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 - swanctl now accesses directories for credentials relative to swanctl.conf, in
16 particular, when it's loaded from a custom location via --file argument. The
17 base directory that's used if --file is not given is configurable at runtime
18 via SWANCTL_DIR environment variable.
20 - With RADIUS Accounting enabled, the eap-radius plugin adds the session ID to
21 Access-Request messages, simplifying associating database entries for IP
22 leases and accounting with sessions.
24 - IPs assigned by RADIUS servers are included in Accounting-Stop even if clients
25 don't claim them, allowing releasing them early on connection errors.
27 - Selectors installed on transport mode SAs by the kernel-netlink plugin are
28 updated on IP address changes (e.g. via MOBIKE).
30 - Added support for RSA signatures with SHA-256 and SHA-512 to the agent plugin.
31 For older versions of ssh/gpg-agent that only support SHA-1, IKEv2 signature
32 authentication has to be disabled via charon.signature_authentication.
34 - The sshkey and agent plugins support Ed25519/Ed448 SSH keys and signatures.
36 - The openssl plugin supports X25519/X448 Diffie-Hellman and Ed25519/Ed448 keys
37 and signatures when built against OpenSSL 1.1.1.
39 - Ed25519, ChaCha20/Poly1305, SHA-3 and AES-CCM were added to the botan plugin.
41 - The mysql plugin now properly handles database connections with transactions
44 - IP addresses in HA pools are now distributed evenly among all segments.
46 - On newer FreeBSD kernels, the kernel-pfkey plugin reads the reqid directly
47 from SADB_ACQUIRE messages, i.e. not requiring previous policy installation by
48 the plugin, e.g. for compatibility with if_ipsec(4) VTIs.
54 - Fixes a vulnerability in the gmp plugin triggered by crafted certificates with
55 RSA keys with very small moduli. When verifying signatures with such keys,
56 the code patched with the fix for CVE-2018-16151/2 caused an integer underflow
57 and subsequent heap buffer overflow that results in a crash of the daemon.
58 The vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2018-17540.
64 - Fixes a potential authorization bypass vulnerability in the gmp plugin that
65 was caused by a too lenient verification of PKCS#1 v1.5 signatures. Several
66 flaws could be exploited by a Bleichenbacher-style attack to forge signatures
67 for low-exponent keys (i.e. with e=3). CVE-2018-16151 has been assigned to
68 the problem of accepting random bytes after the OID of the hash function in
69 such signatures, and CVE-2018-16152 has been assigned to the issue of not
70 verifying that the parameters in the ASN.1 algorithmIdentitifer structure is
71 empty. Other flaws that don't lead to a vulnerability directly (e.g. not
72 checking for at least 8 bytes of padding) have no separate CVE assigned.
74 - Dots are not allowed anymore in section names in swanctl.conf and
75 strongswan.conf. This mainly affects the configuration of file loggers. If the
76 path for such a log file contains dots it now has to be configured in the new
77 `path` setting within the arbitrarily renamed subsection in the `filelog`
80 - Sections in swanctl.conf and strongswan.conf may now reference other sections.
81 All settings and subsections from such a section are inherited. This allows
82 to simplify configs as redundant information has only to be specified once
83 and may then be included in other sections (refer to the example in the man
84 page for strongswan.conf).
86 - The originally selected IKE config (based on the IPs and IKE version) can now
87 change if no matching algorithm proposal is found. This way the order
88 of the configs doesn't matter that much anymore and it's easily possible to
89 specify separate configs for clients that require weak algorithms (instead
90 of having to also add them in other configs that might be selected).
92 - Support for Postquantum Preshared Keys for IKEv2 (draft-ietf-ipsecme-qr-ikev2)
95 - The new botan plugin is a wrapper around the Botan C++ crypto library. It
96 requires a fairly recent build from Botan's master branch (or the upcoming
97 2.8.0 release). Thanks to René Korthaus and his team from Rohde & Schwarz
98 Cybersecurity for the initial patch.
100 - The pki tool accepts a xmppAddr otherName as a subjectAlternativeName using
101 the syntax --san xmppaddr:<jid>.
103 - Implementation of RFC 8412 "Software Inventory Message and Attributes (SWIMA)
104 for PA-TNC". SWIMA subscription option sets CLOSE_WRITE trigger on apt
105 history.log file resulting in a ClientRetry PB-TNC batch to initialize
106 a new measurement cycle.
108 - Added support for fuzzing the PA-TNC (RFC 5792) and PB-TNC (RFC 5793) NEA
109 protocols on Google's OSS-Fuzz infrastructure.
111 - Support for version 2 of Intel's TPM2-TSS TGC Software Stack. The presence of
112 the in-kernel /dev/tpmrm0 resource manager is automatically detected.
114 - Marks the in- and/or outbound SA should apply to packets after processing may
115 be configured in swanctl.conf on Linux. For outbound SAs this requires at
116 least a 4.14 kernel. Setting a mask and configuring a mark/mask for inbound
117 SAs will be added with the upcoming 4.19 kernel.
119 - New options in swanctl.conf allow configuring how/whether DF, ECN and DS
120 fields in the IP headers are copied during IPsec processing. Controlling this
121 is currently only possible on Linux.
123 - To avoid conflicts, the dhcp plugin now only uses the DHCP server port if
124 explicitly configured.
130 - Fixed a DoS vulnerability in the IKEv2 key derivation if the openssl plugin is
131 used in FIPS mode and HMAC-MD5 is negotiated as PRF.
132 This vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2018-10811.
134 - Fixed a vulnerability in the stroke plugin, which did not check the received
135 length before reading a message from the socket. Unless a group is configured,
136 root privileges are required to access that socket, so in the default
137 configuration this shouldn't be an issue.
138 This vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2018-5388.
140 ⁻ CRLs that are not yet valid are now ignored to avoid problems in scenarios
141 where expired certificates are removed from CRLs and the clock on the host
142 doing the revocation check is trailing behind that of the host issuing CRLs.
144 - The issuer of fetched CRLs is now compared to the issuer of the checked
147 - CRL validation results other than revocation (e.g. a skipped check because
148 the CRL couldn't be fetched) are now stored also for intermediate CA
149 certificates and not only for end-entity certificates, so a strict CRL policy
150 can be enforced in such cases.
152 - In compliance with RFC 4945, section 5.1.3.2, certificates used for IKE must
153 now either not contain a keyUsage extension (like the ones generated by pki)
154 or have at least one of the digitalSignature or nonRepudiation bits set.
156 - New options for vici/swanctl allow forcing the local termination of an IKE_SA.
157 This might be useful in situations where it's known the other end is not
158 reachable anymore, or that it already removed the IKE_SA, so retransmitting a
159 DELETE and waiting for a response would be pointless. Waiting only a certain
160 amount of time for a response before destroying the IKE_SA is also possible
161 by additionally specifying a timeout.
163 - When removing routes, the kernel-netlink plugin now checks if it tracks other
164 routes for the same destination and replaces the installed route instead of
165 just removing it. Same during installation, where existing routes previously
166 weren't replaced. This should allow using traps with virtual IPs on Linux.
168 - The dhcp plugin only sends the client identifier option if identity_lease is
169 enabled. It can also send identities of up to 255 bytes length, instead of
170 the previous 64 bytes. If a server address is configured, DHCP requests are
171 now sent from port 67 instead of 68 to avoid ICMP port unreachables.
173 - Roam events are now completely ignored for IKEv1 SAs.
175 - ChaCha20/Poly1305 is now correctly proposed without key length. For
176 compatibility with older releases the chacha20poly1305compat keyword may be
177 included in proposals to also propose the algorithm with a key length.
179 - Configuration of hardware offload of IPsec SAs is now more flexible and allows
180 a new mode, which automatically uses it if the kernel and device support it.
182 - SHA-2 based PRFs are supported in PKCS#8 files as generated by OpenSSL 1.1.
184 - The pki --verify tool may load CA certificates and CRLs from directories.
186 - Fixed an issue with DNS servers passed to NetworkManager in charon-nm.
192 - Fixed a DoS vulnerability in the parser for PKCS#1 RSASSA-PSS signatures that
193 was caused by insufficient input validation. One of the configurable
194 parameters in algorithm identifier structures for RSASSA-PSS signatures is the
195 mask generation function (MGF). Only MGF1 is currently specified for this
196 purpose. However, this in turn takes itself a parameter that specifies the
197 underlying hash function. strongSwan's parser did not correctly handle the
198 case of this parameter being absent, causing an undefined data read.
