4 - Private key implementations may optionally provide a list of supported
5 signature schemes, which is used by the tpm plugin because for each key on a
6 TPM 2.0 the hash algorithm and for RSA also the padding scheme is predefined.
8 - For RSA with PSS padding, the TPM 2.0 specification mandates the maximum salt
9 length (as defined by the length of the key and hash). However, if the TPM is
10 FIPS-168-4 compliant, the salt length equals the hash length. This is assumed
11 for FIPS-140-2 compliant TPMs, but if that's not the case, it might be
12 necessary to manually enable charon.plugins.tpm.fips_186_4 if the TPM doesn't
13 use the maximum salt length.
15 - Added support for RSA signatures with SHA-256 and SHA-512 to the agent plugin.
16 For older versions of ssh/gpg-agent that only support SHA-1, IKEv2 signature
17 authentication has to be disabled via charon.signature_authentication.
19 - The sshkey and agent plugins support Ed25519/Ed448 SSH keys and signatures.
21 - Ed25519, ChaCha20/Poly1305, SHA-3 and AES-CCM were added to the botan plugin.
23 - The mysql plugin now properly handles database connections with transactions
30 - Fixes a vulnerability in the gmp plugin triggered by crafted certificates with
31 RSA keys with very small moduli. When verifying signatures with such keys,
32 the code patched with the fix for CVE-2018-16151/2 caused an integer underflow
33 and subsequent heap buffer overflow that results in a crash of the daemon.
34 The vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2018-17540.
40 - Fixes a potential authorization bypass vulnerability in the gmp plugin that
41 was caused by a too lenient verification of PKCS#1 v1.5 signatures. Several
42 flaws could be exploited by a Bleichenbacher-style attack to forge signatures
43 for low-exponent keys (i.e. with e=3). CVE-2018-16151 has been assigned to
44 the problem of accepting random bytes after the OID of the hash function in
45 such signatures, and CVE-2018-16152 has been assigned to the issue of not
46 verifying that the parameters in the ASN.1 algorithmIdentitifer structure is
47 empty. Other flaws that don't lead to a vulnerability directly (e.g. not
48 checking for at least 8 bytes of padding) have no separate CVE assigned.
50 - Dots are not allowed anymore in section names in swanctl.conf and
51 strongswan.conf. This mainly affects the configuration of file loggers. If the
52 path for such a log file contains dots it now has to be configured in the new
53 `path` setting within the arbitrarily renamed subsection in the `filelog`
56 - Sections in swanctl.conf and strongswan.conf may now reference other sections.
57 All settings and subsections from such a section are inherited. This allows
58 to simplify configs as redundant information has only to be specified once
59 and may then be included in other sections (refer to the example in the man
60 page for strongswan.conf).
62 - The originally selected IKE config (based on the IPs and IKE version) can now
63 change if no matching algorithm proposal is found. This way the order
64 of the configs doesn't matter that much anymore and it's easily possible to
65 specify separate configs for clients that require weak algorithms (instead
66 of having to also add them in other configs that might be selected).
68 - Support for Postquantum Preshared Keys for IKEv2 (draft-ietf-ipsecme-qr-ikev2)
71 - The new botan plugin is a wrapper around the Botan C++ crypto library. It
72 requires a fairly recent build from Botan's master branch (or the upcoming
73 2.8.0 release). Thanks to René Korthaus and his team from Rohde & Schwarz
74 Cybersecurity for the initial patch.
76 - The pki tool accepts a xmppAddr otherName as a subjectAlternativeName using
77 the syntax --san xmppaddr:<jid>.
79 - Implementation of RFC 8412 "Software Inventory Message and Attributes (SWIMA)
80 for PA-TNC". SWIMA subscription option sets CLOSE_WRITE trigger on apt
81 history.log file resulting in a ClientRetry PB-TNC batch to initialize
82 a new measurement cycle.
84 - Added support for fuzzing the PA-TNC (RFC 5792) and PB-TNC (RFC 5793) NEA
85 protocols on Google's OSS-Fuzz infrastructure.
87 - Support for version 2 of Intel's TPM2-TSS TGC Software Stack. The presence of
88 the in-kernel /dev/tpmrm0 resource manager is automatically detected.
90 - Marks the in- and/or outbound SA should apply to packets after processing may
91 be configured in swanctl.conf on Linux. For outbound SAs this requires at
92 least a 4.14 kernel. Setting a mask and configuring a mark/mask for inbound
93 SAs will be added with the upcoming 4.19 kernel.
95 - New options in swanctl.conf allow configuring how/whether DF, ECN and DS
96 fields in the IP headers are copied during IPsec processing. Controlling this
97 is currently only possible on Linux.
99 - To avoid conflicts, the dhcp plugin now only uses the DHCP server port if
100 explicitly configured.
106 - Fixed a DoS vulnerability in the IKEv2 key derivation if the openssl plugin is
107 used in FIPS mode and HMAC-MD5 is negotiated as PRF.
108 This vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2018-10811.
110 - Fixed a vulnerability in the stroke plugin, which did not check the received
111 length before reading a message from the socket. Unless a group is configured,
112 root privileges are required to access that socket, so in the default
113 configuration this shouldn't be an issue.
114 This vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2018-5388.
116 ⁻ CRLs that are not yet valid are now ignored to avoid problems in scenarios
117 where expired certificates are removed from CRLs and the clock on the host
118 doing the revocation check is trailing behind that of the host issuing CRLs.
120 - The issuer of fetched CRLs is now compared to the issuer of the checked
123 - CRL validation results other than revocation (e.g. a skipped check because
124 the CRL couldn't be fetched) are now stored also for intermediate CA
125 certificates and not only for end-entity certificates, so a strict CRL policy
126 can be enforced in such cases.
128 - In compliance with RFC 4945, section 5.1.3.2, certificates used for IKE must
129 now either not contain a keyUsage extension (like the ones generated by pki)
130 or have at least one of the digitalSignature or nonRepudiation bits set.
132 - New options for vici/swanctl allow forcing the local termination of an IKE_SA.
133 This might be useful in situations where it's known the other end is not
134 reachable anymore, or that it already removed the IKE_SA, so retransmitting a
135 DELETE and waiting for a response would be pointless. Waiting only a certain
136 amount of time for a response before destroying the IKE_SA is also possible
137 by additionally specifying a timeout.
139 - When removing routes, the kernel-netlink plugin now checks if it tracks other
140 routes for the same destination and replaces the installed route instead of
141 just removing it. Same during installation, where existing routes previously
142 weren't replaced. This should allow using traps with virtual IPs on Linux.
144 - The dhcp plugin only sends the client identifier option if identity_lease is
145 enabled. It can also send identities of up to 255 bytes length, instead of
146 the previous 64 bytes. If a server address is configured, DHCP requests are
147 now sent from port 67 instead of 68 to avoid ICMP port unreachables.
149 - Roam events are now completely ignored for IKEv1 SAs.
151 - ChaCha20/Poly1305 is now correctly proposed without key length. For
152 compatibility with older releases the chacha20poly1305compat keyword may be
153 included in proposals to also propose the algorithm with a key length.
155 - Configuration of hardware offload of IPsec SAs is now more flexible and allows
156 a new mode, which automatically uses it if the kernel and device support it.
158 - SHA-2 based PRFs are supported in PKCS#8 files as generated by OpenSSL 1.1.
160 - The pki --verify tool may load CA certificates and CRLs from directories.
162 - Fixed an issue with DNS servers passed to NetworkManager in charon-nm.
168 - Fixed a DoS vulnerability in the parser for PKCS#1 RSASSA-PSS signatures that
169 was caused by insufficient input validation. One of the configurable
170 parameters in algorithm identifier structures for RSASSA-PSS signatures is the
171 mask generation function (MGF). Only MGF1 is currently specified for this
172 purpose. However, this in turn takes itself a parameter that specifies the
173 underlying hash function. strongSwan's parser did not correctly handle the
174 case of this parameter being absent, causing an undefined data read.
175 This vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2018-6459.
177 - The previously negotiated DH group is reused when rekeying an SA, instead of
178 using the first group in the configured proposals, which avoids an additional
179 exchange if the peer selected a different group via INVALID_KE_PAYLOAD when
180 the SA was created initially.
181 The selected DH group is also moved to the front of all sent proposals that
182 contain it and all proposals that don't are moved to the back in order to
183 convey the preference for this group to the peer.
185 - Handling of MOBIKE task queuing has been improved. In particular, the response
186 to an address update is not ignored anymore if only an address list update or
189 - The fallback drop policies installed to avoid traffic leaks when replacing
190 addresses in installed policies are now replaced by temporary drop policies,
191 which also prevent acquires because we currently delete and reinstall IPsec
192 SAs to update their addresses.
194 - Access X.509 certificates held in non-volatile storage of a TPM 2.0
195 referenced via the NV index.
197 - Adding the --keyid parameter to pki --print allows to print private keys
198 or certificates stored in a smartcard or a TPM 2.0.
200 - Fixed proposal selection if a peer incorrectly sends DH groups in the ESP
201 proposals during IKE_AUTH and also if a DH group is configured in the local
202 ESP proposal and charon.prefer_configured_proposals is disabled.
204 - MSKs received via RADIUS are now padded to 64 bytes to avoid compatibility
205 issues with EAP-MSCHAPv2 and PRFs that have a block size < 64 bytes (e.g.
208 - The tpm_extendpcr command line tool extends a digest into a TPM PCR.
210 - Ported the NetworkManager backend from the deprecated libnm-glib to libnm.
212 - The save-keys debugging/development plugin saves IKE and/or ESP keys to files
213 compatible with Wireshark.
219 - In compliance with RFCs 8221 and 8247 several algorithms were removed from the
220 default ESP/AH and IKEv2 proposals, respectively (3DES, Blowfish and MD5 from
221 ESP/AH, MD5 and MODP-1024 from IKEv2). These algorithms may still be used in
224 - Added support for RSASSA-PSS signatures. For backwards compatibility they are
225 not used automatically by default, enable charon.rsa_pss to change that. To
226 explicitly use or require such signatures with IKEv2 signature authentication
227 (RFC 7427), regardless of whether that option is enabled, use ike:rsa/pss...
228 authentication constraints.
230 - The pki tool can optionally sign certificates/CRLs with RSASSA-PSS via the
231 `--rsa-padding pss` option.
233 - The sec-updater tool checks for security updates in dpkg-based repositories
234 (e.g. Debian/Ubuntu) and sets the security flags in the IMV policy database
235 accordingly. Additionally for each new package version a SWID tag for the
236 given OS and HW architecture is created and stored in the database.
237 Using the sec-updater.sh script template the lookup can be automated
238 (e.g. via an hourly cron job).
240 - The introduction of file versions in the IMV database scheme broke file
241 reference hash measurements. This has been fixed by creating generic product
242 versions having an empty package name.
244 - A new timeout option for the systime-fix plugin stops periodic system time
245 checks after a while and enforces a certificate verification, closing or
246 reauthenticating all SAs with invalid certificates.
248 - The IKE event counters, previously only available via ipsec listcounters, may
249 now be queried/reset via vici and the new swanctl --counters command. They are
250 provided by the new optional counters plugin.
252 - Class attributes received in RADIUS Access-Accept messages may optionally be
253 added to RADIUS accounting messages.
255 - Inbound marks may optionally be installed on the SA again (was removed with
256 5.5.2) by enabling the mark_in_sa option in swanctl.conf.
262 - Fixed a DoS vulnerability in the gmp plugin that was caused by insufficient
263 input validation when verifying RSA signatures, which requires decryption
264 with the operation m^e mod n, where m is the signature, and e and n are the
265 exponent and modulus of the public key. The value m is an integer between
266 0 and n-1, however, the gmp plugin did not verify this. So if m equals n the
267 calculation results in 0, in which case mpz_export() returns NULL. This
268 result wasn't handled properly causing a null-pointer dereference.
269 This vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2017-11185.
271 - New SWIMA IMC/IMV pair implements the "draft-ietf-sacm-nea-swima-patnc"
272 Internet Draft and has been demonstrated at the IETF 99 Prague Hackathon.
274 - The IMV database template has been adapted to achieve full compliance
275 with the ISO 19770-2:2015 SWID tag standard.
277 - The sw-collector tool extracts software events from apt history logs
278 and stores them in an SQLite database to be used by the SWIMA IMC.
279 The tool can also generate SWID tags both for installed and removed
282 - The pt-tls-client can attach and use TPM 2.0 protected private keys
283 via the --keyid parameter.
285 - libtpmtss supports Intel's TSS2 Architecture Broker and Resource
286 Manager interface (tcti-tabrmd).
288 - The new eap-aka-3gpp plugin implements the 3GPP MILENAGE algorithms
289 in software. K (optionally concatenated with OPc) may be configured as
292 - CHILD_SA rekeying was fixed in charon-tkm and was slightly changed: The
293 switch to the new outbound IPsec SA now happens via SPI on the outbound
294 policy on Linux, and in case of lost rekey collisions no outbound SA/policy
295 is temporarily installed for the redundant CHILD_SA.
297 - The new %unique-dir value for mark* settings allocates separate unique marks
298 for each CHILD_SA direction (in/out).
304 - Fixed a DoS vulnerability in the gmp plugin that was caused by insufficient
305 input validation when verifying RSA signatures. More specifically,
306 mpz_powm_sec() has two requirements regarding the passed exponent and modulus
307 that the plugin did not enforce, if these are not met the calculation will
308 result in a floating point exception that crashes the whole process.
309 This vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2017-9022.
311 - Fixed a DoS vulnerability in the x509 plugin that was caused because the ASN.1
312 parser didn't handle ASN.1 CHOICE types properly, which could result in an
313 infinite loop when parsing X.509 extensions that use such types.
314 This vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2017-9023.
316 - The behavior during IKEv2 CHILD_SA rekeying has been changed in order to avoid
317 traffic loss. The responder now only installs the new inbound SA and delays
318 installing the outbound SA until it receives the DELETE for the replaced
319 CHILD_SA. Similarly, the inbound SA of the replaced CHILD_SA is not removed
320 for a configurable amount of seconds (charon.delete_rekeyed_delay) after the
321 DELETE has been processed to reduce the chance of dropping delayed packets.
323 - The code base has been ported to Apple's ARM64 iOS platform, whose calling
324 conventions for variadic and regular functions are different. This means
325 assigning non-variadic functions to variadic function pointers does not work.
326 To avoid this issue the enumerator_t interface has been changed and the
327 signatures of the callback functions for enumerator_create_filter(), and the
328 invoke_function() and find_first() methods on linked_list_t have been changed.
329 The return type of find_first() also changed from status_t to bool.
331 - Added support for fuzzing the certificate parser provided by the default
332 plugins (x509, pem, gmp etc.) on Google's OSS-Fuzz infrastructure. Several
333 issues found while fuzzing these plugins were fixed.
335 - Two new options have been added to charon's retransmission settings:
336 retransmit_limit and retransmit_jitter. The former adds an upper limit to the
337 calculated retransmission timeout, the latter randomly reduces it.
339 - A bug in swanctl's --load-creds command was fixed that caused unencrypted
340 private keys to get unloaded if the command was called multiple times. The
341 load-key VICI command now returns the key ID of the loaded key on success.
343 - The credential manager now enumerates local credential sets before global
344 ones. This means certificates supplied by the peer will now be preferred over
345 certificates with the same identity that may be locally stored (e.g. in the
348 - Added support for hardware offload of IPsec SAs as introduced by Linux 4.11
349 for hardware that supports this.
351 - When building the libraries monolithically and statically the plugin
352 constructors are now hard-coded in each library so the plugin code is not
353 removed by the linker because it thinks none of their symbols are ever
356 - The pki tool loads the curve25519 plugin by default.
362 - Support of Diffie-Hellman group 31 using Curve25519 for IKE as defined
365 - Support of Ed25519 digital signature algorithm for IKEv2 as defined by
366 draft-ietf-ipsecme-eddsa. Ed25519-based public key pairs, X.509 certificates
367 and CRLs can be generated and printed by the pki tool.
369 - The new "tpm" libtpmtss plugin allows to use persistent private RSA and ECDSA
370 keys bound to a TPM 2.0 for both IKE and TLS authentication. Using the
371 TPM 2.0 object handle as keyid parameter, the pki --pub tool can extract
372 the public key from the TPM thereby replacing the aikpub2 tool. In a similar
373 fashion pki --req can generate a PKCS#10 certificate request signed with
376 - The pki tool gained support for generating certificates with the RFC 3779
377 addrblock extension. The charon addrblock plugin now dynamically narrows
378 traffic selectors based on the certificate addrblocks instead of rejecting
379 non-matching selectors completely. This allows generic connections, where
380 the allowed selectors are defined by the used certificates only.
382 - In-place update of cached base and delta CRLs does not leave dozens
383 of stale copies in cache memory.
385 - Several new features for the VICI interface and the swanctl utility: Querying
386 specific pools, enumerating and unloading keys and shared secrets, loading
387 keys and certificates from PKCS#11 tokens, the ability to initiate, install
388 and uninstall connections and policies by their exact name (if multiple child
389 sections in different connections share the same name), a command to initiate
390 the rekeying of IKE and IPsec SAs, support for settings previously only
391 supported by the old config files (plain pubkeys, dscp, certificate policies,
392 IPv6 Transport Proxy Mode, NT Hash secrets, mediation extension).
394 Important: Due to issues with VICI bindings that map sub-sections to
395 dictionaries the CHILD_SA sections returned via list-sas now have a unique
396 name, the original name of a CHILD_SA is returned in the "name" key of its
403 - The newhope plugin implements the post-quantum NewHope key exchange algorithm
404 proposed in their 2015 paper by Erdem Alkim, Léo Ducas, Thomas Pöppelmann and
407 - The libstrongswan crypto factory now offers the registration of Extended
408 Output Functions (XOFs). Currently supported XOFs are SHAKE128 and SHAKE256
409 implemented by the sha3 plugin, ChaCHa20 implemented by the chapoly plugin
410 and the more traditional MGF1 Mask Generation Functions based on the SHA-1,
411 SHA-256 and SHA-512 hash algorithms implemented by the new mgf1 plugin.
413 - The pki tool, with help of the pkcs1 or openssl plugins, can parse private
414 keys in any of the supported formats without having to know the exact type.
