_DER_ASN1_DN identities. The following notations are possible:
2485 rightid="unstructuredName=John Doe"
2486 rightid="UN=John Doe"
2488 - fixed a long-standing bug which caused PSK-based roadwarrior connections
2489 to segfault in the function id.c:same_id() called by keys.c:get_secret()
2490 if an FQDN, USER_FQDN, or Key ID was defined, as in the following example.
2497 - the ipsec command now supports most ipsec auto commands (e.g. ipsec listall).
2499 - ipsec starter didn't set host_addr and client.addr ports in whack msg.
2501 - in order to guarantee backwards-compatibility with the script-based
2502 auto function (e.g. auto --replace), the ipsec starter scripts stores
2503 the defaultroute information in the temporary file /var/run/ipsec.info.
2505 - The compile-time option USE_XAUTH_VID enables the sending of the XAUTH
2506 Vendor ID which is expected by Cisco PIX 7 boxes that act as IKE Mode Config
2509 - the ipsec starter now also recognizes the parameters authby=never and
2510 type=passthrough|pass|drop|reject.
2516 - ipsec starter now supports the also parameter which allows
2517 a modular structure of the connection definitions. Thus
2518 "ipsec start" is now ready to replace "ipsec setup".
2524 - Mathieu Lafon's popular ipsec starter tool has been added to the
2525 strongSwan distribution. Many thanks go to Stephan Scholz from astaro
2526 for his integration work. ipsec starter is a C program which is going
2527 to replace the various shell and awk starter scripts (setup, _plutoload,
2528 _plutostart, _realsetup, _startklips, _confread, and auto). Since
2529 ipsec.conf is now parsed only once, the starting of multiple tunnels is
2530 accelerated tremedously.
2532 - Added support of %defaultroute to the ipsec starter. If the IP address
2533 changes, a HUP signal to the ipsec starter will automatically
2534 reload pluto's connections.
2536 - moved most compile time configurations from pluto/Makefile to
2537 Makefile.inc by defining the options USE_LIBCURL, USE_LDAP,
2538 USE_SMARTCARD, and USE_NAT_TRAVERSAL_TRANSPORT_MODE.
2540 - removed the ipsec verify and ipsec newhostkey commands
2542 - fixed some 64-bit issues in formatted print statements
2544 - The scepclient functionality implementing the Simple Certificate
2545 Enrollment Protocol (SCEP) is nearly complete but hasn't been
2552 - CA certicates are now automatically loaded from a smartcard
2553 or USB crypto token and appear in the ipsec auto --listcacerts
2560 - when using "ipsec whack --scencrypt <data>" with a PKCS#11
2561 library that does not support the C_Encrypt() Cryptoki
2562 function (e.g. OpenSC), the RSA encryption is done in
2563 software using the public key fetched from the smartcard.
2565 - The scepclient function now allows to define the
2566 validity of a self-signed certificate using the --days,
2567 --startdate, and --enddate options. The default validity
2568 has been changed from one year to five years.
2574 - the config setup parameter pkcs11proxy=yes opens pluto's PKCS#11
2575 interface to other applications for RSA encryption and decryption
2576 via the whack interface. Notation:
2578 ipsec whack --scencrypt <data>
2579 [--inbase 16|hex|64|base64|256|text|ascii]
2580 [--outbase 16|hex|64|base64|256|text|ascii]
2583 ipsec whack --scdecrypt <data>
2584 [--inbase 16|hex|64|base64|256|text|ascii]
2585 [--outbase 16|hex|64|base64|256|text|ascii]
2588 The default setting for inbase and outbase is hex.
2590 The new proxy interface can be used for securing symmetric
2591 encryption keys required by the cryptoloop or dm-crypt
2592 disk encryption schemes, especially in the case when
2593 pkcs11keepstate=yes causes pluto to lock the pkcs11 slot
2596 - if the file /etc/ipsec.secrets is lacking during the startup of
2597 pluto then the root-readable file /etc/ipsec.d/private/myKey.der
2598 containing a 2048 bit RSA private key and a matching self-signed
2599 certificate stored in the file /etc/ipsec.d/certs/selfCert.der
2600 is automatically generated by calling the function
2602 ipsec scepclient --out pkcs1 --out cert-self
2604 scepclient was written by Jan Hutter and Martin Willi, students
2605 at the University of Applied Sciences in Rapperswil, Switzerland.