199 This vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2018-6459.
201 - The previously negotiated DH group is reused when rekeying an SA, instead of
202 using the first group in the configured proposals, which avoids an additional
203 exchange if the peer selected a different group via INVALID_KE_PAYLOAD when
204 the SA was created initially.
205 The selected DH group is also moved to the front of all sent proposals that
206 contain it and all proposals that don't are moved to the back in order to
207 convey the preference for this group to the peer.
209 - Handling of MOBIKE task queuing has been improved. In particular, the response
210 to an address update is not ignored anymore if only an address list update or
213 - The fallback drop policies installed to avoid traffic leaks when replacing
214 addresses in installed policies are now replaced by temporary drop policies,
215 which also prevent acquires because we currently delete and reinstall IPsec
216 SAs to update their addresses.
218 - Access X.509 certificates held in non-volatile storage of a TPM 2.0
219 referenced via the NV index.
221 - Adding the --keyid parameter to pki --print allows to print private keys
222 or certificates stored in a smartcard or a TPM 2.0.
224 - Fixed proposal selection if a peer incorrectly sends DH groups in the ESP
225 proposals during IKE_AUTH and also if a DH group is configured in the local
226 ESP proposal and charon.prefer_configured_proposals is disabled.
228 - MSKs received via RADIUS are now padded to 64 bytes to avoid compatibility
229 issues with EAP-MSCHAPv2 and PRFs that have a block size < 64 bytes (e.g.
232 - The tpm_extendpcr command line tool extends a digest into a TPM PCR.
234 - Ported the NetworkManager backend from the deprecated libnm-glib to libnm.
236 - The save-keys debugging/development plugin saves IKE and/or ESP keys to files
237 compatible with Wireshark.
243 - In compliance with RFCs 8221 and 8247 several algorithms were removed from the
244 default ESP/AH and IKEv2 proposals, respectively (3DES, Blowfish and MD5 from
245 ESP/AH, MD5 and MODP-1024 from IKEv2). These algorithms may still be used in
248 - Added support for RSASSA-PSS signatures. For backwards compatibility they are
249 not used automatically by default, enable charon.rsa_pss to change that. To
250 explicitly use or require such signatures with IKEv2 signature authentication
251 (RFC 7427), regardless of whether that option is enabled, use ike:rsa/pss...
252 authentication constraints.
254 - The pki tool can optionally sign certificates/CRLs with RSASSA-PSS via the
255 `--rsa-padding pss` option.
257 - The sec-updater tool checks for security updates in dpkg-based repositories
258 (e.g. Debian/Ubuntu) and sets the security flags in the IMV policy database
259 accordingly. Additionally for each new package version a SWID tag for the
260 given OS and HW architecture is created and stored in the database.
261 Using the sec-updater.sh script template the lookup can be automated
262 (e.g. via an hourly cron job).
264 - The introduction of file versions in the IMV database scheme broke file
265 reference hash measurements. This has been fixed by creating generic product
266 versions having an empty package name.
268 - A new timeout option for the systime-fix plugin stops periodic system time
269 checks after a while and enforces a certificate verification, closing or
270 reauthenticating all SAs with invalid certificates.
272 - The IKE event counters, previously only available via ipsec listcounters, may
273 now be queried/reset via vici and the new swanctl --counters command. They are
274 provided by the new optional counters plugin.
276 - Class attributes received in RADIUS Access-Accept messages may optionally be
277 added to RADIUS accounting messages.
279 - Inbound marks may optionally be installed on the SA again (was removed with
280 5.5.2) by enabling the mark_in_sa option in swanctl.conf.
286 - Fixed a DoS vulnerability in the gmp plugin that was caused by insufficient
287 input validation when verifying RSA signatures, which requires decryption
288 with the operation m^e mod n, where m is the signature, and e and n are the
289 exponent and modulus of the public key. The value m is an integer between
290 0 and n-1, however, the gmp plugin did not verify this. So if m equals n the
291 calculation results in 0, in which case mpz_export() returns NULL. This
292 result wasn't handled properly causing a null-pointer dereference.
293 This vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2017-11185.
295 - New SWIMA IMC/IMV pair implements the "draft-ietf-sacm-nea-swima-patnc"
296 Internet Draft and has been demonstrated at the IETF 99 Prague Hackathon.
298 - The IMV database template has been adapted to achieve full compliance
299 with the ISO 19770-2:2015 SWID tag standard.
301 - The sw-collector tool extracts software events from apt history logs
302 and stores them in an SQLite database to be used by the SWIMA IMC.
303 The tool can also generate SWID tags both for installed and removed
306 - The pt-tls-client can attach and use TPM 2.0 protected private keys
307 via the --keyid parameter.
309 - libtpmtss supports Intel's TSS2 Architecture Broker and Resource
310 Manager interface (tcti-tabrmd).
312 - The new eap-aka-3gpp plugin implements the 3GPP MILENAGE algorithms
313 in software. K (optionally concatenated with OPc) may be configured as
316 - CHILD_SA rekeying was fixed in charon-tkm and was slightly changed: The
317 switch to the new outbound IPsec SA now happens via SPI on the outbound
318 policy on Linux, and in case of lost rekey collisions no outbound SA/policy
319 is temporarily installed for the redundant CHILD_SA.
321 - The new %unique-dir value for mark* settings allocates separate unique marks
322 for each CHILD_SA direction (in/out).
328 - Fixed a DoS vulnerability in the gmp plugin that was caused by insufficient
329 input validation when verifying RSA signatures. More specifically,
330 mpz_powm_sec() has two requirements regarding the passed exponent and modulus
331 that the plugin did not enforce, if these are not met the calculation will
332 result in a floating point exception that crashes the whole process.
333 This vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2017-9022.
335 - Fixed a DoS vulnerability in the x509 plugin that was caused because the ASN.1
336 parser didn't handle ASN.1 CHOICE types properly, which could result in an
337 infinite loop when parsing X.509 extensions that use such types.
338 This vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2017-9023.
340 - The behavior during IKEv2 CHILD_SA rekeying has been changed in order to avoid
341 traffic loss. The responder now only installs the new inbound SA and delays
342 installing the outbound SA until it receives the DELETE for the replaced
343 CHILD_SA. Similarly, the inbound SA of the replaced CHILD_SA is not removed
344 for a configurable amount of seconds (charon.delete_rekeyed_delay) after the
345 DELETE has been processed to reduce the chance of dropping delayed packets.
347 - The code base has been ported to Apple's ARM64 iOS platform, whose calling
348 conventions for variadic and regular functions are different. This means
349 assigning non-variadic functions to variadic function pointers does not work.
350 To avoid this issue the enumerator_t interface has been changed and the
351 signatures of the callback functions for enumerator_create_filter(), and the
352 invoke_function() and find_first() methods on linked_list_t have been changed.
353 The return type of find_first() also changed from status_t to bool.
355 - Added support for fuzzing the certificate parser provided by the default
356 plugins (x509, pem, gmp etc.) on Google's OSS-Fuzz infrastructure. Several
357 issues found while fuzzing these plugins were fixed.
359 - Two new options have been added to charon's retransmission settings:
360 retransmit_limit and retransmit_jitter. The former adds an upper limit to the
361 calculated retransmission timeout, the latter randomly reduces it.
363 - A bug in swanctl's --load-creds command was fixed that caused unencrypted
364 private keys to get unloaded if the command was called multiple times. The
365 load-key VICI command now returns the key ID of the loaded key on success.
367 - The credential manager now enumerates local credential sets before global
368 ones. This means certificates supplied by the peer will now be preferred over
369 certificates with the same identity that may be locally stored (e.g. in the
372 - Added support for hardware offload of IPsec SAs as introduced by Linux 4.11
373 for hardware that supports this.
375 - When building the libraries monolithically and statically the plugin
376 constructors are now hard-coded in each library so the plugin code is not
377 removed by the linker because it thinks none of their symbols are ever
380 - The pki tool loads the curve25519 plugin by default.
386 - Support of Diffie-Hellman group 31 using Curve25519 for IKE as defined
389 - Support of Ed25519 digital signature algorithm for IKEv2 as defined by
390 draft-ietf-ipsecme-eddsa. Ed25519-based public key pairs, X.509 certificates
391 and CRLs can be generated and printed by the pki tool.