415 So instead of having to specify rsa or ecdsa explicitly the keyword priv may
416 be used to indicate a private key of any type. Similarly, swanctl can load
417 any type of private key from the swanctl/private directory.
419 - The pki tool can handle RSASSA-PKCS1v1.5-with-SHA-3 signatures using the
420 sha3 and gmp plugins.
422 - The VICI flush-certs command flushes certificates from the volatile
423 certificate cache. Optionally the type of the certificates to be
424 flushed (e.g. type = x509_crl) can be specified.
426 - Setting cache_crls = yes in strongswan.conf the vici plugin saves regular,
427 base and delta CRLs to disk.
429 - IKE fragmentation is now enabled by default with the default fragment size
430 set to 1280 bytes for both IP address families.
432 - libtpmtss: In the TSS2 API the function TeardownSocketTcti() was replaced by
433 tss2_tcti_finalize().
439 - The new libtpmtss library offers support for both TPM 1.2 and TPM 2.0
440 Trusted Platform Modules. This allows the Attestation IMC/IMV pair to
441 do TPM 2.0 based attestation.
443 - The behavior during IKEv2 exchange collisions has been improved/fixed in
444 several corner cases and support for TEMPORARY_FAILURE and CHILD_SA_NOT_FOUND
445 notifies, as defined by RFC 7296, has been added.
447 - IPsec policy priorities can be set manually (e.g. for high-priority drop
448 policies) and outbound policies may be restricted to a network interface.
450 - The scheme for the automatically calculated default priorities has been
451 changed and now also considers port masks, which were added with 5.4.0.
453 - FWD policies are now installed in both directions in regards to the traffic
454 selectors. Because such "outbound" FWD policies could conflict with "inbound"
455 FWD policies of other SAs they are installed with a lower priority and don't
456 have a reqid set, which allows kernel plugins to distinguish between the two
457 and prefer those with a reqid.
459 - For outbound IPsec SAs no replay window is configured anymore.
461 - Enhanced the functionality of the swanctl --list-conns command by listing
462 IKE_SA and CHILD_SA reauthentication and rekeying settings, and EAP/XAuth
463 identities and EAP types.
465 - DNS servers installed by the resolve plugin are now refcounted, which should
466 fix its use with make-before-break reauthentication. Any output written to
467 stderr/stdout by resolvconf is now logged.
469 - The methods in the kernel interfaces have been changed to take structs instead
470 of long lists of arguments. Similarly the constructors for peer_cfg_t and
471 child_cfg_t now take structs.
477 - Support for IKEv2 redirection (RFC 5685) has been added. Plugins may
478 implement the redirect_provider_t interface to decide if and when to redirect
479 connecting clients. It is also possible to redirect established IKE_SAs based
480 on different selectors via VICI/swanctl. Unless disabled in strongswan.conf
481 the charon daemon will follow redirect requests received from servers.
483 - The ike: prefix enables the explicit configuration of signature scheme
484 constraints against IKEv2 authentication in rightauth, which allows the use
485 of different signature schemes for trustchain verification and authentication.
487 - The initiator of an IKEv2 make-before-break reauthentication now suspends
488 online certificate revocation checks (OCSP, CRLs) until the new IKE_SA and all
489 CHILD_SAs are established. This is required if the checks are done over the
490 CHILD_SA established with the new IKE_SA. This is not possible until the
491 initiator installs this SA and that only happens after the authentication is
492 completed successfully. So we suspend the checks during the reauthentication
493 and do them afterwards, if they fail the IKE_SA is closed. This change has no
494 effect on the behavior during the authentication of the initial IKE_SA.
496 - For the vici plugin a Vici:Session Perl CPAN module has been added to allow
497 Perl applications to control and/or monitor the IKE daemon using the VICI
498 interface, similar to the existing Python egg or Ruby gem.
500 - Traffic selectors with port ranges can now be configured in the Linux kernel:
501 e.g. remote_ts = 10.1.0.0/16[tcp/20-23] local_ts = dynamic[tcp/32768-65535].
502 The port range must map to a port mask, though since the kernel does not
503 support arbitrary ranges.
505 - The vici plugin allows the configuration of IPv4 and IPv6 address ranges
506 in local and remote traffic selectors. Since both the Linux kernel and
507 iptables cannot handle arbitrary ranges, address ranges are mapped to the next
508 larger CIDR subnet by the kernel-netlink and updown plugins, respectively.
510 - Implemented IKEv1 IPv4/IPv6 address subnet and range identities that can be
511 used as owners of shared secrets.
517 - Properly handle potential EINTR errors in sigwaitinfo(2) calls that replaced
518 sigwait(3) calls with 5.3.4.
520 - RADIUS retransmission timeouts are now configurable, courtesy of Thom Troy.
526 - Fixed an authentication bypass vulnerability in the eap-mschapv2 plugin that
527 was caused by insufficient verification of the internal state when handling
528 MSCHAPv2 Success messages received by the client.
529 This vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2015-8023.
531 - The sha3 plugin implements the SHA3 Keccak-F1600 hash algorithm family.
532 Within the strongSwan framework SHA3 is currently used for BLISS signatures
533 only because the OIDs for other signature algorithms haven't been defined
534 yet. Also the use of SHA3 for IKEv2 has not been standardized yet.
540 - Added support for the ChaCha20/Poly1305 AEAD cipher specified in RFC 7539 and
541 RFC 7634 using the chacha20poly1305 ike/esp proposal keyword. The new chapoly
542 plugin implements the cipher, if possible SSE-accelerated on x86/x64
543 architectures. It is usable both in IKEv2 and the strongSwan libipsec ESP
544 backend. On Linux 4.2 or newer the kernel-netlink plugin can configure the
547 - The vici interface now supports the configuration of auxiliary certification
548 authority information as CRL and OCSP URIs.
550 - In the bliss plugin the c_indices derivation using a SHA-512 based random
551 oracle has been fixed, generalized and standardized by employing the MGF1 mask
552 generation function with SHA-512. As a consequence BLISS signatures unsing the
553 improved oracle are not compatible with the earlier implementation.
555 - Support for auto=route with right=%any for transport mode connections has
556 been added (the ikev2/trap-any scenario provides examples).
558 - The starter daemon does not flush IPsec policies and SAs anymore when it is
559 stopped. Already existing duplicate policies are now overwritten by the IKE
560 daemon when it installs its policies.
562 - Init limits (like charon.init_limit_half_open) can now optionally be enforced
563 when initiating SAs via VICI. For this, IKE_SAs initiated by the daemon are
564 now also counted as half-open SAs, which, as a side-effect, fixes the status
565 output while connecting (e.g. in ipsec status).
567 - Symmetric configuration of EAP methods in left|rightauth is now possible when
568 mutual EAP-only authentication is used (previously, the client had to
569 configure rightauth=eap or rightauth=any, which prevented it from using this
570 same config as responder).
572 - The initiator flag in the IKEv2 header is compared again (wasn't the case
573 since 5.0.0) and packets that have the flag set incorrectly are again ignored.
575 - Implemented a demo Hardcopy Device IMC/IMV pair based on the "Hardcopy
576 Device Health Assessment Trusted Network Connect Binding" (HCD-TNC)
577 document drafted by the IEEE Printer Working Group (PWG).
579 - Fixed IF-M segmentation which failed in the presence of multiple small
580 attributes in front of a huge attribute to be segmented.
586 - Fixed a vulnerability that allowed rogue servers with a valid certificate
587 accepted by the client to trick it into disclosing its username and even
588 password (if the client accepts EAP-GTC). This was caused because constraints
589 against the responder's authentication were enforced too late.
590 This vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2015-4171.
596 - Fixed a denial-of-service and potential remote code execution vulnerability
597 triggered by IKEv1/IKEv2 messages that contain payloads for the respective
598 other IKE version. Such payload are treated specially since 5.2.2 but because
599 they were still identified by their original payload type they were used as
600 such in some places causing invalid function pointer dereferences.
601 The vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2015-3991.
603 - The new aesni plugin provides CBC, CTR, XCBC, CMAC, CCM and GCM crypto
604 primitives for AES-128/192/256. The plugin requires AES-NI and PCLMULQDQ
605 instructions and works on both x86 and x64 architectures. It provides
606 superior crypto performance in userland without any external libraries.
612 - Added support for IKEv2 make-before-break reauthentication. By using a global
613 CHILD_SA reqid allocation mechanism, charon supports overlapping CHILD_SAs.
614 This allows the use of make-before-break instead of the previously supported
615 break-before-make reauthentication, avoiding connectivity gaps during that
616 procedure. As the new mechanism may fail with peers not supporting it (such
617 as any previous strongSwan release) it must be explicitly enabled using
618 the charon.make_before_break strongswan.conf option.
620 - Support for "Signature Authentication in IKEv2" (RFC 7427) has been added.
621 This allows the use of stronger hash algorithms for public key authentication.
622 By default, signature schemes are chosen based on the strength of the
623 signature key, but specific hash algorithms may be configured in leftauth.
625 - Key types and hash algorithms specified in rightauth are now also checked
626 against IKEv2 signature schemes. If such constraints are used for certificate
627 chain validation in existing configurations, in particular with peers that
628 don't support RFC 7427, it may be necessary to disable this feature with the
629 charon.signature_authentication_constraints setting, because the signature
630 scheme used in classic IKEv2 public key authentication may not be strong
633 - The new connmark plugin allows a host to bind conntrack flows to a specific
634 CHILD_SA by applying and restoring the SA mark to conntrack entries. This
635 allows a peer to handle multiple transport mode connections coming over the
636 same NAT device for client-initiated flows. A common use case is to protect
637 L2TP/IPsec, as supported by some systems.
639 - The forecast plugin can forward broadcast and multicast messages between
640 connected clients and a LAN. For CHILD_SA using unique marks, it sets up
641 the required Netfilter rules and uses a multicast/broadcast listener that
642 forwards such messages to all connected clients. This plugin is designed for
643 Windows 7 IKEv2 clients, which announces its services over the tunnel if the
644 negotiated IPsec policy allows it.
646 - For the vici plugin a Python Egg has been added to allow Python applications
647 to control or monitor the IKE daemon using the VICI interface, similar to the
648 existing ruby gem. The Python library has been contributed by Björn Schuberg.
650 - EAP server methods now can fulfill public key constraints, such as rightcert
651 or rightca. Additionally, public key and signature constraints can be
652 specified for EAP methods in the rightauth keyword. Currently the EAP-TLS and
653 EAP-TTLS methods provide verification details to constraints checking.
655 - Upgrade of the BLISS post-quantum signature algorithm to the improved BLISS-B
656 variant. Can be used in conjunction with the SHA256, SHA384 and SHA512 hash
657 algorithms with SHA512 being the default.
659 - The IF-IMV 1.4 interface now makes the IP address of the TNC access requestor
660 as seen by the TNC server available to all IMVs. This information can be
661 forwarded to policy enforcement points (e.g. firewalls or routers).
663 - The new mutual tnccs-20 plugin parameter activates mutual TNC measurements
664 in PB-TNC half-duplex mode between two endpoints over either a PT-EAP or
665 PT-TLS transport medium.
671 - Fixed a denial-of-service vulnerability triggered by an IKEv2 Key Exchange
672 payload that contains the Diffie-Hellman group 1025. This identifier was
673 used internally for DH groups with custom generator and prime. Because
674 these arguments are missing when creating DH objects based on the KE payload
675 an invalid pointer dereference occurred. This allowed an attacker to crash
676 the IKE daemon with a single IKE_SA_INIT message containing such a KE
677 payload. The vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2014-9221.
679 - The left/rightid options in ipsec.conf, or any other identity in strongSwan,
680 now accept prefixes to enforce an explicit type, such as email: or fqdn:.
681 Note that no conversion is done for the remaining string, refer to
682 ipsec.conf(5) for details.
684 - The post-quantum Bimodal Lattice Signature Scheme (BLISS) can be used as
685 an IKEv2 public key authentication method. The pki tool offers full support
686 for the generation of BLISS key pairs and certificates.
688 - Fixed mapping of integrity algorithms negotiated for AH via IKEv1. This could
689 cause interoperability issues when connecting to older versions of charon.
695 - The new charon-systemd IKE daemon implements an IKE daemon tailored for use
696 with systemd. It avoids the dependency on ipsec starter and uses swanctl
697 as configuration backend, building a simple and lightweight solution. It
698 supports native systemd journal logging.
700 - Support for IKEv2 fragmentation as per RFC 7383 has been added. Like IKEv1
701 fragmentation it can be enabled by setting fragmentation=yes in ipsec.conf.
703 - Support of the TCG TNC IF-M Attribute Segmentation specification proposal.
704 All attributes can be segmented. Additionally TCG/SWID Tag, TCG/SWID Tag ID
705 and IETF/Installed Packages attributes can be processed incrementally on a
708 - The new ext-auth plugin calls an external script to implement custom IKE_SA
709 authorization logic, courtesy of Vyronas Tsingaras.
711 - For the vici plugin a ruby gem has been added to allow ruby applications
712 to control or monitor the IKE daemon. The vici documentation has been updated
713 to include a description of the available operations and some simple examples
714 using both the libvici C interface and the ruby gem.
720 - strongSwan has been ported to the Windows platform. Using a MinGW toolchain,
721 many parts of the strongSwan codebase run natively on Windows 7 / 2008 R2
722 and newer releases. charon-svc implements a Windows IKE service based on
723 libcharon, the kernel-iph and kernel-wfp plugins act as networking and IPsec
724 backend on the Windows platform. socket-win provides a native IKE socket
725 implementation, while winhttp fetches CRL and OCSP information using the
728 - The new vici plugin provides a Versatile IKE Configuration Interface for
729 charon. Using the stable IPC interface, external applications can configure,
730 control and monitor the IKE daemon. Instead of scripting the ipsec tool
731 and generating ipsec.conf, third party applications can use the new interface
732 for more control and better reliability.
734 - Built upon the libvici client library, swanctl implements the first user of
735 the VICI interface. Together with a swanctl.conf configuration file,
736 connections can be defined, loaded and managed. swanctl provides a portable,
737 complete IKE configuration and control interface for the command line.
738 The first six swanctl example scenarios have been added.
740 - The SWID IMV implements a JSON-based REST API which allows the exchange
741 of SWID tags and Software IDs with the strongTNC policy manager.
743 - The SWID IMC can extract all installed packages from the dpkg (Debian,
744 Ubuntu, Linux Mint etc.), rpm (Fedora, RedHat, OpenSUSE, etc.), or
745 pacman (Arch Linux, Manjaro, etc.) package managers, respectively, using the
746 swidGenerator (https://github.com/strongswan/swidGenerator) which generates
747 SWID tags according to the new ISO/IEC 19770-2:2014 standard.
749 - All IMVs now share the access requestor ID, device ID and product info
750 of an access requestor via a common imv_session object.
752 - The Attestation IMC/IMV pair supports the IMA-NG measurement format
753 introduced with the Linux 3.13 kernel.
755 - The aikgen tool generates an Attestation Identity Key bound to a TPM.
757 - Implemented the PT-EAP transport protocol (RFC 7171) for Trusted Network
760 - The ipsec.conf replay_window option defines connection specific IPsec replay
761 windows. Original patch courtesy of Zheng Zhong and Christophe Gouault from
768 - Fixed an authentication bypass vulnerability triggered by rekeying an
769 unestablished IKEv2 SA while it gets actively initiated. This allowed an
770 attacker to trick a peer's IKE_SA state to established, without the need to
771 provide any valid authentication credentials. The vulnerability has been
772 registered as CVE-2014-2338.
774 - The acert plugin evaluates X.509 Attribute Certificates. Group membership
775 information encoded as strings can be used to fulfill authorization checks
776 defined with the rightgroups option. Attribute Certificates can be loaded
777 locally or get exchanged in IKEv2 certificate payloads.
779 - The pki command gained support to generate X.509 Attribute Certificates
780 using the --acert subcommand, while the --print command supports the ac type.
781 The openac utility has been removed in favor of the new pki functionality.
783 - The libtls TLS 1.2 implementation as used by EAP-(T)TLS and other protocols
784 has been extended by AEAD mode support, currently limited to AES-GCM.
790 - A new default configuration file layout is introduced. The new default
791 strongswan.conf file mainly includes config snippets from the strongswan.d
792 and strongswan.d/charon directories (the latter containing snippets for all
793 plugins). The snippets, with commented defaults, are automatically
794 generated and installed, if they don't exist yet. They are also installed
795 in $prefix/share/strongswan/templates so existing files can be compared to
796 the current defaults.
798 - As an alternative to the non-extensible charon.load setting, the plugins
799 to load in charon (and optionally other applications) can now be determined
800 via the charon.plugins.<name>.load setting for each plugin (enabled in the
801 new default strongswan.conf file via the charon.load_modular option).