2611 - the current extension of the PKCS#7 framework introduced
2612 a parsing error in PKCS#7 wrapped X.509 certificates that are
2613 e.g. transmitted by Windows XP when multi-level CAs are used.
2614 the parsing syntax has been fixed.
2616 - added a patch by Gerald Richter which tolerates multiple occurrences
2617 of the ipsec0 interface when using KLIPS.
2623 - with gawk-3.1.4 the word "default2 has become a protected
2624 keyword for use in switch statements and cannot be used any
2625 more in the strongSwan scripts. This problem has been
2626 solved by renaming "default" to "defaults" and "setdefault"
2627 in the scripts _confread and auto, respectively.
2629 - introduced the parameter leftsendcert with the values
2631 always|yes (the default, always send a cert)
2632 ifasked (send the cert only upon a cert request)
2633 never|no (never send a cert, used for raw RSA keys and
2636 - fixed the initialization of the ESP key length to a default of
2637 128 bits in the case that the peer does not send a key length
2638 attribute for AES encryption.
2640 - applied Herbert Xu's uniqueIDs patch
2642 - applied Herbert Xu's CLOEXEC patches
2648 - CRLs can now be cached also in the case when the issuer's
2649 certificate does not contain a subjectKeyIdentifier field.
2650 In that case the subjectKeyIdentifier is computed by pluto as the
2651 160 bit SHA-1 hash of the issuer's public key in compliance
2652 with section 4.2.1.2 of RFC 3280.
2654 - Fixed a bug introduced by strongswan-2.5.1 which eliminated
2655 not only multiple Quick Modes of a given connection but also
2656 multiple connections between two security gateways.
2662 - Under the native IPsec of the Linux 2.6 kernel, a %trap eroute
2663 installed either by setting auto=route in ipsec.conf or by
2664 a connection put into hold, generates an XFRM_AQUIRE event
2665 for each packet that wants to use the not-yet exisiting
2666 tunnel. Up to now each XFRM_AQUIRE event led to an entry in
2667 the Quick Mode queue, causing multiple IPsec SA to be
2668 established in rapid succession. Starting with strongswan-2.5.1
2669 only a single IPsec SA is established per host-pair connection.
2671 - Right after loading the PKCS#11 module, all smartcard slots are
2672 searched for certificates. The result can be viewed using
2675 ipsec auto --listcards
2677 The certificate objects found in the slots are numbered
2678 starting with #1, #2, etc. This position number can be used to address
2679 certificates (leftcert=%smartcard) and keys (: PIN %smartcard)
2680 in ipsec.conf and ipsec.secrets, respectively:
2682 %smartcard (selects object #1)
2683 %smartcard#1 (selects object #1)
2684 %smartcard#3 (selects object #3)
2686 As an alternative the existing retrieval scheme can be used:
2688 %smartcard:45 (selects object with id=45)
2689 %smartcard0 (selects first object in slot 0)
2690 %smartcard4:45 (selects object in slot 4 with id=45)
2692 - Depending on the settings of CKA_SIGN and CKA_DECRYPT
2693 private key flags either C_Sign() or C_Decrypt() is used
2694 to generate a signature.
2696 - The output buffer length parameter siglen in C_Sign()
2697 is now initialized to the actual size of the output
2698 buffer prior to the function call. This fixes the
2699 CKR_BUFFER_TOO_SMALL error that could occur when using
2700 the OpenSC PKCS#11 module.
2702 - Changed the initialization of the PKCS#11 CK_MECHANISM in
2703 C_SignInit() to mech = { CKM_RSA_PKCS, NULL_PTR, 0 }.
2705 - Refactored the RSA public/private key code and transferred it
2706 from keys.c to the new pkcs1.c file as a preparatory step
2707 towards the release of the SCEP client.