393 - The new "tpm" libtpmtss plugin allows to use persistent private RSA and ECDSA
394 keys bound to a TPM 2.0 for both IKE and TLS authentication. Using the
395 TPM 2.0 object handle as keyid parameter, the pki --pub tool can extract
396 the public key from the TPM thereby replacing the aikpub2 tool. In a similar
397 fashion pki --req can generate a PKCS#10 certificate request signed with
400 - The pki tool gained support for generating certificates with the RFC 3779
401 addrblock extension. The charon addrblock plugin now dynamically narrows
402 traffic selectors based on the certificate addrblocks instead of rejecting
403 non-matching selectors completely. This allows generic connections, where
404 the allowed selectors are defined by the used certificates only.
406 - In-place update of cached base and delta CRLs does not leave dozens
407 of stale copies in cache memory.
409 - Several new features for the VICI interface and the swanctl utility: Querying
410 specific pools, enumerating and unloading keys and shared secrets, loading
411 keys and certificates from PKCS#11 tokens, the ability to initiate, install
412 and uninstall connections and policies by their exact name (if multiple child
413 sections in different connections share the same name), a command to initiate
414 the rekeying of IKE and IPsec SAs, support for settings previously only
415 supported by the old config files (plain pubkeys, dscp, certificate policies,
416 IPv6 Transport Proxy Mode, NT Hash secrets, mediation extension).
418 Important: Due to issues with VICI bindings that map sub-sections to
419 dictionaries the CHILD_SA sections returned via list-sas now have a unique
420 name, the original name of a CHILD_SA is returned in the "name" key of its
427 - The newhope plugin implements the post-quantum NewHope key exchange algorithm
428 proposed in their 2015 paper by Erdem Alkim, Léo Ducas, Thomas Pöppelmann and
431 - The libstrongswan crypto factory now offers the registration of Extended
432 Output Functions (XOFs). Currently supported XOFs are SHAKE128 and SHAKE256
433 implemented by the sha3 plugin, ChaCHa20 implemented by the chapoly plugin
434 and the more traditional MGF1 Mask Generation Functions based on the SHA-1,
435 SHA-256 and SHA-512 hash algorithms implemented by the new mgf1 plugin.
437 - The pki tool, with help of the pkcs1 or openssl plugins, can parse private
438 keys in any of the supported formats without having to know the exact type.
439 So instead of having to specify rsa or ecdsa explicitly the keyword priv may
440 be used to indicate a private key of any type. Similarly, swanctl can load
441 any type of private key from the swanctl/private directory.
443 - The pki tool can handle RSASSA-PKCS1v1.5-with-SHA-3 signatures using the
444 sha3 and gmp plugins.
446 - The VICI flush-certs command flushes certificates from the volatile
447 certificate cache. Optionally the type of the certificates to be
448 flushed (e.g. type = x509_crl) can be specified.
450 - Setting cache_crls = yes in strongswan.conf the vici plugin saves regular,
451 base and delta CRLs to disk.
453 - IKE fragmentation is now enabled by default with the default fragment size
454 set to 1280 bytes for both IP address families.
456 - libtpmtss: In the TSS2 API the function TeardownSocketTcti() was replaced by
457 tss2_tcti_finalize().
463 - The new libtpmtss library offers support for both TPM 1.2 and TPM 2.0
464 Trusted Platform Modules. This allows the Attestation IMC/IMV pair to
465 do TPM 2.0 based attestation.
467 - The behavior during IKEv2 exchange collisions has been improved/fixed in
468 several corner cases and support for TEMPORARY_FAILURE and CHILD_SA_NOT_FOUND
469 notifies, as defined by RFC 7296, has been added.
471 - IPsec policy priorities can be set manually (e.g. for high-priority drop
472 policies) and outbound policies may be restricted to a network interface.
474 - The scheme for the automatically calculated default priorities has been
475 changed and now also considers port masks, which were added with 5.4.0.
477 - FWD policies are now installed in both directions in regards to the traffic
478 selectors. Because such "outbound" FWD policies could conflict with "inbound"
479 FWD policies of other SAs they are installed with a lower priority and don't
480 have a reqid set, which allows kernel plugins to distinguish between the two
481 and prefer those with a reqid.
483 - For outbound IPsec SAs no replay window is configured anymore.
485 - Enhanced the functionality of the swanctl --list-conns command by listing
486 IKE_SA and CHILD_SA reauthentication and rekeying settings, and EAP/XAuth
487 identities and EAP types.
489 - DNS servers installed by the resolve plugin are now refcounted, which should
490 fix its use with make-before-break reauthentication. Any output written to
491 stderr/stdout by resolvconf is now logged.
493 - The methods in the kernel interfaces have been changed to take structs instead
494 of long lists of arguments. Similarly the constructors for peer_cfg_t and
495 child_cfg_t now take structs.
501 - Support for IKEv2 redirection (RFC 5685) has been added. Plugins may
502 implement the redirect_provider_t interface to decide if and when to redirect
503 connecting clients. It is also possible to redirect established IKE_SAs based
504 on different selectors via VICI/swanctl. Unless disabled in strongswan.conf
505 the charon daemon will follow redirect requests received from servers.
507 - The ike: prefix enables the explicit configuration of signature scheme
508 constraints against IKEv2 authentication in rightauth, which allows the use
509 of different signature schemes for trustchain verification and authentication.
511 - The initiator of an IKEv2 make-before-break reauthentication now suspends
512 online certificate revocation checks (OCSP, CRLs) until the new IKE_SA and all
513 CHILD_SAs are established. This is required if the checks are done over the
514 CHILD_SA established with the new IKE_SA. This is not possible until the
515 initiator installs this SA and that only happens after the authentication is
516 completed successfully. So we suspend the checks during the reauthentication
517 and do them afterwards, if they fail the IKE_SA is closed. This change has no
518 effect on the behavior during the authentication of the initial IKE_SA.
520 - For the vici plugin a Vici:Session Perl CPAN module has been added to allow
521 Perl applications to control and/or monitor the IKE daemon using the VICI
522 interface, similar to the existing Python egg or Ruby gem.
524 - Traffic selectors with port ranges can now be configured in the Linux kernel:
525 e.g. remote_ts = 10.1.0.0/16[tcp/20-23] local_ts = dynamic[tcp/32768-65535].
526 The port range must map to a port mask, though since the kernel does not
527 support arbitrary ranges.
529 - The vici plugin allows the configuration of IPv4 and IPv6 address ranges
530 in local and remote traffic selectors. Since both the Linux kernel and
531 iptables cannot handle arbitrary ranges, address ranges are mapped to the next
532 larger CIDR subnet by the kernel-netlink and updown plugins, respectively.
534 - Implemented IKEv1 IPv4/IPv6 address subnet and range identities that can be
535 used as owners of shared secrets.
541 - Properly handle potential EINTR errors in sigwaitinfo(2) calls that replaced
542 sigwait(3) calls with 5.3.4.
544 - RADIUS retransmission timeouts are now configurable, courtesy of Thom Troy.
550 - Fixed an authentication bypass vulnerability in the eap-mschapv2 plugin that
551 was caused by insufficient verification of the internal state when handling
552 MSCHAPv2 Success messages received by the client.
553 This vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2015-8023.
555 - The sha3 plugin implements the SHA3 Keccak-F1600 hash algorithm family.
556 Within the strongSwan framework SHA3 is currently used for BLISS signatures
557 only because the OIDs for other signature algorithms haven't been defined
558 yet. Also the use of SHA3 for IKEv2 has not been standardized yet.
564 - Added support for the ChaCha20/Poly1305 AEAD cipher specified in RFC 7539 and
565 RFC 7634 using the chacha20poly1305 ike/esp proposal keyword. The new chapoly
566 plugin implements the cipher, if possible SSE-accelerated on x86/x64
567 architectures. It is usable both in IKEv2 and the strongSwan libipsec ESP
568 backend. On Linux 4.2 or newer the kernel-netlink plugin can configure the
571 - The vici interface now supports the configuration of auxiliary certification
572 authority information as CRL and OCSP URIs.
574 - In the bliss plugin the c_indices derivation using a SHA-512 based random
575 oracle has been fixed, generalized and standardized by employing the MGF1 mask
576 generation function with SHA-512. As a consequence BLISS signatures unsing the
577 improved oracle are not compatible with the earlier implementation.
579 - Support for auto=route with right=%any for transport mode connections has
580 been added (the ikev2/trap-any scenario provides examples).
582 - The starter daemon does not flush IPsec policies and SAs anymore when it is
583 stopped. Already existing duplicate policies are now overwritten by the IKE
584 daemon when it installs its policies.