802 The load setting optionally takes a numeric priority value that allows
803 reordering the plugins (otherwise the default plugin order is preserved).
805 - All strongswan.conf settings that were formerly defined in library specific
806 "global" sections are now application specific (e.g. settings for plugins in
807 libstrongswan.plugins can now be set only for charon in charon.plugins).
808 The old options are still supported, which now allows to define defaults for
809 all applications in the libstrongswan section.
811 - The ntru libstrongswan plugin supports NTRUEncrypt as a post-quantum
812 computer IKE key exchange mechanism. The implementation is based on the
813 ntru-crypto library from the NTRUOpenSourceProject. The supported security
814 strengths are ntru112, ntru128, ntru192, and ntru256. Since the private DH
815 group IDs 1030..1033 have been assigned, the strongSwan Vendor ID must be
816 sent (charon.send_vendor_id = yes) in order to use NTRU.
818 - Defined a TPMRA remote attestation workitem and added support for it to the
821 - Compatibility issues between IPComp (compress=yes) and leftfirewall=yes as
822 well as multiple subnets in left|rightsubnet have been fixed.
824 - When enabling its "session" strongswan.conf option, the xauth-pam plugin opens
825 and closes a PAM session for each established IKE_SA. Patch courtesy of
828 - The strongSwan unit testing framework has been rewritten without the "check"
829 dependency for improved flexibility and portability. It now properly supports
830 multi-threaded and memory leak testing and brings a bunch of new test cases.
836 - Fixed a denial-of-service vulnerability and potential authorization bypass
837 triggered by a crafted ID_DER_ASN1_DN ID payload. The cause is an insufficient
838 length check when comparing such identities. The vulnerability has been
839 registered as CVE-2013-6075.
841 - Fixed a denial-of-service vulnerability triggered by a crafted IKEv1
842 fragmentation payload. The cause is a NULL pointer dereference. The
843 vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2013-6076.
845 - The lean stand-alone pt-tls-client can set up a RFC 6876 PT-TLS session
846 with a strongSwan policy enforcement point which uses the tnc-pdp charon
849 - The new TCG TNC SWID IMC/IMV pair supports targeted SWID requests for either
850 full SWID Tag or concise SWID Tag ID inventories.
852 - The XAuth backend in eap-radius now supports multiple XAuth exchanges for
853 different credential types and display messages. All user input gets
854 concatenated and verified with a single User-Password RADIUS attribute on
855 the AAA. With an AAA supporting it, one for example can implement
856 Password+Token authentication with proper dialogs on iOS and OS X clients.
858 - charon supports IKEv1 Mode Config exchange in push mode. The ipsec.conf
859 modeconfig=push option enables it for both client and server, the same way
862 - Using the "ah" ipsec.conf keyword on both IKEv1 and IKEv2 connections,
863 charon can negotiate and install Security Associations integrity-protected by
864 the Authentication Header protocol. Supported are plain AH(+IPComp) SAs only,
865 but not the deprecated RFC2401 style ESP+AH bundles.
867 - The generation of initialization vectors for IKE and ESP (when using libipsec)
868 is now modularized and IVs for e.g. AES-GCM are now correctly allocated
869 sequentially, while other algorithms like AES-CBC still use random IVs.
871 - The left and right options in ipsec.conf can take multiple address ranges
872 and subnets. This allows connection matching against a larger set of
873 addresses, for example to use a different connection for clients connecting
874 from a internal network.
876 - For all those who have a queasy feeling about the NIST elliptic curve set,
877 the Brainpool curves introduced for use with IKE by RFC 6932 might be a
878 more trustworthy alternative.
880 - The kernel-libipsec userland IPsec backend now supports usage statistics,
881 volume based rekeying and accepts ESPv3 style TFC padded packets.
883 - With two new strongswan.conf options fwmarks can be used to implement
884 host-to-host tunnels with kernel-libipsec.
886 - load-tester supports transport mode connections and more complex traffic
887 selectors, including such using unique ports for each tunnel.
889 - The new dnscert plugin provides support for authentication via CERT RRs that
890 are protected via DNSSEC. The plugin was created by Ruslan N. Marchenko.
892 - The eap-radius plugin supports forwarding of several Cisco Unity specific
893 RADIUS attributes in corresponding configuration payloads.
895 - Database transactions are now abstracted and implemented by the two backends.
896 If you use MySQL make sure all tables use the InnoDB engine.
898 - libstrongswan now can provide an experimental custom implementation of the
899 printf family functions based on klibc if neither Vstr nor glibc style printf
900 hooks are available. This can avoid the Vstr dependency on some systems at
901 the cost of slower and less complete printf functions.
907 - Fixed a denial-of-service vulnerability triggered by specific XAuth usernames
908 and EAP identities (since 5.0.3), and PEM files (since 4.1.11). The crash
909 was caused by insufficient error handling in the is_asn1() function.
910 The vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2013-5018.
912 - The new charon-cmd command line IKE client can establish road warrior
913 connections using IKEv1 or IKEv2 with different authentication profiles.
914 It does not depend on any configuration files and can be configured using a
915 few simple command line options.
917 - The kernel-pfroute networking backend has been greatly improved. It now
918 can install virtual IPs on TUN devices on OS X and FreeBSD, allowing these
919 systems to act as a client in common road warrior scenarios.
921 - The new kernel-libipsec plugin uses TUN devices and libipsec to provide IPsec
922 processing in userland on Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X.
924 - The eap-radius plugin can now serve as an XAuth backend called xauth-radius,
925 directly verifying XAuth credentials using RADIUS User-Name/User-Password
926 attributes. This is more efficient than the existing xauth-eap+eap-radius
927 combination, and allows RADIUS servers without EAP support to act as AAA
930 - The new osx-attr plugin installs configuration attributes (currently DNS
931 servers) via SystemConfiguration on Mac OS X. The keychain plugin provides
932 certificates from the OS X keychain service.
934 - The sshkey plugin parses SSH public keys, which, together with the --agent
935 option for charon-cmd, allows the use of ssh-agent for authentication.
936 To configure SSH keys in ipsec.conf the left|rightrsasigkey options are
937 replaced with left|rightsigkey, which now take public keys in one of three
938 formats: SSH (RFC 4253, ssh: prefix), DNSKEY (RFC 3110, dns: prefix), and
939 PKCS#1 (the default, no prefix).
941 - Extraction of certificates and private keys from PKCS#12 files is now provided
942 by the new pkcs12 plugin or the openssl plugin. charon-cmd (--p12) as well
943 as charon (via P12 token in ipsec.secrets) can make use of this.
945 - IKEv2 can now negotiate transport mode and IPComp in NAT situations.
947 - IKEv2 exchange initiators now properly close an established IKE or CHILD_SA
948 on error conditions using an additional exchange, keeping state in sync
951 - Using a SQL database interface a Trusted Network Connect (TNC) Policy Manager
952 can generate specific measurement workitems for an arbitrary number of
953 Integrity Measurement Verifiers (IMVs) based on the history of the VPN user
956 - Several core classes in libstrongswan are now tested with unit tests. These
957 can be enabled with --enable-unit-tests and run with 'make check'. Coverage
958 reports can be generated with --enable-coverage and 'make coverage' (this
959 disables any optimization, so it should not be enabled when building
960 production releases).
962 - The leak-detective developer tool has been greatly improved. It works much
963 faster/stabler with multiple threads, does not use deprecated malloc hooks
964 anymore and has been ported to OS X.
966 - chunk_hash() is now based on SipHash-2-4 with a random key. This provides
967 better distribution and prevents hash flooding attacks when used with
970 - All default plugins implement the get_features() method to define features
971 and their dependencies. The plugin loader has been improved, so that plugins
972 in a custom load statement can be ordered freely or to express preferences
973 without being affected by dependencies between plugin features.
975 - A centralized thread can take care for watching multiple file descriptors
976 concurrently. This removes the need for a dedicated listener threads in
977 various plugins. The number of "reserved" threads for such tasks has been
978 reduced to about five, depending on the plugin configuration.
980 - Plugins that can be controlled by a UNIX socket IPC mechanism gained network
981 transparency. Third party applications querying these plugins now can use
982 TCP connections from a different host.
984 - libipsec now supports AES-GCM.
990 - Fixed a security vulnerability in the openssl plugin which was reported by
991 Kevin Wojtysiak. The vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2013-2944.
992 Before the fix, if the openssl plugin's ECDSA signature verification was used,
993 due to a misinterpretation of the error code returned by the OpenSSL
994 ECDSA_verify() function, an empty or zeroed signature was accepted as a
997 - The handling of a couple of other non-security relevant openssl return codes
1000 - The tnc_ifmap plugin now publishes virtual IPv4 and IPv6 addresses via its
1001 TCG TNC IF-MAP 2.1 interface.
1003 - The charon.initiator_only option causes charon to ignore IKE initiation
1006 - The openssl plugin can now use the openssl-fips library.
1012 - The new ipseckey plugin enables authentication based on trustworthy public
1013 keys stored as IPSECKEY resource records in the DNS and protected by DNSSEC.
1014 To do so it uses a DNSSEC enabled resolver, like the one provided by the new
1015 unbound plugin, which is based on libldns and libunbound. Both plugins were
1016 created by Reto Guadagnini.
1018 - Implemented the TCG TNC IF-IMV 1.4 draft making access requestor identities
1019 available to an IMV. The OS IMV stores the AR identity together with the
1020 device ID in the attest database.
1022 - The openssl plugin now uses the AES-NI accelerated version of AES-GCM
1023 if the hardware supports it.
1025 - The eap-radius plugin can now assign virtual IPs to IKE clients using the
1026 Framed-IP-Address attribute by using the "%radius" named pool in the
1027 rightsourceip ipsec.conf option. Cisco Banner attributes are forwarded to
1028 Unity-capable IKEv1 clients during mode config. charon now sends Interim
1029 Accounting updates if requested by the RADIUS server, reports
1030 sent/received packets in Accounting messages, and adds a Terminate-Cause
1031 to Accounting-Stops.
1033 - The recently introduced "ipsec listcounters" command can report connection
1034 specific counters by passing a connection name, and global or connection
1035 counters can be reset by the "ipsec resetcounters" command.
1037 - The strongSwan libpttls library provides an experimental implementation of
1038 PT-TLS (RFC 6876), a Posture Transport Protocol over TLS.
1040 - The charon systime-fix plugin can disable certificate lifetime checks on
1041 embedded systems if the system time is obviously out of sync after bootup.
1042 Certificates lifetimes get checked once the system time gets sane, closing
1043 or reauthenticating connections using expired certificates.
1045 - The "ikedscp" ipsec.conf option can set DiffServ code points on outgoing
1048 - The new xauth-noauth plugin allows to use basic RSA or PSK authentication with
1049 clients that cannot be configured without XAuth authentication. The plugin
1050 simply concludes the XAuth exchange successfully without actually performing
1051 any authentication. Therefore, to use this backend it has to be selected
1052 explicitly with rightauth2=xauth-noauth.
1054 - The new charon-tkm IKEv2 daemon delegates security critical operations to a
1055 separate process. This has the benefit that the network facing daemon has no
1056 knowledge of keying material used to protect child SAs. Thus subverting
1057 charon-tkm does not result in the compromise of cryptographic keys.
1058 The extracted functionality has been implemented from scratch in a minimal TCB
1059 (trusted computing base) in the Ada programming language. Further information
1060 can be found at http://www.codelabs.ch/tkm/.
1065 - Implemented all IETF Standard PA-TNC attributes and an OS IMC/IMV
1066 pair using them to transfer operating system information.
1068 - The new "ipsec listcounters" command prints a list of global counter values
1069 about received and sent IKE messages and rekeyings.
1071 - A new lookip plugin can perform fast lookup of tunnel information using a
1072 clients virtual IP and can send notifications about established or deleted
1073 tunnels. The "ipsec lookip" command can be used to query such information
1074 or receive notifications.
1076 - The new error-notify plugin catches some common error conditions and allows
1077 an external application to receive notifications for them over a UNIX socket.
1079 - IKE proposals can now use a PRF algorithm different to that defined for
1080 integrity protection. If an algorithm with a "prf" prefix is defined
1081 explicitly (such as prfsha1 or prfsha256), no implicit PRF algorithm based on
1082 the integrity algorithm is added to the proposal.
1084 - The pkcs11 plugin can now load leftcert certificates from a smartcard for a
1085 specific ipsec.conf conn section and cacert CA certificates for a specific ca
1088 - The load-tester plugin gained additional options for certificate generation
1089 and can load keys and multiple CA certificates from external files. It can
1090 install a dedicated outer IP address for each tunnel and tunnel initiation
1091 batches can be triggered and monitored externally using the
1092 "ipsec load-tester" tool.
1094 - PKCS#7 container parsing has been modularized, and the openssl plugin
1095 gained an alternative implementation to decrypt and verify such files.
1096 In contrast to our own DER parser, OpenSSL can handle BER files, which is
1097 required for interoperability of our scepclient with EJBCA.
1099 - Support for the proprietary IKEv1 fragmentation extension has been added.
1100 Fragments are always handled on receipt but only sent if supported by the peer
1101 and if enabled with the new fragmentation ipsec.conf option.
1103 - IKEv1 in charon can now parse certificates received in PKCS#7 containers and
1104 supports NAT traversal as used by Windows clients. Patches courtesy of
1107 - The new rdrand plugin provides a high quality / high performance random
1108 source using the Intel rdrand instruction found on Ivy Bridge processors.
1110 - The integration test environment was updated and now uses KVM and reproducible
1111 guest images based on Debian.
1117 - Introduced the sending of the standard IETF Assessment Result
1118 PA-TNC attribute by all strongSwan Integrity Measurement Verifiers.
1120 - Extended PTS Attestation IMC/IMV pair to provide full evidence of
1121 the Linux IMA measurement process. All pertinent file information
1122 of a Linux OS can be collected and stored in an SQL database.
1124 - The PA-TNC and PB-TNC protocols can now process huge data payloads
1125 >64 kB by distributing PA-TNC attributes over multiple PA-TNC messages
1126 and these messages over several PB-TNC batches. As long as no
1127 consolidated recommandation from all IMVs can be obtained, the TNC
1128 server requests more client data by sending an empty SDATA batch.
1130 - The rightgroups2 ipsec.conf option can require group membership during
1131 a second authentication round, for example during XAuth authentication
1132 against a RADIUS server.
1134 - The xauth-pam backend can authenticate IKEv1 XAuth and Hybrid authenticated
1135 clients against any PAM service. The IKEv2 eap-gtc plugin does not use
1136 PAM directly anymore, but can use any XAuth backend to verify credentials,
1137 including xauth-pam.
1139 - The new unity plugin brings support for some parts of the IKEv1 Cisco Unity
1140 Extension. As client, charon narrows traffic selectors to the received
1141 Split-Include attributes and automatically installs IPsec bypass policies
1142 for received Local-LAN attributes. As server, charon sends Split-Include
1143 attributes for leftsubnet definitions containing multiple subnets to Unity-
1146 - An EAP-Nak payload is returned by clients if the gateway requests an EAP
1147 method that the client does not support. Clients can also request a specific
1148 EAP method by configuring that method with leftauth.
1150 - The eap-dynamic plugin handles EAP-Nak payloads returned by clients and uses
1151 these to select a different EAP method supported/requested by the client.
1152 The plugin initially requests the first registered method or the first method
1153 configured with charon.plugins.eap-dynamic.preferred.
1155 - The new left/rightdns options specify connection specific DNS servers to
1156 request/respond in IKEv2 configuration payloads or IKEv2 mode config. leftdns
1157 can be any (comma separated) combination of %config4 and %config6 to request
1158 multiple servers, both for IPv4 and IPv6. rightdns takes a list of DNS server
1159 IP addresses to return.
1161 - The left/rightsourceip options now accept multiple addresses or pools.
1162 leftsourceip can be any (comma separated) combination of %config4, %config6
1163 or fixed IP addresses to request. rightsourceip accepts multiple explicitly
1164 specified or referenced named pools.
1166 - Multiple connections can now share a single address pool when they use the
1167 same definition in one of the rightsourceip pools.
1169 - The options charon.interfaces_ignore and charon.interfaces_use allow one to
1170 configure the network interfaces used by the daemon.
1172 - The kernel-netlink plugin supports the charon.install_virtual_ip_on option,
1173 which specifies the interface on which virtual IP addresses will be installed.
1174 If it is not specified the current behavior of using the outbound interface
1177 - The kernel-netlink plugin tries to keep the current source address when
1178 looking for valid routes to reach other hosts.
1180 - The autotools build has been migrated to use a config.h header. strongSwan
1181 development headers will get installed during "make install" if
1182 --with-dev-headers has been passed to ./configure.
1184 - All crypto primitives gained return values for most operations, allowing
1185 crypto backends to fail, for example when using hardware accelerators.
1191 - The charon IKE daemon gained experimental support for the IKEv1 protocol.
1192 Pluto has been removed from the 5.x series, and unless strongSwan is
1193 configured with --disable-ikev1 or --disable-ikev2, charon handles both
1194 keying protocols. The feature-set of IKEv1 in charon is almost on par with
1195 pluto, but currently does not support AH or bundled AH+ESP SAs. Beside
1196 RSA/ECDSA, PSK and XAuth, charon also supports the Hybrid authentication
1197 mode. Information for interoperability and migration is available at
1198 http://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/CharonPlutoIKEv1.
1200 - Charon's bus_t has been refactored so that loggers and other listeners are
1201 now handled separately. The single lock was previously cause for deadlocks
1202 if extensive listeners, such as the one provided by the updown plugin, wanted
1203 to acquire locks that were held by other threads which in turn tried to log
1204 messages, and thus were waiting to acquire the same lock currently held by
1205 the thread calling the listener.