2713 - The loading of a PKCS#11 smartcard library module during
2714 runtime does not require OpenSC library functions any more
2715 because the corresponding code has been integrated into
2716 smartcard.c. Also the RSAREF pkcs11 header files have been
2717 included in a newly created pluto/rsaref directory so that
2718 no external include path has to be defined any longer.
2720 - A long-awaited feature has been implemented at last:
2721 The local caching of CRLs fetched via HTTP or LDAP, activated
2722 by the parameter cachecrls=yes in the config setup section
2723 of ipsec.conf. The dynamically fetched CRLs are stored under
2724 a unique file name containing the issuer's subjectKeyID
2725 in /etc/ipsec.d/crls.
2727 - Applied a one-line patch courtesy of Michael Richardson
2728 from the Openswan project which fixes the kernel-oops
2729 in KLIPS when an snmp daemon is running on the same box.
2735 - Eliminated null length CRL distribution point strings.
2737 - Fixed a trust path evaluation bug introduced with 2.4.3
2743 - Improved the joint OCSP / CRL revocation policy.
2744 OCSP responses have precedence over CRL entries.
2746 - Introduced support of CRLv2 reason codes.
2748 - Fixed a bug with key-pad equipped readers which caused
2749 pluto to prompt for the pin via the console when the first
2750 occasion to enter the pin via the key-pad was missed.
2752 - When pluto is built with LDAP_V3 enabled, the library
2753 liblber required by newer versions of openldap is now
2760 - Added the _updown_espmark template which requires all
2761 incoming ESP traffic to be marked with a default mark
2764 - Introduced the pkcs11keepstate parameter in the config setup
2765 section of ipsec.conf. With pkcs11keepstate=yes the PKCS#11
2766 session and login states are kept as long as possible during
2767 the lifetime of pluto. This means that a PIN entry via a key
2768 pad has to be done only once.
2770 - Introduced the pkcs11module parameter in the config setup
2771 section of ipsec.conf which specifies the PKCS#11 module
2772 to be used with smart cards. Example:
2774 pkcs11module=/usr/lib/pkcs11/opensc-pkcs11.lo
2776 - Added support of smartcard readers equipped with a PIN pad.
2778 - Added patch by Jay Pfeifer which detects when netkey
2779 modules have been statically built into the Linux 2.6 kernel.
2781 - Added two patches by Herbert Xu. The first uses ip xfrm
2782 instead of setkey to flush the IPsec policy database. The
2783 second sets the optional flag in inbound IPComp SAs only.
2785 - Applied Ulrich Weber's patch which fixes an interoperability
2786 problem between native IPsec and KLIPS systems caused by
2787 setting the replay window to 32 instead of 0 for ipcomp.
2793 - Fixed a bug which caused an unwanted Mode Config request
2794 to be initiated in the case where "right" was used to denote
2795 the local side in ipsec.conf and "left" the remote side,
2796 contrary to the recommendation that "right" be remote and
2803 - updated Vendor ID to strongSwan-2.4.0
2805 - updated copyright statement to include David Buechi and
2812 - strongSwan now communicates with attached smartcards and
2813 USB crypto tokens via the standardized PKCS #11 interface.
2814 By default the OpenSC library from www.opensc.org is used
2815 but any other PKCS#11 library could be dynamically linked.
2816 strongSwan's PKCS#11 API was implemented by David Buechi
2817 and Michael Meier, both graduates of the Zurich University
2818 of Applied Sciences in Winterthur, Switzerland.
2820 - When a %trap eroute is triggered by an outgoing IP packet
2821 then the native IPsec stack of the Linux 2.6 kernel [often/
2822 always?] returns an XFRM_ACQUIRE message with an undefined
2823 protocol family field and the connection setup fails.
2824 As a workaround IPv4 (AF_INET) is now assumed.
2826 - the results of the UML test scenarios are now enhanced
2827 with block diagrams of the virtual network topology used
2828 in a particular test.