586 - Init limits (like charon.init_limit_half_open) can now optionally be enforced
587 when initiating SAs via VICI. For this, IKE_SAs initiated by the daemon are
588 now also counted as half-open SAs, which, as a side-effect, fixes the status
589 output while connecting (e.g. in ipsec status).
591 - Symmetric configuration of EAP methods in left|rightauth is now possible when
592 mutual EAP-only authentication is used (previously, the client had to
593 configure rightauth=eap or rightauth=any, which prevented it from using this
594 same config as responder).
596 - The initiator flag in the IKEv2 header is compared again (wasn't the case
597 since 5.0.0) and packets that have the flag set incorrectly are again ignored.
599 - Implemented a demo Hardcopy Device IMC/IMV pair based on the "Hardcopy
600 Device Health Assessment Trusted Network Connect Binding" (HCD-TNC)
601 document drafted by the IEEE Printer Working Group (PWG).
603 - Fixed IF-M segmentation which failed in the presence of multiple small
604 attributes in front of a huge attribute to be segmented.
610 - Fixed a vulnerability that allowed rogue servers with a valid certificate
611 accepted by the client to trick it into disclosing its username and even
612 password (if the client accepts EAP-GTC). This was caused because constraints
613 against the responder's authentication were enforced too late.
614 This vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2015-4171.
620 - Fixed a denial-of-service and potential remote code execution vulnerability
621 triggered by IKEv1/IKEv2 messages that contain payloads for the respective
622 other IKE version. Such payload are treated specially since 5.2.2 but because
623 they were still identified by their original payload type they were used as
624 such in some places causing invalid function pointer dereferences.
625 The vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2015-3991.
627 - The new aesni plugin provides CBC, CTR, XCBC, CMAC, CCM and GCM crypto
628 primitives for AES-128/192/256. The plugin requires AES-NI and PCLMULQDQ
629 instructions and works on both x86 and x64 architectures. It provides
630 superior crypto performance in userland without any external libraries.
636 - Added support for IKEv2 make-before-break reauthentication. By using a global
637 CHILD_SA reqid allocation mechanism, charon supports overlapping CHILD_SAs.
638 This allows the use of make-before-break instead of the previously supported
639 break-before-make reauthentication, avoiding connectivity gaps during that
640 procedure. As the new mechanism may fail with peers not supporting it (such
641 as any previous strongSwan release) it must be explicitly enabled using
642 the charon.make_before_break strongswan.conf option.
644 - Support for "Signature Authentication in IKEv2" (RFC 7427) has been added.
645 This allows the use of stronger hash algorithms for public key authentication.
646 By default, signature schemes are chosen based on the strength of the
647 signature key, but specific hash algorithms may be configured in leftauth.
649 - Key types and hash algorithms specified in rightauth are now also checked
650 against IKEv2 signature schemes. If such constraints are used for certificate
651 chain validation in existing configurations, in particular with peers that
652 don't support RFC 7427, it may be necessary to disable this feature with the
653 charon.signature_authentication_constraints setting, because the signature
654 scheme used in classic IKEv2 public key authentication may not be strong
657 - The new connmark plugin allows a host to bind conntrack flows to a specific
658 CHILD_SA by applying and restoring the SA mark to conntrack entries. This
659 allows a peer to handle multiple transport mode connections coming over the
660 same NAT device for client-initiated flows. A common use case is to protect
661 L2TP/IPsec, as supported by some systems.
663 - The forecast plugin can forward broadcast and multicast messages between
664 connected clients and a LAN. For CHILD_SA using unique marks, it sets up
665 the required Netfilter rules and uses a multicast/broadcast listener that
666 forwards such messages to all connected clients. This plugin is designed for
667 Windows 7 IKEv2 clients, which announces its services over the tunnel if the
668 negotiated IPsec policy allows it.
670 - For the vici plugin a Python Egg has been added to allow Python applications
671 to control or monitor the IKE daemon using the VICI interface, similar to the
672 existing ruby gem. The Python library has been contributed by Björn Schuberg.
674 - EAP server methods now can fulfill public key constraints, such as rightcert
675 or rightca. Additionally, public key and signature constraints can be
676 specified for EAP methods in the rightauth keyword. Currently the EAP-TLS and
677 EAP-TTLS methods provide verification details to constraints checking.
679 - Upgrade of the BLISS post-quantum signature algorithm to the improved BLISS-B
680 variant. Can be used in conjunction with the SHA256, SHA384 and SHA512 hash
681 algorithms with SHA512 being the default.
683 - The IF-IMV 1.4 interface now makes the IP address of the TNC access requestor
684 as seen by the TNC server available to all IMVs. This information can be
685 forwarded to policy enforcement points (e.g. firewalls or routers).
687 - The new mutual tnccs-20 plugin parameter activates mutual TNC measurements
688 in PB-TNC half-duplex mode between two endpoints over either a PT-EAP or
689 PT-TLS transport medium.
695 - Fixed a denial-of-service vulnerability triggered by an IKEv2 Key Exchange
696 payload that contains the Diffie-Hellman group 1025. This identifier was
697 used internally for DH groups with custom generator and prime. Because
698 these arguments are missing when creating DH objects based on the KE payload
699 an invalid pointer dereference occurred. This allowed an attacker to crash
700 the IKE daemon with a single IKE_SA_INIT message containing such a KE
701 payload. The vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2014-9221.
703 - The left/rightid options in ipsec.conf, or any other identity in strongSwan,
704 now accept prefixes to enforce an explicit type, such as email: or fqdn:.
705 Note that no conversion is done for the remaining string, refer to
706 ipsec.conf(5) for details.
708 - The post-quantum Bimodal Lattice Signature Scheme (BLISS) can be used as
709 an IKEv2 public key authentication method. The pki tool offers full support
710 for the generation of BLISS key pairs and certificates.
712 - Fixed mapping of integrity algorithms negotiated for AH via IKEv1. This could
713 cause interoperability issues when connecting to older versions of charon.
719 - The new charon-systemd IKE daemon implements an IKE daemon tailored for use
720 with systemd. It avoids the dependency on ipsec starter and uses swanctl
721 as configuration backend, building a simple and lightweight solution. It
722 supports native systemd journal logging.
724 - Support for IKEv2 fragmentation as per RFC 7383 has been added. Like IKEv1
725 fragmentation it can be enabled by setting fragmentation=yes in ipsec.conf.
727 - Support of the TCG TNC IF-M Attribute Segmentation specification proposal.
728 All attributes can be segmented. Additionally TCG/SWID Tag, TCG/SWID Tag ID
729 and IETF/Installed Packages attributes can be processed incrementally on a
732 - The new ext-auth plugin calls an external script to implement custom IKE_SA
733 authorization logic, courtesy of Vyronas Tsingaras.
735 - For the vici plugin a ruby gem has been added to allow ruby applications
736 to control or monitor the IKE daemon. The vici documentation has been updated
737 to include a description of the available operations and some simple examples
738 using both the libvici C interface and the ruby gem.
744 - strongSwan has been ported to the Windows platform. Using a MinGW toolchain,
745 many parts of the strongSwan codebase run natively on Windows 7 / 2008 R2
746 and newer releases. charon-svc implements a Windows IKE service based on
747 libcharon, the kernel-iph and kernel-wfp plugins act as networking and IPsec
748 backend on the Windows platform. socket-win provides a native IKE socket
749 implementation, while winhttp fetches CRL and OCSP information using the
752 - The new vici plugin provides a Versatile IKE Configuration Interface for
753 charon. Using the stable IPC interface, external applications can configure,
754 control and monitor the IKE daemon. Instead of scripting the ipsec tool
755 and generating ipsec.conf, third party applications can use the new interface
756 for more control and better reliability.
758 - Built upon the libvici client library, swanctl implements the first user of
759 the VICI interface. Together with a swanctl.conf configuration file,
760 connections can be defined, loaded and managed. swanctl provides a portable,
761 complete IKE configuration and control interface for the command line.
762 The first six swanctl example scenarios have been added.
764 - The SWID IMV implements a JSON-based REST API which allows the exchange
765 of SWID tags and Software IDs with the strongTNC policy manager.
767 - The SWID IMC can extract all installed packages from the dpkg (Debian,
768 Ubuntu, Linux Mint etc.), rpm (Fedora, RedHat, OpenSUSE, etc.), or
769 pacman (Arch Linux, Manjaro, etc.) package managers, respectively, using the
770 swidGenerator (https://github.com/strongswan/swidGenerator) which generates
771 SWID tags according to the new ISO/IEC 19770-2:2014 standard.
773 - All IMVs now share the access requestor ID, device ID and product info
774 of an access requestor via a common imv_session object.