1206 The implemented changes also allow the use of a read/write-lock for the
1207 loggers which increases performance if multiple loggers are registered.
1208 Besides several interface changes this last bit also changes the semantics
1209 for loggers as these may now be called by multiple threads at the same time.
1211 - Source routes are reinstalled if interfaces are reactivated or IP addresses
1214 - The thread pool (processor_t) now has more control over the lifecycle of
1215 a job (see job.h for details). In particular, it now controls the destruction
1216 of jobs after execution and the cancellation of jobs during shutdown. Due to
1217 these changes the requeueing feature, previously available to callback_job_t
1218 only, is now available to all jobs (in addition to a new rescheduling
1221 - In addition to trustchain key strength definitions for different public key
1222 systems, the rightauth option now takes a list of signature hash algorithms
1223 considered save for trustchain validation. For example, the setting
1224 rightauth=rsa-2048-ecdsa-256-sha256-sha384-sha512 requires a trustchain
1225 that uses at least RSA-2048 or ECDSA-256 keys and certificate signatures
1226 using SHA-256 or better.
1232 - Fixed a security vulnerability in the gmp plugin. If this plugin was used
1233 for RSA signature verification an empty or zeroed signature was handled as
1236 - Fixed several issues with reauthentication and address updates.
1242 - The tnc-pdp plugin implements a RADIUS server interface allowing
1243 a strongSwan TNC server to act as a Policy Decision Point.
1245 - The eap-radius authentication backend enforces Session-Timeout attributes
1246 using RFC4478 repeated authentication and acts upon RADIUS Dynamic
1247 Authorization extensions, RFC 5176. Currently supported are disconnect
1248 requests and CoA messages containing a Session-Timeout.
1250 - The eap-radius plugin can forward arbitrary RADIUS attributes from and to
1251 clients using custom IKEv2 notify payloads. The new radattr plugin reads
1252 attributes to include from files and prints received attributes to the
1255 - Added support for untruncated MD5 and SHA1 HMACs in ESP as used in
1258 - The cmac plugin implements the AES-CMAC-96 and AES-CMAC-PRF-128 algorithms
1259 as defined in RFC 4494 and RFC 4615, respectively.
1261 - The resolve plugin automatically installs nameservers via resolvconf(8),
1262 if it is installed, instead of modifying /etc/resolv.conf directly.
1264 - The IKEv2 charon daemon supports now raw RSA public keys in RFC 3110
1265 DNSKEY and PKCS#1 file format.
1271 - Upgraded the TCG IF-IMC and IF-IMV C API to the upcoming version 1.3
1272 which supports IF-TNCCS 2.0 long message types, the exclusive flags
1273 and multiple IMC/IMV IDs. Both the TNC Client and Server as well as
1274 the "Test", "Scanner", and "Attestation" IMC/IMV pairs were updated.
1276 - Fully implemented the "TCG Attestation PTS Protocol: Binding to IF-M"
1277 standard (TLV-based messages only). TPM-based remote attestation of
1278 Linux IMA (Integrity Measurement Architecture) possible. Measurement
1279 reference values are automatically stored in an SQLite database.
1281 - The EAP-RADIUS authentication backend supports RADIUS accounting. It sends
1282 start/stop messages containing Username, Framed-IP and Input/Output-Octets
1283 attributes and has been tested against FreeRADIUS and Microsoft NPS.
1285 - Added support for PKCS#8 encoded private keys via the libstrongswan
1286 pkcs8 plugin. This is the default format used by some OpenSSL tools since
1287 version 1.0.0 (e.g. openssl req with -keyout).
1289 - Added session resumption support to the strongSwan TLS stack.
1295 - Because of changing checksums before and after installation which caused
1296 the integrity tests to fail we avoided directly linking libsimaka, libtls and
1297 libtnccs to those libcharon plugins which make use of these dynamic libraries.
1298 Instead we linked the libraries to the charon daemon. Unfortunately Ubuntu
1299 11.10 activated the --as-needed ld option which discards explicit links
1300 to dynamic libraries that are not actually used by the charon daemon itself,
1301 thus causing failures during the loading of the plugins which depend on these
1302 libraries for resolving external symbols.
1304 - Therefore our approach of computing integrity checksums for plugins had to be
1305 changed radically by moving the hash generation from the compilation to the
1306 post-installation phase.
1312 - The new libstrongswan certexpire plugin collects expiration information of
1313 all used certificates and exports them to CSV files. It either directly
1314 exports them or uses cron style scheduling for batch exports.
1316 - starter passes unresolved hostnames to charon, allowing it to do name
1317 resolution not before the connection attempt. This is especially useful with
1318 connections between hosts using dynamic IP addresses. Thanks to Mirko Parthey
1319 for the initial patch.
1321 - The android plugin can now be used without the Android frontend patch and
1322 provides DNS server registration and logging to logcat.
1324 - Pluto and starter (plus stroke and whack) have been ported to Android.
1326 - Support for ECDSA private and public key operations has been added to the
1327 pkcs11 plugin. The plugin now also provides DH and ECDH via PKCS#11 and can
1328 use tokens as random number generators (RNG). By default only private key
1329 operations are enabled, more advanced features have to be enabled by their
1330 option in strongswan.conf. This also applies to public key operations (even
1331 for keys not stored on the token) which were enabled by default before.
1333 - The libstrongswan plugin system now supports detailed plugin dependencies.
1334 Many plugins have been extended to export its capabilities and requirements.
1335 This allows the plugin loader to resolve plugin loading order automatically,
1336 and in future releases, to dynamically load the required features on demand.
1337 Existing third party plugins are source (but not binary) compatible if they
1338 properly initialize the new get_features() plugin function to NULL.
1340 - The tnc-ifmap plugin implements a TNC IF-MAP 2.0 client which can deliver
1341 metadata about IKE_SAs via a SOAP interface to a MAP server. The tnc-ifmap
1342 plugin requires the Apache Axis2/C library.
1348 - Our private libraries (e.g. libstrongswan) are not installed directly in
1349 prefix/lib anymore. Instead a subdirectory is used (prefix/lib/ipsec/ by
1350 default). The plugins directory is also moved from libexec/ipsec/ to that
1353 - The dynamic IMC/IMV libraries were moved from the plugins directory to
1354 a new imcvs directory in the prefix/lib/ipsec/ subdirectory.
1356 - Job priorities were introduced to prevent thread starvation caused by too
1357 many threads handling blocking operations (such as CRL fetching). Refer to
1358 strongswan.conf(5) for details.
1360 - Two new strongswan.conf options allow to fine-tune performance on IKEv2
1361 gateways by dropping IKE_SA_INIT requests on high load.
1363 - IKEv2 charon daemon supports start PASS and DROP shunt policies
1364 preventing traffic to go through IPsec connections. Installation of the
1365 shunt policies either via the XFRM netfilter or PFKEYv2 IPsec kernel
1368 - The history of policies installed in the kernel is now tracked so that e.g.
1369 trap policies are correctly updated when reauthenticated SAs are terminated.
1371 - IMC/IMV Scanner pair implementing the RFC 5792 PA-TNC (IF-M) protocol.
1372 Using "netstat -l" the IMC scans open listening ports on the TNC client
1373 and sends a port list to the IMV which based on a port policy decides if
1374 the client is admitted to the network.
1375 (--enable-imc-scanner/--enable-imv-scanner).
1377 - IMC/IMV Test pair implementing the RFC 5792 PA-TNC (IF-M) protocol.
1378 (--enable-imc-test/--enable-imv-test).
1380 - The IKEv2 close action does not use the same value as the ipsec.conf dpdaction
1381 setting, but the value defined by its own closeaction keyword. The action
1382 is triggered if the remote peer closes a CHILD_SA unexpectedly.
1388 - The whitelist plugin for the IKEv2 daemon maintains an in-memory identity
1389 whitelist. Any connection attempt of peers not whitelisted will get rejected.
1390 The 'ipsec whitelist' utility provides a simple command line frontend for
1391 whitelist administration.
1393 - The duplicheck plugin provides a specialized form of duplicate checking,
1394 doing a liveness check on the old SA and optionally notify a third party
1395 application about detected duplicates.
1397 - The coupling plugin permanently couples two or more devices by limiting
1398 authentication to previously used certificates.
1400 - In the case that the peer config and child config don't have the same name
1401 (usually in SQL database defined connections), ipsec up|route <peer config>
1402 starts|routes all associated child configs and ipsec up|route <child config>
1403 only starts|routes the specific child config.
1405 - fixed the encoding and parsing of X.509 certificate policy statements (CPS).
1407 - Duncan Salerno contributed the eap-sim-pcsc plugin implementing a
1408 pcsc-lite based SIM card backend.
1410 - The eap-peap plugin implements the EAP PEAP protocol. Interoperates
1411 successfully with a FreeRADIUS server and Windows 7 Agile VPN clients.
1413 - The IKEv2 daemon charon rereads strongswan.conf on SIGHUP and instructs
1414 all plugins to reload. Currently only the eap-radius and the attr plugins
1415 support configuration reloading.
1417 - Added userland support to the IKEv2 daemon for Extended Sequence Numbers
1418 support coming with Linux 2.6.39. To enable ESN on a connection, add
1419 the 'esn' keyword to the proposal. The default proposal uses 32-bit sequence
1420 numbers only ('noesn'), and the same value is used if no ESN mode is
1421 specified. To negotiate ESN support with the peer, include both, e.g.
1422 esp=aes128-sha1-esn-noesn.
1424 - In addition to ESN, Linux 2.6.39 gained support for replay windows larger
1425 than 32 packets. The new global strongswan.conf option 'charon.replay_window'
1426 configures the size of the replay window, in packets.
1432 - Sansar Choinyambuu implemented the RFC 5793 Posture Broker Protocol (BP)
1433 compatible with Trusted Network Connect (TNC). The TNCCS 2.0 protocol
1434 requires the tnccs_20, tnc_imc and tnc_imv plugins but does not depend
1435 on the libtnc library. Any available IMV/IMC pairs conforming to the
1436 Trusted Computing Group's TNC-IF-IMV/IMC 1.2 interface specification
1437 can be loaded via /etc/tnc_config.
1439 - Re-implemented the TNCCS 1.1 protocol by using the tnc_imc and tnc_imv
1440 in place of the external libtnc library.
1442 - The tnccs_dynamic plugin loaded on a TNC server in addition to the
1443 tnccs_11 and tnccs_20 plugins, dynamically detects the IF-TNCCS
1444 protocol version used by a TNC client and invokes an instance of
1445 the corresponding protocol stack.
1447 - IKE and ESP proposals can now be stored in an SQL database using a
1448 new proposals table. The start_action field in the child_configs
1449 tables allows the automatic starting or routing of connections stored
1452 - The new certificate_authorities and certificate_distribution_points
1453 tables make it possible to store CRL and OCSP Certificate Distribution
1454 points in an SQL database.
1456 - The new 'include' statement allows to recursively include other files in
1457 strongswan.conf. Existing sections and values are thereby extended and
1458 replaced, respectively.
1460 - Due to the changes in the parser for strongswan.conf, the configuration
1461 syntax for the attr plugin has changed. Previously, it was possible to
1462 specify multiple values of a specific attribute type by adding multiple
1463 key/value pairs with the same key (e.g. dns) to the plugins.attr section.
1464 Because values with the same key now replace previously defined values
1465 this is not possible anymore. As an alternative, multiple values can be
1466 specified by separating them with a comma (e.g. dns = 1.2.3.4, 2.3.4.5).
1468 - ipsec listalgs now appends (set in square brackets) to each crypto
1469 algorithm listed the plugin that registered the function.
1471 - Traffic Flow Confidentiality padding supported with Linux 2.6.38 can be used
1472 by the IKEv2 daemon. The ipsec.conf 'tfc' keyword pads all packets to a given
1473 boundary, the special value '%mtu' pads all packets to the path MTU.
1475 - The new af-alg plugin can use various crypto primitives of the Linux Crypto
1476 API using the AF_ALG interface introduced with 2.6.38. This removes the need
1477 for additional userland implementations of symmetric cipher, hash, hmac and
1480 - The IKEv2 daemon supports the INITIAL_CONTACT notify as initiator and
1481 responder. The notify is sent when initiating configurations with a unique
1482 policy, set in ipsec.conf via the global 'uniqueids' option.
1484 - The conftest conformance testing framework enables the IKEv2 stack to perform
1485 many tests using a distinct tool and configuration frontend. Various hooks
1486 can alter reserved bits, flags, add custom notifies and proposals, reorder
1487 or drop messages and much more. It is enabled using the --enable-conftest
1490 - The new libstrongswan constraints plugin provides advanced X.509 constraint
1491 checking. In addition to X.509 pathLen constraints, the plugin checks for
1492 nameConstraints and certificatePolicies, including policyMappings and
1493 policyConstraints. The x509 certificate plugin and the pki tool have been
1494 enhanced to support these extensions. The new left/rightcertpolicy ipsec.conf
1495 connection keywords take OIDs a peer certificate must have.
1497 - The left/rightauth ipsec.conf keywords accept values with a minimum strength
1498 for trustchain public keys in bits, such as rsa-2048 or ecdsa-256.
1500 - The revocation and x509 libstrongswan plugins and the pki tool gained basic
1501 support for delta CRLs.
1507 - IMPORTANT: the default keyexchange mode 'ike' is changing with release 4.5
1508 from 'ikev1' to 'ikev2', thus commemorating the five year anniversary of the
1509 IKEv2 RFC 4306 and its mature successor RFC 5996. The time has definitively
1510 come for IKEv1 to go into retirement and to cede its place to the much more
1511 robust, powerful and versatile IKEv2 protocol!
1513 - Added new ctr, ccm and gcm plugins providing Counter, Counter with CBC-MAC
1514 and Galois/Counter Modes based on existing CBC implementations. These
1515 new plugins bring support for AES and Camellia Counter and CCM algorithms
1516 and the AES GCM algorithms for use in IKEv2.
1518 - The new pkcs11 plugin brings full Smartcard support to the IKEv2 daemon and
1519 the pki utility using one or more PKCS#11 libraries. It currently supports
1520 RSA private and public key operations and loads X.509 certificates from
1523 - Implemented a general purpose TLS stack based on crypto and credential
1524 primitives of libstrongswan. libtls supports TLS versions 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2,
1525 ECDHE-ECDSA/RSA, DHE-RSA and RSA key exchange algorithms and RSA/ECDSA based
1526 client authentication.
1528 - Based on libtls, the eap-tls plugin brings certificate based EAP
1529 authentication for client and server. It is compatible to Windows 7 IKEv2
1530 Smartcard authentication and the OpenSSL based FreeRADIUS EAP-TLS backend.
1532 - Implemented the TNCCS 1.1 Trusted Network Connect protocol using the
1533 libtnc library on the strongSwan client and server side via the tnccs_11
1534 plugin and optionally connecting to a TNC@FHH-enhanced FreeRADIUS AAA server.
1535 Depending on the resulting TNC Recommendation, strongSwan clients are granted
1536 access to a network behind a strongSwan gateway (allow), are put into a
1537 remediation zone (isolate) or are blocked (none), respectively. Any number
1538 of Integrity Measurement Collector/Verifier pairs can be attached
1539 via the tnc-imc and tnc-imv charon plugins.
1541 - The IKEv1 daemon pluto now uses the same kernel interfaces as the IKEv2
1542 daemon charon. As a result of this, pluto now supports xfrm marks which
1543 were introduced in charon with 4.4.1.
1545 - Applets for Maemo 5 (Nokia) allow to easily configure and control IKEv2
1546 based VPN connections with EAP authentication on supported devices.
1548 - The RADIUS plugin eap-radius now supports multiple RADIUS servers for
1549 redundant setups. Servers are selected by a defined priority, server load and
1552 - The simple led plugin controls hardware LEDs through the Linux LED subsystem.
1553 It currently shows activity of the IKE daemon and is a good example how to
1554 implement a simple event listener.
1556 - Improved MOBIKE behavior in several corner cases, for instance, if the
1557 initial responder moves to a different address.
1559 - Fixed left-/rightnexthop option, which was broken since 4.4.0.
1561 - Fixed a bug not releasing a virtual IP address to a pool if the XAUTH
1562 identity was different from the IKE identity.
1564 - Fixed the alignment of ModeConfig messages on 4-byte boundaries in the
1565 case where the attributes are not a multiple of 4 bytes (e.g. Cisco's
1568 - Fixed the interoperability of the socket_raw and socket_default
1571 - Added man page for strongswan.conf
1577 - Support of xfrm marks in IPsec SAs and IPsec policies introduced
1578 with the Linux 2.6.34 kernel. For details see the example scenarios
1579 ikev2/nat-two-rw-mark, ikev2/rw-nat-mark-in-out and ikev2/net2net-psk-dscp.
1581 - The PLUTO_MARK_IN and PLUTO_ESP_ENC environment variables can be used
1582 in a user-specific updown script to set marks on inbound ESP or
1585 - The openssl plugin now supports X.509 certificate and CRL functions.
1587 - OCSP/CRL checking in IKEv2 has been moved to the revocation plugin, enabled
1588 by default. Please update manual load directives in strongswan.conf.
1590 - RFC3779 ipAddrBlock constraint checking has been moved to the addrblock
1591 plugin, disabled by default. Enable it and update manual load directives
1592 in strongswan.conf, if required.
1594 - The pki utility supports CRL generation using the --signcrl command.