2834 - fixed IV used to decrypt informational messages.
2835 This bug was introduced with Mode Config functionality.
2837 - fixed NCP Vendor ID.
2839 - undid one of Ulrich Weber's maximum udp size patches
2840 because it caused a segmentation fault with NAT-ed
2843 - added UML scenarios wildcards and attr-cert which
2844 demonstrate the implementation of IPsec policies based
2845 on wildcard parameters contained in Distinguished Names and
2846 on X.509 attribute certificates, respectively.
2852 - Added basic Mode Config functionality
2854 - Added Mathieu Lafon's patch which upgrades the status of
2855 the NAT-Traversal implementation to RFC 3947.
2857 - The _startklips script now also loads the xfrm4_tunnel
2860 - Added Ulrich Weber's netlink replay window size and
2861 maximum udp size patches.
2863 - UML testing now uses the Linux 2.6.10 UML kernel by default.
2869 - Eric Marchionni and Patrik Rayo, both recent graduates from
2870 the Zuercher Hochschule Winterthur in Switzerland, created a
2871 User-Mode-Linux test setup for strongSwan. For more details
2872 please read the INSTALL and README documents in the testing
2875 - Full support of group attributes based on X.509 attribute
2876 certificates. Attribute certificates can be generated
2877 using the openac facility. For more details see
2881 The group attributes can be used in connection definitions
2882 in order to give IPsec access to specific user groups.
2883 This is done with the new parameter left|rightgroups as in
2885 rightgroups="Research, Sales"
2887 giving access to users possessing the group attributes
2888 Research or Sales, only.
2890 - In Quick Mode clients with subnet mask /32 are now
2891 coded as IP_V4_ADDRESS or IP_V6_ADDRESS. This should
2892 fix rekeying problems with the SafeNet/SoftRemote and NCP
2893 Secure Entry Clients.
2895 - Changed the defaults of the ikelifetime and keylife parameters
2896 to 3h and 1h, respectively. The maximum allowable values are
2897 now both set to 24 h.
2899 - Suppressed notification wars between two IPsec peers that
2900 could e.g. be triggered by incorrect ISAKMP encryption.
2902 - Public RSA keys can now have identical IDs if either the
2903 issuing CA or the serial number is different. The serial
2904 number of a certificate is now shown by the command
2906 ipsec auto --listpubkeys
2912 - Added Tuomo Soini's sourceip feature which allows a strongSwan
2913 roadwarrior to use a fixed Virtual IP (see README section 2.6)
2914 and reduces the well-known four tunnel case on VPN gateways to
2915 a single tunnel definition (see README section 2.4).
2917 - Fixed a bug occurring with NAT-Traversal enabled when the responder
2918 suddenly turns initiator and the initiator cannot find a matching
2919 connection because of the floated IKE port 4500.
2921 - Removed misleading ipsec verify command from barf.
2923 - Running under the native IP stack, ipsec --version now shows
2924 the Linux kernel version (courtesy to the Openswan project).
2930 - Introduced the ipsec auto --listalgs monitoring command which lists
2931 all currently registered IKE and ESP algorithms.
2933 - Fixed a bug in the ESP algorithm selection occurring when the strict flag
2934 is set and the first proposed transform does not match.
2936 - Fixed another deadlock in the use of the lock_certs_and_keys() mutex,
2937 occurring when a smartcard is present.
2939 - Prevented that a superseded Phase1 state can trigger a DPD_TIMEOUT event.
2941 - Fixed the printing of the notification names (null)
2943 - Applied another of Herbert Xu's Netlink patches.
2949 - Support of Dead Peer Detection. The connection parameter
2951 dpdaction=clear|hold
2953 activates DPD for the given connection.
2955 - The default Opportunistic Encryption (OE) policy groups are not
2956 automatically included anymore. Those wishing to activate OE can include
2957 the policy group with the following statement in ipsec.conf:
2959 include /etc/ipsec.d/examples/oe.conf
2961 The default for [right|left]rsasigkey is now set to %cert.
2963 - strongSwan now has a Vendor ID of its own which can be activated
2964 using the compile option VENDORID
2966 - Applied Herbert Xu's patch which sets the compression algorithm correctly.