776 - The Attestation IMC/IMV pair supports the IMA-NG measurement format
777 introduced with the Linux 3.13 kernel.
779 - The aikgen tool generates an Attestation Identity Key bound to a TPM.
781 - Implemented the PT-EAP transport protocol (RFC 7171) for Trusted Network
784 - The ipsec.conf replay_window option defines connection specific IPsec replay
785 windows. Original patch courtesy of Zheng Zhong and Christophe Gouault from
792 - Fixed an authentication bypass vulnerability triggered by rekeying an
793 unestablished IKEv2 SA while it gets actively initiated. This allowed an
794 attacker to trick a peer's IKE_SA state to established, without the need to
795 provide any valid authentication credentials. The vulnerability has been
796 registered as CVE-2014-2338.
798 - The acert plugin evaluates X.509 Attribute Certificates. Group membership
799 information encoded as strings can be used to fulfill authorization checks
800 defined with the rightgroups option. Attribute Certificates can be loaded
801 locally or get exchanged in IKEv2 certificate payloads.
803 - The pki command gained support to generate X.509 Attribute Certificates
804 using the --acert subcommand, while the --print command supports the ac type.
805 The openac utility has been removed in favor of the new pki functionality.
807 - The libtls TLS 1.2 implementation as used by EAP-(T)TLS and other protocols
808 has been extended by AEAD mode support, currently limited to AES-GCM.
814 - A new default configuration file layout is introduced. The new default
815 strongswan.conf file mainly includes config snippets from the strongswan.d
816 and strongswan.d/charon directories (the latter containing snippets for all
817 plugins). The snippets, with commented defaults, are automatically
818 generated and installed, if they don't exist yet. They are also installed
819 in $prefix/share/strongswan/templates so existing files can be compared to
820 the current defaults.
822 - As an alternative to the non-extensible charon.load setting, the plugins
823 to load in charon (and optionally other applications) can now be determined
824 via the charon.plugins.<name>.load setting for each plugin (enabled in the
825 new default strongswan.conf file via the charon.load_modular option).
826 The load setting optionally takes a numeric priority value that allows
827 reordering the plugins (otherwise the default plugin order is preserved).
829 - All strongswan.conf settings that were formerly defined in library specific
830 "global" sections are now application specific (e.g. settings for plugins in
831 libstrongswan.plugins can now be set only for charon in charon.plugins).
832 The old options are still supported, which now allows to define defaults for
833 all applications in the libstrongswan section.
835 - The ntru libstrongswan plugin supports NTRUEncrypt as a post-quantum
836 computer IKE key exchange mechanism. The implementation is based on the
837 ntru-crypto library from the NTRUOpenSourceProject. The supported security
838 strengths are ntru112, ntru128, ntru192, and ntru256. Since the private DH
839 group IDs 1030..1033 have been assigned, the strongSwan Vendor ID must be
840 sent (charon.send_vendor_id = yes) in order to use NTRU.
842 - Defined a TPMRA remote attestation workitem and added support for it to the
845 - Compatibility issues between IPComp (compress=yes) and leftfirewall=yes as
846 well as multiple subnets in left|rightsubnet have been fixed.
848 - When enabling its "session" strongswan.conf option, the xauth-pam plugin opens
849 and closes a PAM session for each established IKE_SA. Patch courtesy of
852 - The strongSwan unit testing framework has been rewritten without the "check"
853 dependency for improved flexibility and portability. It now properly supports
854 multi-threaded and memory leak testing and brings a bunch of new test cases.
860 - Fixed a denial-of-service vulnerability and potential authorization bypass
861 triggered by a crafted ID_DER_ASN1_DN ID payload. The cause is an insufficient
862 length check when comparing such identities. The vulnerability has been
863 registered as CVE-2013-6075.
865 - Fixed a denial-of-service vulnerability triggered by a crafted IKEv1
866 fragmentation payload. The cause is a NULL pointer dereference. The
867 vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2013-6076.
869 - The lean stand-alone pt-tls-client can set up a RFC 6876 PT-TLS session
870 with a strongSwan policy enforcement point which uses the tnc-pdp charon
873 - The new TCG TNC SWID IMC/IMV pair supports targeted SWID requests for either
874 full SWID Tag or concise SWID Tag ID inventories.
876 - The XAuth backend in eap-radius now supports multiple XAuth exchanges for
877 different credential types and display messages. All user input gets
878 concatenated and verified with a single User-Password RADIUS attribute on
879 the AAA. With an AAA supporting it, one for example can implement
880 Password+Token authentication with proper dialogs on iOS and OS X clients.
882 - charon supports IKEv1 Mode Config exchange in push mode. The ipsec.conf
883 modeconfig=push option enables it for both client and server, the same way
886 - Using the "ah" ipsec.conf keyword on both IKEv1 and IKEv2 connections,
887 charon can negotiate and install Security Associations integrity-protected by
888 the Authentication Header protocol. Supported are plain AH(+IPComp) SAs only,
889 but not the deprecated RFC2401 style ESP+AH bundles.
891 - The generation of initialization vectors for IKE and ESP (when using libipsec)
892 is now modularized and IVs for e.g. AES-GCM are now correctly allocated
893 sequentially, while other algorithms like AES-CBC still use random IVs.
895 - The left and right options in ipsec.conf can take multiple address ranges
896 and subnets. This allows connection matching against a larger set of
897 addresses, for example to use a different connection for clients connecting
898 from a internal network.
900 - For all those who have a queasy feeling about the NIST elliptic curve set,
901 the Brainpool curves introduced for use with IKE by RFC 6932 might be a
902 more trustworthy alternative.
904 - The kernel-libipsec userland IPsec backend now supports usage statistics,
905 volume based rekeying and accepts ESPv3 style TFC padded packets.
907 - With two new strongswan.conf options fwmarks can be used to implement
908 host-to-host tunnels with kernel-libipsec.
910 - load-tester supports transport mode connections and more complex traffic
911 selectors, including such using unique ports for each tunnel.
913 - The new dnscert plugin provides support for authentication via CERT RRs that
914 are protected via DNSSEC. The plugin was created by Ruslan N. Marchenko.
916 - The eap-radius plugin supports forwarding of several Cisco Unity specific
917 RADIUS attributes in corresponding configuration payloads.
919 - Database transactions are now abstracted and implemented by the two backends.
920 If you use MySQL make sure all tables use the InnoDB engine.
922 - libstrongswan now can provide an experimental custom implementation of the
923 printf family functions based on klibc if neither Vstr nor glibc style printf
924 hooks are available. This can avoid the Vstr dependency on some systems at
925 the cost of slower and less complete printf functions.
931 - Fixed a denial-of-service vulnerability triggered by specific XAuth usernames
932 and EAP identities (since 5.0.3), and PEM files (since 4.1.11). The crash
933 was caused by insufficient error handling in the is_asn1() function.
934 The vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2013-5018.
936 - The new charon-cmd command line IKE client can establish road warrior
937 connections using IKEv1 or IKEv2 with different authentication profiles.
938 It does not depend on any configuration files and can be configured using a
939 few simple command line options.
941 - The kernel-pfroute networking backend has been greatly improved. It now
942 can install virtual IPs on TUN devices on OS X and FreeBSD, allowing these
943 systems to act as a client in common road warrior scenarios.
945 - The new kernel-libipsec plugin uses TUN devices and libipsec to provide IPsec
946 processing in userland on Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X.
948 - The eap-radius plugin can now serve as an XAuth backend called xauth-radius,
949 directly verifying XAuth credentials using RADIUS User-Name/User-Password
950 attributes. This is more efficient than the existing xauth-eap+eap-radius
951 combination, and allows RADIUS servers without EAP support to act as AAA
954 - The new osx-attr plugin installs configuration attributes (currently DNS
955 servers) via SystemConfiguration on Mac OS X. The keychain plugin provides
956 certificates from the OS X keychain service.
958 - The sshkey plugin parses SSH public keys, which, together with the --agent
959 option for charon-cmd, allows the use of ssh-agent for authentication.
960 To configure SSH keys in ipsec.conf the left|rightrsasigkey options are
961 replaced with left|rightsigkey, which now take public keys in one of three
962 formats: SSH (RFC 4253, ssh: prefix), DNSKEY (RFC 3110, dns: prefix), and
963 PKCS#1 (the default, no prefix).
965 - Extraction of certificates and private keys from PKCS#12 files is now provided
966 by the new pkcs12 plugin or the openssl plugin. charon-cmd (--p12) as well
967 as charon (via P12 token in ipsec.secrets) can make use of this.