1596 - The ipsec pki --self, --issue and --req commands now support output in
1597 PEM format using the --outform pem option.
1599 - The major refactoring of the IKEv1 Mode Config functionality now allows
1600 the transport and handling of any Mode Config attribute.
1602 - The RADIUS proxy plugin eap-radius now supports multiple servers. Configured
1603 servers are chosen randomly, with the option to prefer a specific server.
1604 Non-responding servers are degraded by the selection process.
1606 - The ipsec pool tool manages arbitrary configuration attributes stored
1607 in an SQL database. ipsec pool --help gives the details.
1609 - The new eap-simaka-sql plugin acts as a backend for EAP-SIM and EAP-AKA,
1610 reading triplets/quintuplets from an SQL database.
1612 - The High Availability plugin now supports a HA enabled in-memory address
1613 pool and Node reintegration without IKE_SA rekeying. The latter allows
1614 clients without IKE_SA rekeying support to keep connected during
1615 reintegration. Additionally, many other issues have been fixed in the ha
1618 - Fixed a potential remote code execution vulnerability resulting from
1619 the misuse of snprintf(). The vulnerability is exploitable by
1620 unauthenticated users.
1626 - The IKEv2 High Availability plugin has been integrated. It provides
1627 load sharing and failover capabilities in a cluster of currently two nodes,
1628 based on an extend ClusterIP kernel module. More information is available at
1629 http://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/HighAvailability.
1630 The development of the High Availability functionality was sponsored by
1631 secunet Security Networks AG.
1633 - Added IKEv1 and IKEv2 configuration support for the AES-GMAC
1634 authentication-only ESP cipher. Our aes_gmac kernel patch or a Linux
1635 2.6.34 kernel is required to make AES-GMAC available via the XFRM
1638 - Added support for Diffie-Hellman groups 22, 23 and 24 to the gmp, gcrypt
1639 and openssl plugins, usable by both pluto and charon. The new proposal
1640 keywords are modp1024s160, modp2048s224 and modp2048s256. Thanks to Joy Latten
1641 from IBM for his contribution.
1643 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon supports RAM-based virtual IP pools using
1644 the rightsourceip directive with a subnet from which addresses
1647 - The ipsec pki --gen and --pub commands now allow the output of
1648 private and public keys in PEM format using the --outform pem
1649 command line option.
1651 - The new DHCP plugin queries virtual IP addresses for clients from a DHCP
1652 server using broadcasts, or a defined server using the
1653 charon.plugins.dhcp.server strongswan.conf option. DNS/WINS server information
1654 is additionally served to clients if the DHCP server provides such
1655 information. The plugin is used in ipsec.conf configurations having
1656 rightsourceip set to %dhcp.
1658 - A new plugin called farp fakes ARP responses for virtual IP addresses
1659 handed out to clients from the IKEv2 daemon charon. The plugin lets a
1660 road-warrior act as a client on the local LAN if it uses a virtual IP
1661 from the responders subnet, e.g. acquired using the DHCP plugin.
1663 - The existing IKEv2 socket implementations have been migrated to the
1664 socket-default and the socket-raw plugins. The new socket-dynamic plugin
1665 binds sockets dynamically to ports configured via the left-/rightikeport
1666 ipsec.conf connection parameters.
1668 - The android charon plugin stores received DNS server information as "net.dns"
1669 system properties, as used by the Android platform.
1675 - The IKEv2 daemon supports RFC 3779 IP address block constraints
1676 carried as a critical X.509v3 extension in the peer certificate.
1678 - The ipsec pool --add|del dns|nbns command manages DNS and NBNS name
1679 server entries that are sent via the IKEv1 Mode Config or IKEv2
1680 Configuration Payload to remote clients.
1682 - The Camellia cipher can be used as an IKEv1 encryption algorithm.
1684 - The IKEv1 and IKEV2 daemons now check certificate path length constraints.
1686 - The new ipsec.conf conn option "inactivity" closes a CHILD_SA if no traffic
1687 was sent or received within the given interval. To close the complete IKE_SA
1688 if its only CHILD_SA was inactive, set the global strongswan.conf option
1689 "charon.inactivity_close_ike" to yes.
1691 - More detailed IKEv2 EAP payload information in debug output
1693 - IKEv2 EAP-SIM and EAP-AKA share joint libsimaka library
1695 - Added required userland changes for proper SHA256 and SHA384/512 in ESP that
1696 will be introduced with Linux 2.6.33. The "sha256"/"sha2_256" keyword now
1697 configures the kernel with 128 bit truncation, not the non-standard 96
1698 bit truncation used by previous releases. To use the old 96 bit truncation
1699 scheme, the new "sha256_96" proposal keyword has been introduced.
1701 - Fixed IPComp in tunnel mode, stripping out the duplicated outer header. This
1702 change makes IPcomp tunnel mode connections incompatible with previous
1703 releases; disable compression on such tunnels.
1705 - Fixed BEET mode connections on recent kernels by installing SAs with
1706 appropriate traffic selectors, based on a patch by Michael Rossberg.
1708 - Using extensions (such as BEET mode) and crypto algorithms (such as twofish,
1709 serpent, sha256_96) allocated in the private use space now require that we
1710 know its meaning, i.e. we are talking to strongSwan. Use the new
1711 "charon.send_vendor_id" option in strongswan.conf to let the remote peer know
1714 - Experimental support for draft-eronen-ipsec-ikev2-eap-auth, where the
1715 responder omits public key authentication in favor of a mutual authentication
1716 method. To enable EAP-only authentication, set rightauth=eap on the responder
1717 to rely only on the MSK constructed AUTH payload. This not-yet standardized
1718 extension requires the strongSwan vendor ID introduced above.
1720 - The IKEv1 daemon ignores the Juniper SRX notification type 40001, thus
1721 allowing interoperability.
1727 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon can now use SQL-based address pools to deal out
1728 virtual IP addresses as a Mode Config server. The pool capability has been
1729 migrated from charon's sql plugin to a new attr-sql plugin which is loaded
1730 by libstrongswan and which can be used by both daemons either with a SQLite
1731 or MySQL database and the corresponding plugin.
1733 - Plugin names have been streamlined: EAP plugins now have a dash after eap
1734 (e.g. eap-sim), as it is used with the --enable-eap-sim ./configure option.
1735 Plugin configuration sections in strongswan.conf now use the same name as the
1736 plugin itself (i.e. with a dash). Make sure to update "load" directives and
1737 the affected plugin sections in existing strongswan.conf files.
1739 - The private/public key parsing and encoding has been split up into
1740 separate pkcs1, pgp, pem and dnskey plugins. The public key implementation
1741 plugins gmp, gcrypt and openssl can all make use of them.
1743 - The EAP-AKA plugin can use different backends for USIM/quintuplet
1744 calculations, very similar to the EAP-SIM plugin. The existing 3GPP2 software
1745 implementation has been migrated to a separate plugin.
1747 - The IKEv2 daemon charon gained basic PGP support. It can use locally installed
1748 peer certificates and can issue signatures based on RSA private keys.
1750 - The new 'ipsec pki' tool provides a set of commands to maintain a public
1751 key infrastructure. It currently supports operations to create RSA and ECDSA
1752 private/public keys, calculate fingerprints and issue or verify certificates.
1754 - Charon uses a monotonic time source for statistics and job queueing, behaving
1755 correctly if the system time changes (e.g. when using NTP).
1757 - In addition to time based rekeying, charon supports IPsec SA lifetimes based
1758 on processed volume or number of packets. They new ipsec.conf parameters
1759 'lifetime' (an alias to 'keylife'), 'lifebytes' and 'lifepackets' handle
1760 SA timeouts, while the parameters 'margintime' (an alias to rekeymargin),
1761 'marginbytes' and 'marginpackets' trigger the rekeying before a SA expires.
1762 The existing parameter 'rekeyfuzz' affects all margins.
1764 - If no CA/Gateway certificate is specified in the NetworkManager plugin,
1765 charon uses a set of trusted root certificates preinstalled by distributions.
1766 The directory containing CA certificates can be specified using the
1767 --with-nm-ca-dir=path configure option.
1769 - Fixed the encoding of the Email relative distinguished name in left|rightid
1772 - Fixed the broken parsing of PKCS#7 wrapped certificates by the pluto daemon.
1774 - Fixed smartcard-based authentication in the pluto daemon which was broken by
1775 the ECDSA support introduced with the 4.3.2 release.
1777 - A patch contributed by Heiko Hund fixes mixed IPv6 in IPv4 and vice versa
1778 tunnels established with the IKEv1 pluto daemon.
1780 - The pluto daemon now uses the libstrongswan x509 plugin for certificates and
1781 CRls and the struct id type was replaced by identification_t used by charon
1782 and the libstrongswan library.
1788 - IKEv2 charon daemon ported to FreeBSD and Mac OS X. Installation details can
1789 be found on wiki.strongswan.org.
1791 - ipsec statusall shows the number of bytes transmitted and received over
1792 ESP connections configured by the IKEv2 charon daemon.
1794 - The IKEv2 charon daemon supports include files in ipsec.secrets.
1800 - The configuration option --enable-integrity-test plus the strongswan.conf
1801 option libstrongswan.integrity_test = yes activate integrity tests
1802 of the IKE daemons charon and pluto, libstrongswan and all loaded
1803 plugins. Thus dynamic library misconfigurations and non-malicious file
1804 manipulations can be reliably detected.
1806 - The new default setting libstrongswan.ecp_x_coordinate_only=yes allows
1807 IKEv1 interoperability with MS Windows using the ECP DH groups 19 and 20.
1809 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon now supports the AES-CCM and AES-GCM ESP
1810 authenticated encryption algorithms.
1812 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon now supports V4 OpenPGP keys.
1814 - The RDN parser vulnerability discovered by Orange Labs research team
1815 was not completely fixed in version 4.3.2. Some more modifications
1816 had to be applied to the asn1_length() function to make it robust.
1822 - The new gcrypt plugin provides symmetric cipher, hasher, RNG, Diffie-Hellman
1823 and RSA crypto primitives using the LGPL licensed GNU gcrypt library.
1825 - libstrongswan features an integrated crypto selftest framework for registered
1826 algorithms. The test-vector plugin provides a first set of test vectors and
1827 allows pluto and charon to rely on tested crypto algorithms.
1829 - pluto can now use all libstrongswan plugins with the exception of x509 and xcbc.
1830 Thanks to the openssl plugin, the ECP Diffie-Hellman groups 19, 20, 21, 25, and
1831 26 as well as ECDSA-256, ECDSA-384, and ECDSA-521 authentication can be used
1834 - Applying their fuzzing tool, the Orange Labs vulnerability research team found
1835 another two DoS vulnerabilities, one in the rather old ASN.1 parser of Relative
1836 Distinguished Names (RDNs) and a second one in the conversion of ASN.1 UTCTIME
1837 and GENERALIZEDTIME strings to a time_t value.
1843 - The nm plugin now passes DNS/NBNS server information to NetworkManager,
1844 allowing a gateway administrator to set DNS/NBNS configuration on clients
1847 - The nm plugin also accepts CA certificates for gateway authentication. If
1848 a CA certificate is configured, strongSwan uses the entered gateway address
1849 as its idenitity, requiring the gateways certificate to contain the same as
1850 subjectAltName. This allows a gateway administrator to deploy the same
1851 certificates to Windows 7 and NetworkManager clients.
1853 - The command ipsec purgeike deletes IKEv2 SAs that don't have a CHILD SA.
1854 The command ipsec down <conn>{n} deletes CHILD SA instance n of connection
1855 <conn> whereas ipsec down <conn>{*} deletes all CHILD SA instances.
1856 The command ipsec down <conn>[n] deletes IKE SA instance n of connection
1857 <conn> plus dependent CHILD SAs whereas ipsec down <conn>[*] deletes all
1858 IKE SA instances of connection <conn>.
1860 - Fixed a regression introduced in 4.3.0 where EAP authentication calculated
1861 the AUTH payload incorrectly. Further, the EAP-MSCHAPv2 MSK key derivation
1862 has been updated to be compatible with the Windows 7 Release Candidate.
1864 - Refactored installation of triggering policies. Routed policies are handled
1865 outside of IKE_SAs to keep them installed in any case. A tunnel gets
1866 established only once, even if initiation is delayed due network outages.
1868 - Improved the handling of multiple acquire signals triggered by the kernel.
1870 - Fixed two DoS vulnerabilities in the charon daemon that were discovered by
1871 fuzzing techniques: 1) Sending a malformed IKE_SA_INIT request leaved an
1872 incomplete state which caused a null pointer dereference if a subsequent
1873 CREATE_CHILD_SA request was sent. 2) Sending an IKE_AUTH request with either
1874 a missing TSi or TSr payload caused a null pointer derefence because the
1875 checks for TSi and TSr were interchanged. The IKEv2 fuzzer used was
1876 developed by the Orange Labs vulnerability research team. The tool was
1877 initially written by Gabriel Campana and is now maintained by Laurent Butti.
1879 - Added support for AES counter mode in ESP in IKEv2 using the proposal
1880 keywords aes128ctr, aes192ctr and aes256ctr.
1882 - Further progress in refactoring pluto: Use of the curl and ldap plugins
1883 for fetching crls and OCSP. Use of the random plugin to get keying material
1884 from /dev/random or /dev/urandom. Use of the openssl plugin as an alternative
1885 to the aes, des, sha1, sha2, and md5 plugins. The blowfish, twofish, and
1886 serpent encryption plugins are now optional and are not enabled by default.
1892 - Support for the IKEv2 Multiple Authentication Exchanges extension (RFC4739).
1893 Initiators and responders can use several authentication rounds (e.g. RSA
1894 followed by EAP) to authenticate. The new ipsec.conf leftauth/rightauth and
1895 leftauth2/rightauth2 parameters define own authentication rounds or setup
1896 constraints for the remote peer. See the ipsec.conf man page for more detials.
1898 - If glibc printf hooks (register_printf_function) are not available,
1899 strongSwan can use the vstr string library to run on non-glibc systems.
1901 - The IKEv2 charon daemon can now configure the ESP CAMELLIA-CBC cipher
1902 (esp=camellia128|192|256).
1904 - Refactored the pluto and scepclient code to use basic functions (memory
1905 allocation, leak detective, chunk handling, printf_hooks, strongswan.conf
1906 attributes, ASN.1 parser, etc.) from the libstrongswan library.
1908 - Up to two DNS and WINS servers to be sent via IKEv1 ModeConfig can be
1909 configured in the pluto section of strongswan.conf.
1915 - The new server-side EAP RADIUS plugin (--enable-eap-radius)
1916 relays EAP messages to and from a RADIUS server. Successfully
1917 tested with with a freeradius server using EAP-MD5 and EAP-SIM.
1919 - A vulnerability in the Dead Peer Detection (RFC 3706) code was found by
1920 Gerd v. Egidy <gerd.von.egidy@intra2net.com> of Intra2net AG affecting
1921 all Openswan and strongSwan releases. A malicious (or expired ISAKMP)
1922 R_U_THERE or R_U_THERE_ACK Dead Peer Detection packet can cause the
1923 pluto IKE daemon to crash and restart. No authentication or encryption
1924 is required to trigger this bug. One spoofed UDP packet can cause the
1925 pluto IKE daemon to restart and be unresponsive for a few seconds while
1926 restarting. This DPD null state vulnerability has been officially
1927 registered as CVE-2009-0790 and is fixed by this release.
1929 - ASN.1 to time_t conversion caused a time wrap-around for
1930 dates after Jan 18 03:14:07 UTC 2038 on 32-bit platforms.
1931 As a workaround such dates are set to the maximum representable
1932 time, i.e. Jan 19 03:14:07 UTC 2038.
1934 - Distinguished Names containing wildcards (*) are not sent in the
1935 IDr payload anymore.
1941 - Fixed a use-after-free bug in the DPD timeout section of the
1942 IKEv1 pluto daemon which sporadically caused a segfault.
1944 - Fixed a crash in the IKEv2 charon daemon occurring with
1945 mixed RAM-based and SQL-based virtual IP address pools.
1947 - Fixed ASN.1 parsing of algorithmIdentifier objects where the
1948 parameters field is optional.
1950 - Ported nm plugin to NetworkManager 7.1.
1956 - Support of the EAP-MSCHAPv2 protocol enabled by the option
1957 --enable-eap-mschapv2. Requires the MD4 hash algorithm enabled
1958 either by --enable-md4 or --enable-openssl.
1960 - Assignment of up to two DNS and up to two WINS servers to peers via
1961 the IKEv2 Configuration Payload (CP). The IPv4 or IPv6 nameserver
1962 addresses are defined in strongswan.conf.
1964 - The strongSwan applet for the Gnome NetworkManager is now built and
1965 distributed as a separate tarball under the name NetworkManager-strongswan.
1971 - Fixed ESP NULL encryption broken by the refactoring of keymat.c.
1972 Also introduced proper initialization and disposal of keying material.
1974 - Fixed the missing listing of connection definitions in ipsec statusall
1975 broken by an unfortunate local variable overload.
1981 - Several performance improvements to handle thousands of tunnels with almost
1982 linear upscaling. All relevant data structures have been replaced by faster
1983 counterparts with better lookup times.
1985 - Better parallelization to run charon on multiple cores. Due to improved
1986 resource locking and other optimizations the daemon can take full
1987 advantage of 16 or even more cores.
1989 - The load-tester plugin can use a NULL Diffie-Hellman group and simulate
1990 unique identities and certificates by signing peer certificates using a CA
1993 - The redesigned stroke in-memory IP pool handles leases. The "ipsec leases"
1994 command queries assigned leases.