2968 - Applied Herbert Xu's patch fixing an ESPINUDP problem
2970 - Applied Herbert Xu's patch setting source/destination port numbers.
2972 - Reapplied one of Herbert Xu's NAT-Traversal patches which got
2973 lost during the migration from SuperFreeS/WAN.
2975 - Fixed a deadlock in the use of the lock_certs_and_keys() mutex.
2977 - Fixed the unsharing of alg parameters when instantiating group
2984 - Thomas Walpuski made me aware of a potential DoS attack via
2985 a PKCS#7-wrapped certificate bundle which could overwrite valid CA
2986 certificates in Pluto's authority certificate store. This vulnerability
2987 was fixed by establishing trust in CA candidate certificates up to a
2988 trusted root CA prior to insertion into Pluto's chained list.
2990 - replaced the --assign option by the -v option in the auto awk script
2991 in order to make it run with mawk under debian/woody.
2997 - Split of the status information between ipsec auto --status (concise)
2998 and ipsec auto --statusall (verbose). Both commands can be used with
2999 an optional connection selector:
3001 ipsec auto --status[all] <connection_name>
3003 - Added the description of X.509 related features to the ipsec_auto(8)
3006 - Hardened the ASN.1 parser in debug mode, especially the printing
3007 of malformed distinguished names.
3009 - The size of an RSA public key received in a certificate is now restricted to
3011 512 bits <= modulus length <= 8192 bits.
3013 - Fixed the debug mode enumeration.
3019 - Fixed another PKCS#7 vulnerability which could lead to an
3020 endless loop while following the X.509 trust chain.
3026 - Fixed the PKCS#7 vulnerability discovered by Thomas Walpuski
3027 that accepted end certificates having identical issuer and subject
3028 distinguished names in a multi-tier X.509 trust chain.
3034 - Removed all remaining references to ipsec_netlink.h in KLIPS.
3040 - The new "ca" section allows to define the following parameters:
3043 cacert=koolCA.pem # cacert of kool CA
3044 ocspuri=http://ocsp.kool.net:8001 # ocsp server
3045 ldapserver=ldap.kool.net # default ldap server
3046 crluri=http://www.kool.net/kool.crl # crl distribution point
3047 crluri2="ldap:///O=Kool, C= .." # crl distribution point #2
3048 auto=add # add, ignore
3050 The ca definitions can be monitored via the command
3052 ipsec auto --listcainfos
3054 - Fixed cosmetic corruption of /proc filesystem by integrating
3055 D. Hugh Redelmeier's freeswan-2.06 kernel fixes.
3061 - Added support for the 818043 NAT-Traversal update of Microsoft's
3062 Windows 2000/XP IPsec client which sends an ID_FQDN during Quick Mode.
3064 - A symbolic link to libcrypto is now added in the kernel sources
3065 during kernel compilation
3067 - Fixed a couple of 64 bit issues (mostly casts to int).
3068 Thanks to Ken Bantoft who checked my sources on a 64 bit platform.
3070 - Replaced s[n]printf() statements in the kernel by ipsec_snprintf().
3071 Credits go to D. Hugh Redelmeier, Michael Richardson, and Sam Sgro
3072 of the FreeS/WAN team who solved this problem with the 2.4.25 kernel.
3078 - an empty ASN.1 SEQUENCE OF or SET OF object (e.g. a subjectAltName
3079 certificate extension which contains no generalName item) can cause
3080 a pluto crash. This bug has been fixed. Additionally the ASN.1 parser has
3081 been hardened to make it more robust against malformed ASN.1 objects.
3083 - applied Herbert Xu's NAT-T patches which fixes NAT-T under the native
3084 Linux 2.6 IPsec stack.
3090 - based on freeswan-2.04, x509-1.5.3, nat-0.6c, alg-0.8.1rc12