969 - IKEv2 can now negotiate transport mode and IPComp in NAT situations.
971 - IKEv2 exchange initiators now properly close an established IKE or CHILD_SA
972 on error conditions using an additional exchange, keeping state in sync
975 - Using a SQL database interface a Trusted Network Connect (TNC) Policy Manager
976 can generate specific measurement workitems for an arbitrary number of
977 Integrity Measurement Verifiers (IMVs) based on the history of the VPN user
980 - Several core classes in libstrongswan are now tested with unit tests. These
981 can be enabled with --enable-unit-tests and run with 'make check'. Coverage
982 reports can be generated with --enable-coverage and 'make coverage' (this
983 disables any optimization, so it should not be enabled when building
984 production releases).
986 - The leak-detective developer tool has been greatly improved. It works much
987 faster/stabler with multiple threads, does not use deprecated malloc hooks
988 anymore and has been ported to OS X.
990 - chunk_hash() is now based on SipHash-2-4 with a random key. This provides
991 better distribution and prevents hash flooding attacks when used with
994 - All default plugins implement the get_features() method to define features
995 and their dependencies. The plugin loader has been improved, so that plugins
996 in a custom load statement can be ordered freely or to express preferences
997 without being affected by dependencies between plugin features.
999 - A centralized thread can take care for watching multiple file descriptors
1000 concurrently. This removes the need for a dedicated listener threads in
1001 various plugins. The number of "reserved" threads for such tasks has been
1002 reduced to about five, depending on the plugin configuration.
1004 - Plugins that can be controlled by a UNIX socket IPC mechanism gained network
1005 transparency. Third party applications querying these plugins now can use
1006 TCP connections from a different host.
1008 - libipsec now supports AES-GCM.
1014 - Fixed a security vulnerability in the openssl plugin which was reported by
1015 Kevin Wojtysiak. The vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2013-2944.
1016 Before the fix, if the openssl plugin's ECDSA signature verification was used,
1017 due to a misinterpretation of the error code returned by the OpenSSL
1018 ECDSA_verify() function, an empty or zeroed signature was accepted as a
1021 - The handling of a couple of other non-security relevant openssl return codes
1024 - The tnc_ifmap plugin now publishes virtual IPv4 and IPv6 addresses via its
1025 TCG TNC IF-MAP 2.1 interface.
1027 - The charon.initiator_only option causes charon to ignore IKE initiation
1030 - The openssl plugin can now use the openssl-fips library.
1036 - The new ipseckey plugin enables authentication based on trustworthy public
1037 keys stored as IPSECKEY resource records in the DNS and protected by DNSSEC.
1038 To do so it uses a DNSSEC enabled resolver, like the one provided by the new
1039 unbound plugin, which is based on libldns and libunbound. Both plugins were
1040 created by Reto Guadagnini.
1042 - Implemented the TCG TNC IF-IMV 1.4 draft making access requestor identities
1043 available to an IMV. The OS IMV stores the AR identity together with the
1044 device ID in the attest database.
1046 - The openssl plugin now uses the AES-NI accelerated version of AES-GCM
1047 if the hardware supports it.
1049 - The eap-radius plugin can now assign virtual IPs to IKE clients using the
1050 Framed-IP-Address attribute by using the "%radius" named pool in the
1051 rightsourceip ipsec.conf option. Cisco Banner attributes are forwarded to
1052 Unity-capable IKEv1 clients during mode config. charon now sends Interim
1053 Accounting updates if requested by the RADIUS server, reports
1054 sent/received packets in Accounting messages, and adds a Terminate-Cause
1055 to Accounting-Stops.
1057 - The recently introduced "ipsec listcounters" command can report connection
1058 specific counters by passing a connection name, and global or connection
1059 counters can be reset by the "ipsec resetcounters" command.
1061 - The strongSwan libpttls library provides an experimental implementation of
1062 PT-TLS (RFC 6876), a Posture Transport Protocol over TLS.
1064 - The charon systime-fix plugin can disable certificate lifetime checks on
1065 embedded systems if the system time is obviously out of sync after bootup.
1066 Certificates lifetimes get checked once the system time gets sane, closing
1067 or reauthenticating connections using expired certificates.
1069 - The "ikedscp" ipsec.conf option can set DiffServ code points on outgoing
1072 - The new xauth-noauth plugin allows to use basic RSA or PSK authentication with
1073 clients that cannot be configured without XAuth authentication. The plugin
1074 simply concludes the XAuth exchange successfully without actually performing
1075 any authentication. Therefore, to use this backend it has to be selected
1076 explicitly with rightauth2=xauth-noauth.
1078 - The new charon-tkm IKEv2 daemon delegates security critical operations to a
1079 separate process. This has the benefit that the network facing daemon has no
1080 knowledge of keying material used to protect child SAs. Thus subverting
1081 charon-tkm does not result in the compromise of cryptographic keys.
1082 The extracted functionality has been implemented from scratch in a minimal TCB
1083 (trusted computing base) in the Ada programming language. Further information
1084 can be found at https://www.codelabs.ch/tkm/.
1089 - Implemented all IETF Standard PA-TNC attributes and an OS IMC/IMV
1090 pair using them to transfer operating system information.
1092 - The new "ipsec listcounters" command prints a list of global counter values
1093 about received and sent IKE messages and rekeyings.
1095 - A new lookip plugin can perform fast lookup of tunnel information using a
1096 clients virtual IP and can send notifications about established or deleted
1097 tunnels. The "ipsec lookip" command can be used to query such information
1098 or receive notifications.
1100 - The new error-notify plugin catches some common error conditions and allows
1101 an external application to receive notifications for them over a UNIX socket.
1103 - IKE proposals can now use a PRF algorithm different to that defined for
1104 integrity protection. If an algorithm with a "prf" prefix is defined
1105 explicitly (such as prfsha1 or prfsha256), no implicit PRF algorithm based on
1106 the integrity algorithm is added to the proposal.
1108 - The pkcs11 plugin can now load leftcert certificates from a smartcard for a
1109 specific ipsec.conf conn section and cacert CA certificates for a specific ca
1112 - The load-tester plugin gained additional options for certificate generation
1113 and can load keys and multiple CA certificates from external files. It can
1114 install a dedicated outer IP address for each tunnel and tunnel initiation
1115 batches can be triggered and monitored externally using the
1116 "ipsec load-tester" tool.
1118 - PKCS#7 container parsing has been modularized, and the openssl plugin
1119 gained an alternative implementation to decrypt and verify such files.
1120 In contrast to our own DER parser, OpenSSL can handle BER files, which is
1121 required for interoperability of our scepclient with EJBCA.
1123 - Support for the proprietary IKEv1 fragmentation extension has been added.
1124 Fragments are always handled on receipt but only sent if supported by the peer
1125 and if enabled with the new fragmentation ipsec.conf option.
1127 - IKEv1 in charon can now parse certificates received in PKCS#7 containers and
1128 supports NAT traversal as used by Windows clients. Patches courtesy of
1131 - The new rdrand plugin provides a high quality / high performance random
1132 source using the Intel rdrand instruction found on Ivy Bridge processors.
1134 - The integration test environment was updated and now uses KVM and reproducible
1135 guest images based on Debian.
1141 - Introduced the sending of the standard IETF Assessment Result
1142 PA-TNC attribute by all strongSwan Integrity Measurement Verifiers.
1144 - Extended PTS Attestation IMC/IMV pair to provide full evidence of
1145 the Linux IMA measurement process. All pertinent file information
1146 of a Linux OS can be collected and stored in an SQL database.
1148 - The PA-TNC and PB-TNC protocols can now process huge data payloads
1149 >64 kB by distributing PA-TNC attributes over multiple PA-TNC messages
1150 and these messages over several PB-TNC batches. As long as no
1151 consolidated recommandation from all IMVs can be obtained, the TNC
1152 server requests more client data by sending an empty SDATA batch.
1154 - The rightgroups2 ipsec.conf option can require group membership during
1155 a second authentication round, for example during XAuth authentication
1156 against a RADIUS server.
1158 - The xauth-pam backend can authenticate IKEv1 XAuth and Hybrid authenticated
1159 clients against any PAM service. The IKEv2 eap-gtc plugin does not use
1160 PAM directly anymore, but can use any XAuth backend to verify credentials,
1161 including xauth-pam.