1996 - Added support for smartcards in charon by using the ENGINE API provided by
1997 OpenSSL, based on patches by Michael Roßberg.
1999 - The Padlock plugin supports the hardware RNG found on VIA CPUs to provide a
2000 reliable source of randomness.
2005 - Flexible configuration of logging subsystem allowing to log to multiple
2006 syslog facilities or to files using fine-grained log levels for each target.
2008 - Load testing plugin to do stress testing of the IKEv2 daemon against self
2009 or another host. Found and fixed issues during tests in the multi-threaded
2010 use of the OpenSSL plugin.
2012 - Added profiling code to synchronization primitives to find bottlenecks if
2013 running on multiple cores. Found and fixed an issue where parts of the
2014 Diffie-Hellman calculation acquired an exclusive lock. This greatly improves
2015 parallelization to multiple cores.
2017 - updown script invocation has been separated into a plugin of its own to
2018 further slim down the daemon core.
2020 - Separated IKE_SA/CHILD_SA key derivation process into a closed system,
2021 allowing future implementations to use a secured environment in e.g. kernel
2024 - The kernel interface of charon has been modularized. XFRM NETLINK (default)
2025 and PFKEY (--enable-kernel-pfkey) interface plugins for the native IPsec
2026 stack of the Linux 2.6 kernel as well as a PFKEY interface for the KLIPS
2027 IPsec stack (--enable-kernel-klips) are provided.
2029 - Basic Mobile IPv6 support has been introduced, securing Binding Update
2030 messages as well as tunneled traffic between Mobile Node and Home Agent.
2031 The installpolicy=no option allows peaceful cooperation with a dominant
2032 mip6d daemon and the new type=transport_proxy implements the special MIPv6
2033 IPsec transport proxy mode where the IKEv2 daemon uses the Care-of-Address
2034 but the IPsec SA is set up for the Home Address.
2036 - Implemented migration of Mobile IPv6 connections using the KMADDRESS
2037 field contained in XFRM_MSG_MIGRATE messages sent by the mip6d daemon
2038 via the Linux 2.6.28 (or appropriately patched) kernel.
2044 - IKEv2 charon daemon supports authentication based on raw public keys
2045 stored in the SQL database backend. The ipsec listpubkeys command
2046 lists the available raw public keys via the stroke interface.
2048 - Several MOBIKE improvements: Detect changes in NAT mappings in DPD exchanges,
2049 handle events if kernel detects NAT mapping changes in UDP-encapsulated
2050 ESP packets (requires kernel patch), reuse old addresses in MOBIKE updates as
2051 long as possible and other fixes.
2053 - Fixed a bug in addr_in_subnet() which caused insertion of wrong source
2054 routes for destination subnets having netwmasks not being a multiple of 8 bits.
2055 Thanks go to Wolfgang Steudel, TU Ilmenau for reporting this bug.
2061 - Fixed a Denial-of-Service vulnerability where an IKE_SA_INIT message with
2062 a KE payload containing zeroes only can cause a crash of the IKEv2 charon
2063 daemon due to a NULL pointer returned by the mpz_export() function of the
2064 GNU Multiprecision Library (GMP). Thanks go to Mu Dynamics Research Labs
2065 for making us aware of this problem.
2067 - The new agent plugin provides a private key implementation on top of an
2070 - The NetworkManager plugin has been extended to support certificate client
2071 authentication using RSA keys loaded from a file or using ssh-agent.
2073 - Daemon capability dropping has been ported to libcap and must be enabled
2074 explicitly --with-capabilities=libcap. Future version will support the
2075 newer libcap2 library.
2077 - ipsec listalgs lists the IKEv2 cryptografic algorithms registered with the
2078 charon keying daemon.
2084 - A NetworkManager plugin allows GUI-based configuration of road-warrior
2085 clients in a simple way. It features X509 based gateway authentication
2086 and EAP client authentication, tunnel setup/teardown and storing passwords
2087 in the Gnome Keyring.
2089 - A new EAP-GTC plugin implements draft-sheffer-ikev2-gtc-00.txt and allows
2090 username/password authentication against any PAM service on the gateway.
2091 The new EAP method interacts nicely with the NetworkManager plugin and allows
2092 client authentication against e.g. LDAP.
2094 - Improved support for the EAP-Identity method. The new ipsec.conf eap_identity
2095 parameter defines an additional identity to pass to the server in EAP
2098 - The "ipsec statusall" command now lists CA restrictions, EAP
2099 authentication types and EAP identities.
2101 - Fixed two multithreading deadlocks occurring when starting up
2102 several hundred tunnels concurrently.
2104 - Fixed the --enable-integrity-test configure option which
2105 computes a SHA-1 checksum over the libstrongswan library.
2111 - Consistent logging of IKE and CHILD SAs at the audit (AUD) level.
2113 - Improved the performance of the SQL-based virtual IP address pool
2114 by introducing an additional addresses table. The leases table
2115 storing only history information has become optional and can be
2116 disabled by setting charon.plugins.sql.lease_history = no in
2119 - The XFRM_STATE_AF_UNSPEC flag added to xfrm.h allows IPv4-over-IPv6
2120 and IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnels with the 2.6.26 and later Linux kernels.
2122 - management of different virtual IP pools for different
2123 network interfaces have become possible.
2125 - fixed a bug which prevented the assignment of more than 256
2126 virtual IP addresses from a pool managed by an sql database.
2128 - fixed a bug which did not delete own IPCOMP SAs in the kernel.
2134 - Added statistics functions to ipsec pool --status and ipsec pool --leases
2135 and input validation checks to various ipsec pool commands.
2137 - ipsec statusall now lists all loaded charon plugins and displays
2138 the negotiated IKEv2 cipher suite proposals.
2140 - The openssl plugin supports the elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman groups
2141 19, 20, 21, 25, and 26.
2143 - The openssl plugin supports ECDSA authentication using elliptic curve
2146 - Fixed a bug in stroke which caused multiple charon threads to close
2147 the file descriptors during packet transfers over the stroke socket.
2149 - ESP sequence numbers are now migrated in IPsec SA updates handled by
2150 MOBIKE. Works only with Linux kernels >= 2.6.17.
2156 - Fixed the strongswan.conf path configuration problem that occurred when
2157 --sysconfig was not set explicitly in ./configure.
2159 - Fixed a number of minor bugs that where discovered during the 4th
2160 IKEv2 interoperability workshop in San Antonio, TX.
2166 - Plugins for libstrongswan and charon can optionally be loaded according
2167 to a configuration in strongswan.conf. Most components provide a
2168 "load = " option followed by a space separated list of plugins to load.
2169 This allows e.g. the fallback from a hardware crypto accelerator to
2170 to software-based crypto plugins.
2172 - Charons SQL plugin has been extended by a virtual IP address pool.
2173 Configurations with a rightsourceip=%poolname setting query a SQLite or
2174 MySQL database for leases. The "ipsec pool" command helps in administrating
2175 the pool database. See ipsec pool --help for the available options
2177 - The Authenticated Encryption Algorithms AES-CCM-8/12/16 and AES-GCM-8/12/16
2178 for ESP are now supported starting with the Linux 2.6.25 kernel. The
2179 syntax is e.g. esp=aes128ccm12 or esp=aes256gcm16.
2185 - Support for "Hash and URL" encoded certificate payloads has been implemented
2186 in the IKEv2 daemon charon. Using the "certuribase" option of a CA section
2187 allows to assign a base URL to all certificates issued by the specified CA.
2188 The final URL is then built by concatenating that base and the hex encoded
2189 SHA1 hash of the DER encoded certificate. Note that this feature is disabled
2190 by default and must be enabled using the option "charon.hash_and_url".
2192 - The IKEv2 daemon charon now supports the "uniqueids" option to close multiple
2193 IKE_SAs with the same peer. The option value "keep" prefers existing
2194 connection setups over new ones, where the value "replace" replaces existing
2197 - The crypto factory in libstrongswan additionally supports random number
2198 generators, plugins may provide other sources of randomness. The default
2199 plugin reads raw random data from /dev/(u)random.
2201 - Extended the credential framework by a caching option to allow plugins
2202 persistent caching of fetched credentials. The "cachecrl" option has been
2205 - The new trustchain verification introduced in 4.2.0 has been parallelized.
2206 Threads fetching CRL or OCSP information no longer block other threads.
2208 - A new IKEv2 configuration attribute framework has been introduced allowing
2209 plugins to provide virtual IP addresses, and in the future, other
2210 configuration attribute services (e.g. DNS/WINS servers).
2212 - The stroke plugin has been extended to provide virtual IP addresses from
2213 a pool defined in ipsec.conf. The "rightsourceip" parameter now accepts
2214 address pools in CIDR notation (e.g. 10.1.1.0/24). The parameter also accepts
2215 the value "%poolname", where "poolname" identifies a pool provided by a
2218 - Fixed compilation on uClibc and a couple of other minor bugs.
2220 - Set DPD defaults in ipsec starter to dpd_delay=30s and dpd_timeout=150s.
2222 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon now supports the ESP encryption algorithm CAMELLIA
2223 with key lengths of 128, 192, and 256 bits, as well as the authentication
2224 algorithm AES_XCBC_MAC. Configuration example: esp=camellia192-aesxcbc.
2230 - libstrongswan has been modularized to attach crypto algorithms,
2231 credential implementations (keys, certificates) and fetchers dynamically
2232 through plugins. Existing code has been ported to plugins:
2233 - RSA/Diffie-Hellman implementation using the GNU Multi Precision library
2234 - X509 certificate system supporting CRLs, OCSP and attribute certificates
2235 - Multiple plugins providing crypto algorithms in software
2236 - CURL and OpenLDAP fetcher
2238 - libstrongswan gained a relational database API which uses pluggable database
2239 providers. Plugins for MySQL and SQLite are available.
2241 - The IKEv2 keying daemon charon is more extensible. Generic plugins may provide
2242 connection configuration, credentials and EAP methods or control the daemon.
2243 Existing code has been ported to plugins:
2244 - EAP-AKA, EAP-SIM, EAP-MD5 and EAP-Identity
2245 - stroke configuration, credential and control (compatible to pluto)
2246 - XML bases management protocol to control and query the daemon
2247 The following new plugins are available:
2248 - An experimental SQL configuration, credential and logging plugin on
2249 top of either MySQL or SQLite
2250 - A unit testing plugin to run tests at daemon startup
2252 - The authentication and credential framework in charon has been heavily
2253 refactored to support modular credential providers, proper
2254 CERTREQ/CERT payload exchanges and extensible authorization rules.
2256 - The framework of strongSwan Manager has evolved to the web application
2257 framework libfast (FastCGI Application Server w/ Templates) and is usable
2258 by other applications.
2264 - IKE rekeying in NAT situations did not inherit the NAT conditions
2265 to the rekeyed IKE_SA so that the UDP encapsulation was lost with
2266 the next CHILD_SA rekeying.
2268 - Wrong type definition of the next_payload variable in id_payload.c
2269 caused an INVALID_SYNTAX error on PowerPC platforms.
2271 - Implemented IKEv2 EAP-SIM server and client test modules that use
2272 triplets stored in a file. For details on the configuration see
2273 the scenario 'ikev2/rw-eap-sim-rsa'.
2279 - Fixed error in the ordering of the certinfo_t records in the ocsp cache that
2280 caused multiple entries of the same serial number to be created.
2282 - Implementation of a simple EAP-MD5 module which provides CHAP
2283 authentication. This may be interesting in conjunction with certificate
2284 based server authentication, as weak passwords can't be brute forced
2285 (in contradiction to traditional IKEv2 PSK).
2287 - A complete software based implementation of EAP-AKA, using algorithms
2288 specified in 3GPP2 (S.S0055). This implementation does not use an USIM,
2289 but reads the secrets from ipsec.secrets. Make sure to read eap_aka.h
2292 - Support for vendor specific EAP methods using Expanded EAP types. The
2293 interface to EAP modules has been slightly changed, so make sure to
2294 check the changes if you're already rolling your own modules.
2300 - The default _updown script now dynamically inserts and removes ip6tables
2301 firewall rules if leftfirewall=yes is set in IPv6 connections. New IPv6
2302 net-net and roadwarrior (PSK/RSA) scenarios for both IKEv1 and IKEV2 were
2305 - Implemented RFC4478 repeated authentication to force EAP/Virtual-IP clients
2306 to reestablish an IKE_SA within a given timeframe.
2308 - strongSwan Manager supports configuration listing, initiation and termination
2309 of IKE and CHILD_SAs.
2311 - Fixes and improvements to multithreading code.
2313 - IKEv2 plugins have been renamed to libcharon-* to avoid naming conflicts.
2314 Make sure to remove the old plugins in $libexecdir/ipsec, otherwise they get
2321 - Removed recursive pthread mutexes since uClibc doesn't support them.
2327 - In NAT traversal situations and multiple queued Quick Modes,
2328 those pending connections inserted by auto=start after the
2329 port floating from 500 to 4500 were erroneously deleted.
2331 - Added a "forceencaps" connection parameter to enforce UDP encapsulation
2332 to surmount restrictive firewalls. NAT detection payloads are faked to
2333 simulate a NAT situation and trick the other peer into NAT mode (IKEv2 only).
2335 - Preview of strongSwan Manager, a web based configuration and monitoring
2336 application. It uses a new XML control interface to query the IKEv2 daemon
2337 (see http://wiki.strongswan.org/wiki/Manager).
2339 - Experimental SQLite configuration backend which will provide the configuration
2340 interface for strongSwan Manager in future releases.
2342 - Further improvements to MOBIKE support.
2348 - Since some third party IKEv2 implementations run into
2349 problems with strongSwan announcing MOBIKE capability per
2350 default, MOBIKE can be disabled on a per-connection-basis
2351 using the mobike=no option. Whereas mobike=no disables the
2352 sending of the MOBIKE_SUPPORTED notification and the floating
2353 to UDP port 4500 with the IKE_AUTH request even if no NAT
2354 situation has been detected, strongSwan will still support
2355 MOBIKE acting as a responder.
2357 - the default ipsec routing table plus its corresponding priority
2358 used for inserting source routes has been changed from 100 to 220.
2359 It can be configured using the --with-ipsec-routing-table and
2360 --with-ipsec-routing-table-prio options.
2362 - the --enable-integrity-test configure option tests the
2363 integrity of the libstrongswan crypto code during the charon
2366 - the --disable-xauth-vid configure option disables the sending
2367 of the XAUTH vendor ID. This can be used as a workaround when
2368 interoperating with some Windows VPN clients that get into
2369 trouble upon reception of an XAUTH VID without eXtended
2370 AUTHentication having been configured.
2372 - ipsec stroke now supports the rereadsecrets, rereadaacerts,
2373 rereadacerts, and listacerts options.
2379 - If a DNS lookup failure occurs when resolving right=%<FQDN>
2380 or right=<FQDN> combined with rightallowany=yes then the
2381 connection is not updated by ipsec starter thus preventing
2382 the disruption of an active IPsec connection. Only if the DNS
2383 lookup successfully returns with a changed IP address the
2384 corresponding connection definition is updated.
2386 - Routes installed by the keying daemons are now in a separate
2387 routing table with the ID 100 to avoid conflicts with the main
2388 table. Route lookup for IKEv2 traffic is done in userspace to ignore
2389 routes installed for IPsec, as IKE traffic shouldn't get encapsulated.
2395 - The pluto IKEv1 daemon now exhibits the same behaviour as its
2396 IKEv2 companion charon by inserting an explicit route via the
2397 _updown script only if a sourceip exists. This is admissible
2398 since routing through the IPsec tunnel is handled automatically
2399 by NETKEY's IPsec policies. As a consequence the left|rightnexthop
2400 parameter is not required any more.
2402 - The new IKEv1 parameter right|leftallowany parameters helps to handle
2403 the case where both peers possess dynamic IP addresses that are
2404 usually resolved using DynDNS or a similar service. The configuration
2409 can be used by the initiator to start up a connection to a peer
2410 by resolving peer.foo.bar into the currently allocated IP address.
2411 Thanks to the rightallowany flag the connection behaves later on
2416 so that the peer can rekey the connection as an initiator when his
2417 IP address changes. An alternative notation is
2421 which will implicitly set rightallowany=yes.
2423 - ipsec starter now fails more gracefully in the presence of parsing
2424 errors. Flawed ca and conn section are discarded and pluto is started
2425 if non-fatal errors only were encountered. If right=%peer.foo.bar
2426 cannot be resolved by DNS then right=%any will be used so that passive
2427 connections as a responder are still possible.
2429 - The new pkcs11initargs parameter that can be placed in the
2430 setup config section of /etc/ipsec.conf allows the definition
2431 of an argument string that is used with the PKCS#11 C_Initialize()
2432 function. This non-standard feature is required by the NSS softoken
2433 library. This patch was contributed by Robert Varga.
2435 - Fixed a bug in ipsec starter introduced by strongswan-2.8.5
2436 which caused a segmentation fault in the presence of unknown
2437 or misspelt keywords in ipsec.conf. This bug fix was contributed
2440 - Partial support for MOBIKE in IKEv2. The initiator acts on interface/
2441 address configuration changes and updates IKE and IPsec SAs dynamically.
2447 - IKEv2 peer configuration selection now can be based on a given
2448 certification authority using the rightca= statement.
2450 - IKEv2 authentication based on RSA signatures now can handle multiple
2451 certificates issued for a given peer ID. This allows a smooth transition
2452 in the case of a peer certificate renewal.
2454 - IKEv2: Support for requesting a specific virtual IP using leftsourceip on the
2455 client and returning requested virtual IPs using rightsourceip=%config
2456 on the server. If the server does not support configuration payloads, the
2457 client enforces its leftsourceip parameter.
2459 - The ./configure options --with-uid/--with-gid allow pluto and charon
2460 to drop their privileges to a minimum and change to an other UID/GID. This
2461 improves the systems security, as a possible intruder may only get the
2462 CAP_NET_ADMIN capability.
2464 - Further modularization of charon: Pluggable control interface and
2465 configuration backend modules provide extensibility. The control interface
2466 for stroke is included, and further interfaces using DBUS (NetworkManager)
2467 or XML are on the way. A backend for storing configurations in the daemon
2468 is provided and more advanced backends (using e.g. a database) are trivial
2471 - Fixed a compilation failure in libfreeswan occurring with Linux kernel
2478 - Support for an additional Diffie-Hellman exchange when creating/rekeying
2479 a CHILD_SA in IKEv2 (PFS). PFS is enabled when the proposal contains a
2480 DH group (e.g. "esp=aes128-sha1-modp1536"). Further, DH group negotiation
2481 is implemented properly for rekeying.
2483 - Support for the AES-XCBC-96 MAC algorithm for IPsec SAs when using IKEv2
2484 (requires linux >= 2.6.20). It is enabled using e.g. "esp=aes256-aesxcbc".
2486 - Working IPv4-in-IPv6 and IPv6-in-IPv4 tunnels for linux >= 2.6.21.
2488 - Added support for EAP modules which do not establish an MSK.
2490 - Removed the dependencies from the /usr/include/linux/ headers by
2491 including xfrm.h, ipsec.h, and pfkeyv2.h in the distribution.
2493 - crlNumber is now listed by ipsec listcrls
2495 - The xauth_modules.verify_secret() function now passes the
2502 - Server side cookie support. If to may IKE_SAs are in CONNECTING state,
2503 cookies are enabled and protect against DoS attacks with faked source
2504 addresses. Number of IKE_SAs in CONNECTING state is also limited per
2505 peer address to avoid resource exhaustion. IKE_SA_INIT messages are
2506 compared to properly detect retransmissions and incoming retransmits are
2507 detected even if the IKE_SA is blocked (e.g. doing OCSP fetches).
2509 - The IKEv2 daemon charon now supports dynamic http- and ldap-based CRL
2510 fetching enabled by crlcheckinterval > 0 and caching fetched CRLs
2511 enabled by cachecrls=yes.
2513 - Added the configuration options --enable-nat-transport which enables
2514 the potentially insecure NAT traversal for IPsec transport mode and
2515 --disable-vendor-id which disables the sending of the strongSwan
2518 - Fixed a long-standing bug in the pluto IKEv1 daemon which caused
2519 a segmentation fault if a malformed payload was detected in the
2520 IKE MR2 message and pluto tried to send an encrypted notification
2523 - Added the NATT_IETF_02_N Vendor ID in order to support IKEv1 connections
2524 with Windows 2003 Server which uses a wrong VID hash.
2530 - Support of SHA2_384 hash function for protecting IKEv1
2531 negotiations and support of SHA2 signatures in X.509 certificates.
2533 - Fixed a serious bug in the computation of the SHA2-512 HMAC
2534 function. Introduced automatic self-test of all IKEv1 hash
2535 and hmac functions during pluto startup. Failure of a self-test
2536 currently issues a warning only but does not exit pluto [yet].
2538 - Support for SHA2-256/384/512 PRF and HMAC functions in IKEv2.
2540 - Full support of CA information sections. ipsec listcainfos
2541 now shows all collected crlDistributionPoints and OCSP
2544 - Support of the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) for IKEv2.
2545 This feature requires the HTTP fetching capabilities of the libcurl
2546 library which must be enabled by setting the --enable-http configure
2549 - Refactored core of the IKEv2 message processing code, allowing better
2550 code reuse and separation.
2552 - Virtual IP support in IKEv2 using INTERNAL_IP4/6_ADDRESS configuration
2553 payload. Additionally, the INTERNAL_IP4/6_DNS attribute is interpreted
2554 by the requestor and installed in a resolv.conf file.
2556 - The IKEv2 daemon charon installs a route for each IPsec policy to use
2557 the correct source address even if an application does not explicitly
2560 - Integrated the EAP framework into charon which loads pluggable EAP library
2561 modules. The ipsec.conf parameter authby=eap initiates EAP authentication
2562 on the client side, while the "eap" parameter on the server side defines
2563 the EAP method to use for client authentication.
2564 A generic client side EAP-Identity module and an EAP-SIM authentication
2565 module using a third party card reader implementation are included.
2567 - Added client side support for cookies.
2569 - Integrated the fixes done at the IKEv2 interoperability bakeoff, including
2570 strict payload order, correct INVALID_KE_PAYLOAD rejection and other minor
2571 fixes to enhance interoperability with other implementations.
2577 - strongSwan now interoperates with the NCP Secure Entry Client,
2578 the Shrew Soft VPN Client, and the Cisco VPN client, doing both
2579 XAUTH and Mode Config.
2581 - UNITY attributes are now recognized and UNITY_BANNER is set
2582 to a default string.
2588 - IKEv1: Support for extended authentication (XAUTH) in combination
2589 with ISAKMP Main Mode RSA or PSK authentication. Both client and
2590 server side were implemented. Handling of user credentials can
2591 be done by a run-time loadable XAUTH module. By default user
2592 credentials are stored in ipsec.secrets.
2594 - IKEv2: Support for reauthentication when rekeying
2596 - IKEv2: Support for transport mode
2598 - fixed a lot of bugs related to byte order
2600 - various other bugfixes
2606 - IKEv1: Implementation of ModeConfig push mode via the new connection
2607 keyword modeconfig=push allows interoperability with Cisco VPN gateways.
2609 - IKEv1: The command ipsec statusall now shows "DPD active" for all
2610 ISAKMP SAs that are under active Dead Peer Detection control.
2612 - IKEv2: Charon's logging and debugging framework has been completely rewritten.
2613 Instead of logger, special printf() functions are used to directly
2614 print objects like hosts (%H) identifications (%D), certificates (%Q),
2615 etc. The number of debugging levels have been reduced to:
2617 0 (audit), 1 (control), 2 (controlmore), 3 (raw), 4 (private)
2619 The debugging levels can either be specified statically in ipsec.conf as
2622 charondebug="lib 1, cfg 3, net 2"
2624 or changed at runtime via stroke as
2626 ipsec stroke loglevel cfg 2
2632 - Implemented full support for IPv6-in-IPv6 tunnels.
2634 - Added configuration options for dead peer detection in IKEv2. dpd_action
2635 types "clear", "hold" and "restart" are supported. The dpd_timeout
2636 value is not used, as the normal retransmission policy applies to
2637 detect dead peers. The dpd_delay parameter enables sending of empty
2638 informational message to detect dead peers in case of inactivity.
2640 - Added support for preshared keys in IKEv2. PSK keys configured in
2641 ipsec.secrets are loaded. The authby parameter specifies the authentication
2642 method to authentificate ourself, the other peer may use PSK or RSA.
2644 - Changed retransmission policy to respect the keyingtries parameter.
2646 - Added private key decryption. PEM keys encrypted with AES-128/192/256
2647 or 3DES are supported.
2649 - Implemented DES/3DES algorithms in libstrongswan. 3DES can be used to
2650 encrypt IKE traffic.
2652 - Implemented SHA-256/384/512 in libstrongswan, allows usage of certificates
2653 signed with such a hash algorithm.
2655 - Added initial support for updown scripts. The actions up-host/client and
2656 down-host/client are executed. The leftfirewall=yes parameter
2657 uses the default updown script to insert dynamic firewall rules, a custom
2658 updown script may be specified with the leftupdown parameter.
2664 - Added support for the auto=route ipsec.conf parameter and the
2665 ipsec route/unroute commands for IKEv2. This allows to set up IKE_SAs and
2666 CHILD_SAs dynamically on demand when traffic is detected by the
2669 - Added support for rekeying IKE_SAs in IKEv2 using the ikelifetime parameter.
2670 As specified in IKEv2, no reauthentication is done (unlike in IKEv1), only
2671 new keys are generated using perfect forward secrecy. An optional flag
2672 which enforces reauthentication will be implemented later.
2674 - "sha" and "sha1" are now treated as synonyms in the ike= and esp=
2675 algorithm configuration statements.
2681 - Full X.509 certificate trust chain verification has been implemented.
2682 End entity certificates can be exchanged via CERT payloads. The current
2683 default is leftsendcert=always, since CERTREQ payloads are not supported
2684 yet. Optional CRLs must be imported locally into /etc/ipsec.d/crls.
2686 - Added support for leftprotoport/rightprotoport parameters in IKEv2. IKEv2
2687 would offer more possibilities for traffic selection, but the Linux kernel
2688 currently does not support it. That's why we stick with these simple
2689 ipsec.conf rules for now.
2691 - Added Dead Peer Detection (DPD) which checks liveliness of remote peer if no
2692 IKE or ESP traffic is received. DPD is currently hardcoded (dpdaction=clear,
2695 - Initial NAT traversal support in IKEv2. Charon includes NAT detection
2696 notify payloads to detect NAT routers between the peers. It switches
2697 to port 4500, uses UDP encapsulated ESP packets, handles peer address
2698 changes gracefully and sends keep alive message periodically.
2700 - Reimplemented IKE_SA state machine for charon, which allows simultaneous
2701 rekeying, more shared code, cleaner design, proper retransmission
2702 and a more extensible code base.
2704 - The mixed PSK/RSA roadwarrior detection capability introduced by the
2705 strongswan-2.7.0 release necessitated the pre-parsing of the IKE proposal
2706 payloads by the responder right before any defined IKE Main Mode state had
2707 been established. Although any form of bad proposal syntax was being correctly
2708 detected by the payload parser, the subsequent error handler didn't check
2709 the state pointer before logging current state information, causing an
2710 immediate crash of the pluto keying daemon due to a NULL pointer.
2716 - Added algorithm selection to charon: New default algorithms for
2717 ike=aes128-sha-modp2048, as both daemons support it. The default
2718 for IPsec SAs is now esp=aes128-sha,3des-md5. charon handles
2719 the ike/esp parameter the same way as pluto. As this syntax does
2720 not allow specification of a pseudo random function, the same
2721 algorithm as for integrity is used (currently sha/md5). Supported
2723 Encryption: aes128, aes192, aes256
2724 Integrity/PRF: md5, sha (using hmac)
2725 DH-Groups: modp768, 1024, 1536, 2048, 4096, 8192
2727 Encryption: aes128, aes192, aes256, 3des, blowfish128,
2728 blowfish192, blowfish256
2729 Integrity: md5, sha1
2730 More IKE encryption algorithms will come after porting libcrypto into
2733 - initial support for rekeying CHILD_SAs using IKEv2. Currently no
2734 perfect forward secrecy is used. The rekeying parameters rekey,
2735 rekeymargin, rekeyfuzz and keylife from ipsec.conf are now supported
2736 when using IKEv2. WARNING: charon currently is unable to handle
2737 simultaneous rekeying. To avoid such a situation, use a large
2738 rekeyfuzz, or even better, set rekey=no on one peer.
2740 - support for host2host, net2net, host2net (roadwarrior) tunnels
2741 using predefined RSA certificates (see uml scenarios for
2742 configuration examples).
2744 - new build environment featuring autotools. Features such
2745 as HTTP, LDAP and smartcard support may be enabled using
2746 the ./configure script. Changing install directories
2747 is possible, too. See ./configure --help for more details.
2749 - better integration of charon with ipsec starter, which allows
2750 (almost) transparent operation with both daemons. charon
2751 handles ipsec commands up, down, status, statusall, listall,
2752 listcerts and allows proper load, reload and delete of connections
2759 - initial support of the IKEv2 protocol. Connections in
2760 ipsec.conf designated by keyexchange=ikev2 are negotiated
2761 by the new IKEv2 charon keying daemon whereas those marked
2762 by keyexchange=ikev1 or the default keyexchange=ike are
2763 handled thy the IKEv1 pluto keying daemon. Currently only
2764 a limited subset of functions are available with IKEv2
2765 (Default AES encryption, authentication based on locally
2766 imported X.509 certificates, unencrypted private RSA keys
2767 in PKCS#1 file format, limited functionality of the ipsec
2774 - the dynamic iptables rules from the _updown_x509 template
2775 for KLIPS and the _updown_policy template for NETKEY have
2776 been merged into the default _updown script. The existing
2777 left|rightfirewall keyword causes the automatic insertion
2778 and deletion of ACCEPT rules for tunneled traffic upon
2779 the successful setup and teardown of an IPsec SA, respectively.
2780 left|rightfirwall can be used with KLIPS under any Linux 2.4
2781 kernel or with NETKEY under a Linux kernel version >= 2.6.16
2782 in conjunction with iptables >= 1.3.5. For NETKEY under a Linux
2783 kernel version < 2.6.16 which does not support IPsec policy
2784 matching yet, please continue to use a copy of the _updown_espmark
2785 template loaded via the left|rightupdown keyword.
2787 - a new left|righthostaccess keyword has been introduced which
2788 can be used in conjunction with left|rightfirewall and the
2789 default _updown script. By default leftfirewall=yes inserts
2790 a bi-directional iptables FORWARD rule for a local client network
2791 with a netmask different from 255.255.255.255 (single host).
2792 This does not allow to access the VPN gateway host via its
2793 internal network interface which is part of the client subnet
2794 because an iptables INPUT and OUTPUT rule would be required.
2795 lefthostaccess=yes will cause this additional ACCEPT rules to
2798 - mixed PSK|RSA roadwarriors are now supported. The ISAKMP proposal
2799 payload is preparsed in order to find out whether the roadwarrior
2800 requests PSK or RSA so that a matching connection candidate can
2807 - the new _updown_policy template allows ipsec policy based
2808 iptables firewall rules. Required are iptables version
2809 >= 1.3.5 and linux kernel >= 2.6.16. This script obsoletes
2810 the _updown_espmark template, so that no INPUT mangle rules
2811 are required any more.
2813 - added support of DPD restart mode
2815 - ipsec starter now allows the use of wildcards in include
2816 statements as e.g. in "include /etc/my_ipsec/*.conf".
2817 Patch courtesy of Matthias Haas.
2819 - the Netscape OID 'employeeNumber' is now recognized and can be
2820 used as a Relative Distinguished Name in certificates.
2826 - /etc/init.d/ipsec or /etc/rc.d/ipsec is now a copy of the ipsec
2827 command and not of ipsec setup any more.
2829 - ipsec starter now supports AH authentication in conjunction with
2830 ESP encryption. AH authentication is configured in ipsec.conf
2831 via the auth=ah parameter.
2833 - The command ipsec scencrypt|scdecrypt <args> is now an alias for
2834 ipsec whack --scencrypt|scdecrypt <args>.
2836 - get_sa_info() now determines for the native netkey IPsec stack
2837 the exact time of the last use of an active eroute. This information
2838 is used by the Dead Peer Detection algorithm and is also displayed by
2839 the ipsec status command.
2845 - running under the native Linux 2.6 IPsec stack, the function
2846 get_sa_info() is called by ipsec auto --status to display the current
2847 number of transmitted bytes per IPsec SA.
2849 - get_sa_info() is also used by the Dead Peer Detection process to detect
2850 recent ESP activity. If ESP traffic was received from the peer within
2851 the last dpd_delay interval then no R_Y_THERE notification must be sent.
2853 - strongSwan now supports the Relative Distinguished Name "unstructuredName"
2854 in ID_DER_ASN1_DN identities. The following notations are possible:
2856 rightid="unstructuredName=John Doe"
2857 rightid="UN=John Doe"
2859 - fixed a long-standing bug which caused PSK-based roadwarrior connections
2860 to segfault in the function id.c:same_id() called by keys.c:get_secret()
2861 if an FQDN, USER_FQDN, or Key ID was defined, as in the following example.
2868 - the ipsec command now supports most ipsec auto commands (e.g. ipsec listall).
2870 - ipsec starter didn't set host_addr and client.addr ports in whack msg.
2872 - in order to guarantee backwards-compatibility with the script-based
2873 auto function (e.g. auto --replace), the ipsec starter scripts stores
2874 the defaultroute information in the temporary file /var/run/ipsec.info.
2876 - The compile-time option USE_XAUTH_VID enables the sending of the XAUTH
2877 Vendor ID which is expected by Cisco PIX 7 boxes that act as IKE Mode Config
2880 - the ipsec starter now also recognizes the parameters authby=never and
2881 type=passthrough|pass|drop|reject.
2887 - ipsec starter now supports the also parameter which allows
2888 a modular structure of the connection definitions. Thus
2889 "ipsec start" is now ready to replace "ipsec setup".
2895 - Mathieu Lafon's popular ipsec starter tool has been added to the
2896 strongSwan distribution. Many thanks go to Stephan Scholz from astaro
2897 for his integration work. ipsec starter is a C program which is going
2898 to replace the various shell and awk starter scripts (setup, _plutoload,
2899 _plutostart, _realsetup, _startklips, _confread, and auto). Since
2900 ipsec.conf is now parsed only once, the starting of multiple tunnels is
2901 accelerated tremedously.
2903 - Added support of %defaultroute to the ipsec starter. If the IP address
2904 changes, a HUP signal to the ipsec starter will automatically
2905 reload pluto's connections.