1163 - The new unity plugin brings support for some parts of the IKEv1 Cisco Unity
1164 Extension. As client, charon narrows traffic selectors to the received
1165 Split-Include attributes and automatically installs IPsec bypass policies
1166 for received Local-LAN attributes. As server, charon sends Split-Include
1167 attributes for leftsubnet definitions containing multiple subnets to Unity-
1170 - An EAP-Nak payload is returned by clients if the gateway requests an EAP
1171 method that the client does not support. Clients can also request a specific
1172 EAP method by configuring that method with leftauth.
1174 - The eap-dynamic plugin handles EAP-Nak payloads returned by clients and uses
1175 these to select a different EAP method supported/requested by the client.
1176 The plugin initially requests the first registered method or the first method
1177 configured with charon.plugins.eap-dynamic.preferred.
1179 - The new left/rightdns options specify connection specific DNS servers to
1180 request/respond in IKEv2 configuration payloads or IKEv2 mode config. leftdns
1181 can be any (comma separated) combination of %config4 and %config6 to request
1182 multiple servers, both for IPv4 and IPv6. rightdns takes a list of DNS server
1183 IP addresses to return.
1185 - The left/rightsourceip options now accept multiple addresses or pools.
1186 leftsourceip can be any (comma separated) combination of %config4, %config6
1187 or fixed IP addresses to request. rightsourceip accepts multiple explicitly
1188 specified or referenced named pools.
1190 - Multiple connections can now share a single address pool when they use the
1191 same definition in one of the rightsourceip pools.
1193 - The options charon.interfaces_ignore and charon.interfaces_use allow one to
1194 configure the network interfaces used by the daemon.
1196 - The kernel-netlink plugin supports the charon.install_virtual_ip_on option,
1197 which specifies the interface on which virtual IP addresses will be installed.
1198 If it is not specified the current behavior of using the outbound interface
1201 - The kernel-netlink plugin tries to keep the current source address when
1202 looking for valid routes to reach other hosts.
1204 - The autotools build has been migrated to use a config.h header. strongSwan
1205 development headers will get installed during "make install" if
1206 --with-dev-headers has been passed to ./configure.
1208 - All crypto primitives gained return values for most operations, allowing
1209 crypto backends to fail, for example when using hardware accelerators.
1215 - The charon IKE daemon gained experimental support for the IKEv1 protocol.
1216 Pluto has been removed from the 5.x series, and unless strongSwan is
1217 configured with --disable-ikev1 or --disable-ikev2, charon handles both
1218 keying protocols. The feature-set of IKEv1 in charon is almost on par with
1219 pluto, but currently does not support AH or bundled AH+ESP SAs. Beside
1220 RSA/ECDSA, PSK and XAuth, charon also supports the Hybrid authentication
1221 mode. Information for interoperability and migration is available at
1222 https://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/CharonPlutoIKEv1.
1224 - Charon's bus_t has been refactored so that loggers and other listeners are
1225 now handled separately. The single lock was previously cause for deadlocks
1226 if extensive listeners, such as the one provided by the updown plugin, wanted
1227 to acquire locks that were held by other threads which in turn tried to log
1228 messages, and thus were waiting to acquire the same lock currently held by
1229 the thread calling the listener.
1230 The implemented changes also allow the use of a read/write-lock for the
1231 loggers which increases performance if multiple loggers are registered.
1232 Besides several interface changes this last bit also changes the semantics
1233 for loggers as these may now be called by multiple threads at the same time.
1235 - Source routes are reinstalled if interfaces are reactivated or IP addresses
1238 - The thread pool (processor_t) now has more control over the lifecycle of
1239 a job (see job.h for details). In particular, it now controls the destruction
1240 of jobs after execution and the cancellation of jobs during shutdown. Due to
1241 these changes the requeueing feature, previously available to callback_job_t
1242 only, is now available to all jobs (in addition to a new rescheduling
1245 - In addition to trustchain key strength definitions for different public key
1246 systems, the rightauth option now takes a list of signature hash algorithms
1247 considered save for trustchain validation. For example, the setting
1248 rightauth=rsa-2048-ecdsa-256-sha256-sha384-sha512 requires a trustchain
1249 that uses at least RSA-2048 or ECDSA-256 keys and certificate signatures
1250 using SHA-256 or better.
1256 - Fixed a security vulnerability in the gmp plugin. If this plugin was used
1257 for RSA signature verification an empty or zeroed signature was handled as
1260 - Fixed several issues with reauthentication and address updates.
1266 - The tnc-pdp plugin implements a RADIUS server interface allowing
1267 a strongSwan TNC server to act as a Policy Decision Point.
1269 - The eap-radius authentication backend enforces Session-Timeout attributes
1270 using RFC4478 repeated authentication and acts upon RADIUS Dynamic
1271 Authorization extensions, RFC 5176. Currently supported are disconnect
1272 requests and CoA messages containing a Session-Timeout.
1274 - The eap-radius plugin can forward arbitrary RADIUS attributes from and to
1275 clients using custom IKEv2 notify payloads. The new radattr plugin reads
1276 attributes to include from files and prints received attributes to the
1279 - Added support for untruncated MD5 and SHA1 HMACs in ESP as used in
1282 - The cmac plugin implements the AES-CMAC-96 and AES-CMAC-PRF-128 algorithms
1283 as defined in RFC 4494 and RFC 4615, respectively.
1285 - The resolve plugin automatically installs nameservers via resolvconf(8),
1286 if it is installed, instead of modifying /etc/resolv.conf directly.
1288 - The IKEv2 charon daemon supports now raw RSA public keys in RFC 3110
1289 DNSKEY and PKCS#1 file format.
1295 - Upgraded the TCG IF-IMC and IF-IMV C API to the upcoming version 1.3
1296 which supports IF-TNCCS 2.0 long message types, the exclusive flags
1297 and multiple IMC/IMV IDs. Both the TNC Client and Server as well as
1298 the "Test", "Scanner", and "Attestation" IMC/IMV pairs were updated.
1300 - Fully implemented the "TCG Attestation PTS Protocol: Binding to IF-M"
1301 standard (TLV-based messages only). TPM-based remote attestation of
1302 Linux IMA (Integrity Measurement Architecture) possible. Measurement
1303 reference values are automatically stored in an SQLite database.
1305 - The EAP-RADIUS authentication backend supports RADIUS accounting. It sends
1306 start/stop messages containing Username, Framed-IP and Input/Output-Octets
1307 attributes and has been tested against FreeRADIUS and Microsoft NPS.
1309 - Added support for PKCS#8 encoded private keys via the libstrongswan
1310 pkcs8 plugin. This is the default format used by some OpenSSL tools since
1311 version 1.0.0 (e.g. openssl req with -keyout).
1313 - Added session resumption support to the strongSwan TLS stack.
1319 - Because of changing checksums before and after installation which caused
1320 the integrity tests to fail we avoided directly linking libsimaka, libtls and
1321 libtnccs to those libcharon plugins which make use of these dynamic libraries.
1322 Instead we linked the libraries to the charon daemon. Unfortunately Ubuntu
1323 11.10 activated the --as-needed ld option which discards explicit links
1324 to dynamic libraries that are not actually used by the charon daemon itself,
1325 thus causing failures during the loading of the plugins which depend on these
1326 libraries for resolving external symbols.
1328 - Therefore our approach of computing integrity checksums for plugins had to be
1329 changed radically by moving the hash generation from the compilation to the
1330 post-installation phase.
1336 - The new libstrongswan certexpire plugin collects expiration information of
1337 all used certificates and exports them to CSV files. It either directly
1338 exports them or uses cron style scheduling for batch exports.
1340 - starter passes unresolved hostnames to charon, allowing it to do name
1341 resolution not before the connection attempt. This is especially useful with
1342 connections between hosts using dynamic IP addresses. Thanks to Mirko Parthey
1343 for the initial patch.
1345 - The android plugin can now be used without the Android frontend patch and
1346 provides DNS server registration and logging to logcat.
1348 - Pluto and starter (plus stroke and whack) have been ported to Android.
1350 - Support for ECDSA private and public key operations has been added to the
1351 pkcs11 plugin. The plugin now also provides DH and ECDH via PKCS#11 and can
1352 use tokens as random number generators (RNG). By default only private key
1353 operations are enabled, more advanced features have to be enabled by their
1354 option in strongswan.conf. This also applies to public key operations (even
1355 for keys not stored on the token) which were enabled by default before.
1357 - The libstrongswan plugin system now supports detailed plugin dependencies.