2907 - moved most compile time configurations from pluto/Makefile to
2908 Makefile.inc by defining the options USE_LIBCURL, USE_LDAP,
2909 USE_SMARTCARD, and USE_NAT_TRAVERSAL_TRANSPORT_MODE.
2911 - removed the ipsec verify and ipsec newhostkey commands
2913 - fixed some 64-bit issues in formatted print statements
2915 - The scepclient functionality implementing the Simple Certificate
2916 Enrollment Protocol (SCEP) is nearly complete but hasn't been
2923 - CA certificates are now automatically loaded from a smartcard
2924 or USB crypto token and appear in the ipsec auto --listcacerts
2931 - when using "ipsec whack --scencrypt <data>" with a PKCS#11
2932 library that does not support the C_Encrypt() Cryptoki
2933 function (e.g. OpenSC), the RSA encryption is done in
2934 software using the public key fetched from the smartcard.
2936 - The scepclient function now allows to define the
2937 validity of a self-signed certificate using the --days,
2938 --startdate, and --enddate options. The default validity
2939 has been changed from one year to five years.
2945 - the config setup parameter pkcs11proxy=yes opens pluto's PKCS#11
2946 interface to other applications for RSA encryption and decryption
2947 via the whack interface. Notation:
2949 ipsec whack --scencrypt <data>
2950 [--inbase 16|hex|64|base64|256|text|ascii]
2951 [--outbase 16|hex|64|base64|256|text|ascii]
2954 ipsec whack --scdecrypt <data>
2955 [--inbase 16|hex|64|base64|256|text|ascii]
2956 [--outbase 16|hex|64|base64|256|text|ascii]
2959 The default setting for inbase and outbase is hex.
2961 The new proxy interface can be used for securing symmetric
2962 encryption keys required by the cryptoloop or dm-crypt
2963 disk encryption schemes, especially in the case when
2964 pkcs11keepstate=yes causes pluto to lock the pkcs11 slot
2967 - if the file /etc/ipsec.secrets is lacking during the startup of
2968 pluto then the root-readable file /etc/ipsec.d/private/myKey.der
2969 containing a 2048 bit RSA private key and a matching self-signed
2970 certificate stored in the file /etc/ipsec.d/certs/selfCert.der
2971 is automatically generated by calling the function
2973 ipsec scepclient --out pkcs1 --out cert-self
2975 scepclient was written by Jan Hutter and Martin Willi, students
2976 at the University of Applied Sciences in Rapperswil, Switzerland.
2982 - the current extension of the PKCS#7 framework introduced
2983 a parsing error in PKCS#7 wrapped X.509 certificates that are
2984 e.g. transmitted by Windows XP when multi-level CAs are used.
2985 the parsing syntax has been fixed.
2987 - added a patch by Gerald Richter which tolerates multiple occurrences
2988 of the ipsec0 interface when using KLIPS.
2994 - with gawk-3.1.4 the word "default2 has become a protected
2995 keyword for use in switch statements and cannot be used any
2996 more in the strongSwan scripts. This problem has been
2997 solved by renaming "default" to "defaults" and "setdefault"
2998 in the scripts _confread and auto, respectively.
3000 - introduced the parameter leftsendcert with the values
3002 always|yes (the default, always send a cert)
3003 ifasked (send the cert only upon a cert request)
3004 never|no (never send a cert, used for raw RSA keys and
3007 - fixed the initialization of the ESP key length to a default of
3008 128 bits in the case that the peer does not send a key length
3009 attribute for AES encryption.
3011 - applied Herbert Xu's uniqueIDs patch
3013 - applied Herbert Xu's CLOEXEC patches
3019 - CRLs can now be cached also in the case when the issuer's
3020 certificate does not contain a subjectKeyIdentifier field.
3021 In that case the subjectKeyIdentifier is computed by pluto as the
3022 160 bit SHA-1 hash of the issuer's public key in compliance
3023 with section 4.2.1.2 of RFC 3280.
3025 - Fixed a bug introduced by strongswan-2.5.1 which eliminated
3026 not only multiple Quick Modes of a given connection but also
3027 multiple connections between two security gateways.
3033 - Under the native IPsec of the Linux 2.6 kernel, a %trap eroute
3034 installed either by setting auto=route in ipsec.conf or by
3035 a connection put into hold, generates an XFRM_AQUIRE event
3036 for each packet that wants to use the not-yet existing
3037 tunnel. Up to now each XFRM_AQUIRE event led to an entry in
3038 the Quick Mode queue, causing multiple IPsec SA to be
3039 established in rapid succession. Starting with strongswan-2.5.1
3040 only a single IPsec SA is established per host-pair connection.
3042 - Right after loading the PKCS#11 module, all smartcard slots are
3043 searched for certificates. The result can be viewed using
3046 ipsec auto --listcards
3048 The certificate objects found in the slots are numbered
3049 starting with #1, #2, etc. This position number can be used to address
3050 certificates (leftcert=%smartcard) and keys (: PIN %smartcard)
3051 in ipsec.conf and ipsec.secrets, respectively:
3053 %smartcard (selects object #1)
3054 %smartcard#1 (selects object #1)
3055 %smartcard#3 (selects object #3)
3057 As an alternative the existing retrieval scheme can be used:
3059 %smartcard:45 (selects object with id=45)
3060 %smartcard0 (selects first object in slot 0)
3061 %smartcard4:45 (selects object in slot 4 with id=45)
3063 - Depending on the settings of CKA_SIGN and CKA_DECRYPT
3064 private key flags either C_Sign() or C_Decrypt() is used
3065 to generate a signature.
3067 - The output buffer length parameter siglen in C_Sign()
3068 is now initialized to the actual size of the output
3069 buffer prior to the function call. This fixes the
3070 CKR_BUFFER_TOO_SMALL error that could occur when using
3071 the OpenSC PKCS#11 module.
3073 - Changed the initialization of the PKCS#11 CK_MECHANISM in
3074 C_SignInit() to mech = { CKM_RSA_PKCS, NULL_PTR, 0 }.
3076 - Refactored the RSA public/private key code and transferred it
3077 from keys.c to the new pkcs1.c file as a preparatory step
3078 towards the release of the SCEP client.
3084 - The loading of a PKCS#11 smartcard library module during
3085 runtime does not require OpenSC library functions any more
3086 because the corresponding code has been integrated into
3087 smartcard.c. Also the RSAREF pkcs11 header files have been
3088 included in a newly created pluto/rsaref directory so that
3089 no external include path has to be defined any longer.
3091 - A long-awaited feature has been implemented at last:
3092 The local caching of CRLs fetched via HTTP or LDAP, activated
3093 by the parameter cachecrls=yes in the config setup section
3094 of ipsec.conf. The dynamically fetched CRLs are stored under
3095 a unique file name containing the issuer's subjectKeyID
3096 in /etc/ipsec.d/crls.
3098 - Applied a one-line patch courtesy of Michael Richardson
3099 from the Openswan project which fixes the kernel-oops
3100 in KLIPS when an snmp daemon is running on the same box.
3106 - Eliminated null length CRL distribution point strings.
3108 - Fixed a trust path evaluation bug introduced with 2.4.3
3114 - Improved the joint OCSP / CRL revocation policy.
3115 OCSP responses have precedence over CRL entries.
3117 - Introduced support of CRLv2 reason codes.
3119 - Fixed a bug with key-pad equipped readers which caused
3120 pluto to prompt for the pin via the console when the first
3121 occasion to enter the pin via the key-pad was missed.
3123 - When pluto is built with LDAP_V3 enabled, the library
3124 liblber required by newer versions of openldap is now
3131 - Added the _updown_espmark template which requires all
3132 incoming ESP traffic to be marked with a default mark
3135 - Introduced the pkcs11keepstate parameter in the config setup
3136 section of ipsec.conf. With pkcs11keepstate=yes the PKCS#11
3137 session and login states are kept as long as possible during
3138 the lifetime of pluto. This means that a PIN entry via a key
3139 pad has to be done only once.
3141 - Introduced the pkcs11module parameter in the config setup
3142 section of ipsec.conf which specifies the PKCS#11 module
3143 to be used with smart cards. Example:
3145 pkcs11module=/usr/lib/pkcs11/opensc-pkcs11.lo
3147 - Added support of smartcard readers equipped with a PIN pad.
3149 - Added patch by Jay Pfeifer which detects when netkey
3150 modules have been statically built into the Linux 2.6 kernel.
3152 - Added two patches by Herbert Xu. The first uses ip xfrm
3153 instead of setkey to flush the IPsec policy database. The
3154 second sets the optional flag in inbound IPComp SAs only.
3156 - Applied Ulrich Weber's patch which fixes an interoperability
3157 problem between native IPsec and KLIPS systems caused by
3158 setting the replay window to 32 instead of 0 for ipcomp.
3164 - Fixed a bug which caused an unwanted Mode Config request
3165 to be initiated in the case where "right" was used to denote
3166 the local side in ipsec.conf and "left" the remote side,
3167 contrary to the recommendation that "right" be remote and
3174 - updated Vendor ID to strongSwan-2.4.0
3176 - updated copyright statement to include David Buechi and
3183 - strongSwan now communicates with attached smartcards and
3184 USB crypto tokens via the standardized PKCS #11 interface.
3185 By default the OpenSC library from www.opensc.org is used
3186 but any other PKCS#11 library could be dynamically linked.
3187 strongSwan's PKCS#11 API was implemented by David Buechi
3188 and Michael Meier, both graduates of the Zurich University
3189 of Applied Sciences in Winterthur, Switzerland.
3191 - When a %trap eroute is triggered by an outgoing IP packet
3192 then the native IPsec stack of the Linux 2.6 kernel [often/
3193 always?] returns an XFRM_ACQUIRE message with an undefined
3194 protocol family field and the connection setup fails.
3195 As a workaround IPv4 (AF_INET) is now assumed.
3197 - the results of the UML test scenarios are now enhanced
3198 with block diagrams of the virtual network topology used
3199 in a particular test.
3205 - fixed IV used to decrypt informational messages.
3206 This bug was introduced with Mode Config functionality.
3208 - fixed NCP Vendor ID.
3210 - undid one of Ulrich Weber's maximum udp size patches
3211 because it caused a segmentation fault with NAT-ed
3214 - added UML scenarios wildcards and attr-cert which
3215 demonstrate the implementation of IPsec policies based
3216 on wildcard parameters contained in Distinguished Names and
3217 on X.509 attribute certificates, respectively.
3223 - Added basic Mode Config functionality
3225 - Added Mathieu Lafon's patch which upgrades the status of
3226 the NAT-Traversal implementation to RFC 3947.
3228 - The _startklips script now also loads the xfrm4_tunnel
3231 - Added Ulrich Weber's netlink replay window size and
3232 maximum udp size patches.
3234 - UML testing now uses the Linux 2.6.10 UML kernel by default.
3240 - Eric Marchionni and Patrik Rayo, both recent graduates from
3241 the Zuercher Hochschule Winterthur in Switzerland, created a
3242 User-Mode-Linux test setup for strongSwan. For more details
3243 please read the INSTALL and README documents in the testing
3246 - Full support of group attributes based on X.509 attribute
3247 certificates. Attribute certificates can be generated
3248 using the openac facility. For more details see
3252 The group attributes can be used in connection definitions
3253 in order to give IPsec access to specific user groups.
3254 This is done with the new parameter left|rightgroups as in
3256 rightgroups="Research, Sales"
3258 giving access to users possessing the group attributes
3259 Research or Sales, only.
3261 - In Quick Mode clients with subnet mask /32 are now
3262 coded as IP_V4_ADDRESS or IP_V6_ADDRESS. This should
3263 fix rekeying problems with the SafeNet/SoftRemote and NCP
3264 Secure Entry Clients.
3266 - Changed the defaults of the ikelifetime and keylife parameters
3267 to 3h and 1h, respectively. The maximum allowable values are
3268 now both set to 24 h.
3270 - Suppressed notification wars between two IPsec peers that
3271 could e.g. be triggered by incorrect ISAKMP encryption.
3273 - Public RSA keys can now have identical IDs if either the
3274 issuing CA or the serial number is different. The serial
3275 number of a certificate is now shown by the command
3277 ipsec auto --listpubkeys
3283 - Added Tuomo Soini's sourceip feature which allows a strongSwan
3284 roadwarrior to use a fixed Virtual IP (see README section 2.6)
3285 and reduces the well-known four tunnel case on VPN gateways to
3286 a single tunnel definition (see README section 2.4).
3288 - Fixed a bug occurring with NAT-Traversal enabled when the responder
3289 suddenly turns initiator and the initiator cannot find a matching
3290 connection because of the floated IKE port 4500.
3292 - Removed misleading ipsec verify command from barf.
3294 - Running under the native IP stack, ipsec --version now shows
3295 the Linux kernel version (courtesy to the Openswan project).
3301 - Introduced the ipsec auto --listalgs monitoring command which lists
3302 all currently registered IKE and ESP algorithms.
3304 - Fixed a bug in the ESP algorithm selection occurring when the strict flag
3305 is set and the first proposed transform does not match.
3307 - Fixed another deadlock in the use of the lock_certs_and_keys() mutex,
3308 occurring when a smartcard is present.
3310 - Prevented that a superseded Phase1 state can trigger a DPD_TIMEOUT event.
3312 - Fixed the printing of the notification names (null)
3314 - Applied another of Herbert Xu's Netlink patches.
3320 - Support of Dead Peer Detection. The connection parameter
3322 dpdaction=clear|hold
3324 activates DPD for the given connection.
3326 - The default Opportunistic Encryption (OE) policy groups are not
3327 automatically included anymore. Those wishing to activate OE can include
3328 the policy group with the following statement in ipsec.conf:
3330 include /etc/ipsec.d/examples/oe.conf
3332 The default for [right|left]rsasigkey is now set to %cert.
3334 - strongSwan now has a Vendor ID of its own which can be activated
3335 using the compile option VENDORID
3337 - Applied Herbert Xu's patch which sets the compression algorithm correctly.
3339 - Applied Herbert Xu's patch fixing an ESPINUDP problem
3341 - Applied Herbert Xu's patch setting source/destination port numbers.
3343 - Reapplied one of Herbert Xu's NAT-Traversal patches which got
3344 lost during the migration from SuperFreeS/WAN.
3346 - Fixed a deadlock in the use of the lock_certs_and_keys() mutex.
3348 - Fixed the unsharing of alg parameters when instantiating group
3355 - Thomas Walpuski made me aware of a potential DoS attack via
3356 a PKCS#7-wrapped certificate bundle which could overwrite valid CA
3357 certificates in Pluto's authority certificate store. This vulnerability
3358 was fixed by establishing trust in CA candidate certificates up to a
3359 trusted root CA prior to insertion into Pluto's chained list.
3361 - replaced the --assign option by the -v option in the auto awk script
3362 in order to make it run with mawk under debian/woody.
3368 - Split of the status information between ipsec auto --status (concise)
3369 and ipsec auto --statusall (verbose). Both commands can be used with
3370 an optional connection selector:
3372 ipsec auto --status[all] <connection_name>
3374 - Added the description of X.509 related features to the ipsec_auto(8)
3377 - Hardened the ASN.1 parser in debug mode, especially the printing
3378 of malformed distinguished names.
3380 - The size of an RSA public key received in a certificate is now restricted to
3382 512 bits <= modulus length <= 8192 bits.
3384 - Fixed the debug mode enumeration.
3390 - Fixed another PKCS#7 vulnerability which could lead to an
3391 endless loop while following the X.509 trust chain.
3397 - Fixed the PKCS#7 vulnerability discovered by Thomas Walpuski
3398 that accepted end certificates having identical issuer and subject
3399 distinguished names in a multi-tier X.509 trust chain.
3405 - Removed all remaining references to ipsec_netlink.h in KLIPS.
3411 - The new "ca" section allows to define the following parameters:
3414 cacert=koolCA.pem # cacert of kool CA
3415 ocspuri=http://ocsp.kool.net:8001 # ocsp server
3416 ldapserver=ldap.kool.net # default ldap server
3417 crluri=http://www.kool.net/kool.crl # crl distribution point
3418 crluri2="ldap:///O=Kool, C= .." # crl distribution point #2
3419 auto=add # add, ignore
3421 The ca definitions can be monitored via the command
3423 ipsec auto --listcainfos
3425 - Fixed cosmetic corruption of /proc filesystem by integrating
3426 D. Hugh Redelmeier's freeswan-2.06 kernel fixes.
3432 - Added support for the 818043 NAT-Traversal update of Microsoft's
3433 Windows 2000/XP IPsec client which sends an ID_FQDN during Quick Mode.
3435 - A symbolic link to libcrypto is now added in the kernel sources
3436 during kernel compilation
3438 - Fixed a couple of 64 bit issues (mostly casts to int).
3439 Thanks to Ken Bantoft who checked my sources on a 64 bit platform.
3441 - Replaced s[n]printf() statements in the kernel by ipsec_snprintf().
3442 Credits go to D. Hugh Redelmeier, Michael Richardson, and Sam Sgro
3443 of the FreeS/WAN team who solved this problem with the 2.4.25 kernel.
3449 - an empty ASN.1 SEQUENCE OF or SET OF object (e.g. a subjectAltName
3450 certificate extension which contains no generalName item) can cause
3451 a pluto crash. This bug has been fixed. Additionally the ASN.1 parser has
3452 been hardened to make it more robust against malformed ASN.1 objects.
3454 - applied Herbert Xu's NAT-T patches which fixes NAT-T under the native
3455 Linux 2.6 IPsec stack.
3461 - based on freeswan-2.04, x509-1.5.3, nat-0.6c, alg-0.8.1rc12