1358 Many plugins have been extended to export its capabilities and requirements.
1359 This allows the plugin loader to resolve plugin loading order automatically,
1360 and in future releases, to dynamically load the required features on demand.
1361 Existing third party plugins are source (but not binary) compatible if they
1362 properly initialize the new get_features() plugin function to NULL.
1364 - The tnc-ifmap plugin implements a TNC IF-MAP 2.0 client which can deliver
1365 metadata about IKE_SAs via a SOAP interface to a MAP server. The tnc-ifmap
1366 plugin requires the Apache Axis2/C library.
1372 - Our private libraries (e.g. libstrongswan) are not installed directly in
1373 prefix/lib anymore. Instead a subdirectory is used (prefix/lib/ipsec/ by
1374 default). The plugins directory is also moved from libexec/ipsec/ to that
1377 - The dynamic IMC/IMV libraries were moved from the plugins directory to
1378 a new imcvs directory in the prefix/lib/ipsec/ subdirectory.
1380 - Job priorities were introduced to prevent thread starvation caused by too
1381 many threads handling blocking operations (such as CRL fetching). Refer to
1382 strongswan.conf(5) for details.
1384 - Two new strongswan.conf options allow to fine-tune performance on IKEv2
1385 gateways by dropping IKE_SA_INIT requests on high load.
1387 - IKEv2 charon daemon supports start PASS and DROP shunt policies
1388 preventing traffic to go through IPsec connections. Installation of the
1389 shunt policies either via the XFRM netfilter or PFKEYv2 IPsec kernel
1392 - The history of policies installed in the kernel is now tracked so that e.g.
1393 trap policies are correctly updated when reauthenticated SAs are terminated.
1395 - IMC/IMV Scanner pair implementing the RFC 5792 PA-TNC (IF-M) protocol.
1396 Using "netstat -l" the IMC scans open listening ports on the TNC client
1397 and sends a port list to the IMV which based on a port policy decides if
1398 the client is admitted to the network.
1399 (--enable-imc-scanner/--enable-imv-scanner).
1401 - IMC/IMV Test pair implementing the RFC 5792 PA-TNC (IF-M) protocol.
1402 (--enable-imc-test/--enable-imv-test).
1404 - The IKEv2 close action does not use the same value as the ipsec.conf dpdaction
1405 setting, but the value defined by its own closeaction keyword. The action
1406 is triggered if the remote peer closes a CHILD_SA unexpectedly.
1412 - The whitelist plugin for the IKEv2 daemon maintains an in-memory identity
1413 whitelist. Any connection attempt of peers not whitelisted will get rejected.
1414 The 'ipsec whitelist' utility provides a simple command line frontend for
1415 whitelist administration.
1417 - The duplicheck plugin provides a specialized form of duplicate checking,
1418 doing a liveness check on the old SA and optionally notify a third party
1419 application about detected duplicates.
1421 - The coupling plugin permanently couples two or more devices by limiting
1422 authentication to previously used certificates.
1424 - In the case that the peer config and child config don't have the same name
1425 (usually in SQL database defined connections), ipsec up|route <peer config>
1426 starts|routes all associated child configs and ipsec up|route <child config>
1427 only starts|routes the specific child config.
1429 - fixed the encoding and parsing of X.509 certificate policy statements (CPS).
1431 - Duncan Salerno contributed the eap-sim-pcsc plugin implementing a
1432 pcsc-lite based SIM card backend.
1434 - The eap-peap plugin implements the EAP PEAP protocol. Interoperates
1435 successfully with a FreeRADIUS server and Windows 7 Agile VPN clients.
1437 - The IKEv2 daemon charon rereads strongswan.conf on SIGHUP and instructs
1438 all plugins to reload. Currently only the eap-radius and the attr plugins
1439 support configuration reloading.
1441 - Added userland support to the IKEv2 daemon for Extended Sequence Numbers
1442 support coming with Linux 2.6.39. To enable ESN on a connection, add
1443 the 'esn' keyword to the proposal. The default proposal uses 32-bit sequence
1444 numbers only ('noesn'), and the same value is used if no ESN mode is
1445 specified. To negotiate ESN support with the peer, include both, e.g.
1446 esp=aes128-sha1-esn-noesn.
1448 - In addition to ESN, Linux 2.6.39 gained support for replay windows larger
1449 than 32 packets. The new global strongswan.conf option 'charon.replay_window'
1450 configures the size of the replay window, in packets.
1456 - Sansar Choinyambuu implemented the RFC 5793 Posture Broker Protocol (BP)
1457 compatible with Trusted Network Connect (TNC). The TNCCS 2.0 protocol
1458 requires the tnccs_20, tnc_imc and tnc_imv plugins but does not depend
1459 on the libtnc library. Any available IMV/IMC pairs conforming to the
1460 Trusted Computing Group's TNC-IF-IMV/IMC 1.2 interface specification
1461 can be loaded via /etc/tnc_config.
1463 - Re-implemented the TNCCS 1.1 protocol by using the tnc_imc and tnc_imv
1464 in place of the external libtnc library.
1466 - The tnccs_dynamic plugin loaded on a TNC server in addition to the
1467 tnccs_11 and tnccs_20 plugins, dynamically detects the IF-TNCCS
1468 protocol version used by a TNC client and invokes an instance of
1469 the corresponding protocol stack.
1471 - IKE and ESP proposals can now be stored in an SQL database using a
1472 new proposals table. The start_action field in the child_configs
1473 tables allows the automatic starting or routing of connections stored
1476 - The new certificate_authorities and certificate_distribution_points
1477 tables make it possible to store CRL and OCSP Certificate Distribution
1478 points in an SQL database.
1480 - The new 'include' statement allows to recursively include other files in
1481 strongswan.conf. Existing sections and values are thereby extended and
1482 replaced, respectively.
1484 - Due to the changes in the parser for strongswan.conf, the configuration
1485 syntax for the attr plugin has changed. Previously, it was possible to
1486 specify multiple values of a specific attribute type by adding multiple
1487 key/value pairs with the same key (e.g. dns) to the plugins.attr section.
1488 Because values with the same key now replace previously defined values
1489 this is not possible anymore. As an alternative, multiple values can be
1490 specified by separating them with a comma (e.g. dns = 1.2.3.4, 2.3.4.5).
1492 - ipsec listalgs now appends (set in square brackets) to each crypto
1493 algorithm listed the plugin that registered the function.
1495 - Traffic Flow Confidentiality padding supported with Linux 2.6.38 can be used
1496 by the IKEv2 daemon. The ipsec.conf 'tfc' keyword pads all packets to a given
1497 boundary, the special value '%mtu' pads all packets to the path MTU.
1499 - The new af-alg plugin can use various crypto primitives of the Linux Crypto
1500 API using the AF_ALG interface introduced with 2.6.38. This removes the need
1501 for additional userland implementations of symmetric cipher, hash, hmac and
1504 - The IKEv2 daemon supports the INITIAL_CONTACT notify as initiator and
1505 responder. The notify is sent when initiating configurations with a unique
1506 policy, set in ipsec.conf via the global 'uniqueids' option.
1508 - The conftest conformance testing framework enables the IKEv2 stack to perform
1509 many tests using a distinct tool and configuration frontend. Various hooks
1510 can alter reserved bits, flags, add custom notifies and proposals, reorder
1511 or drop messages and much more. It is enabled using the --enable-conftest
1514 - The new libstrongswan constraints plugin provides advanced X.509 constraint
1515 checking. In addition to X.509 pathLen constraints, the plugin checks for
1516 nameConstraints and certificatePolicies, including policyMappings and
1517 policyConstraints. The x509 certificate plugin and the pki tool have been
1518 enhanced to support these extensions. The new left/rightcertpolicy ipsec.conf
1519 connection keywords take OIDs a peer certificate must have.
1521 - The left/rightauth ipsec.conf keywords accept values with a minimum strength
1522 for trustchain public keys in bits, such as rsa-2048 or ecdsa-256.
1524 - The revocation and x509 libstrongswan plugins and the pki tool gained basic
1525 support for delta CRLs.
1531 - IMPORTANT: the default keyexchange mode 'ike' is changing with release 4.5
1532 from 'ikev1' to 'ikev2', thus commemorating the five year anniversary of the
1533 IKEv2 RFC 4306 and its mature successor RFC 5996. The time has definitively
1534 come for IKEv1 to go into retirement and to cede its place to the much more
1535 robust, powerful and versatile IKEv2 protocol!
1537 - Added new ctr, ccm and gcm plugins providing Counter, Counter with CBC-MAC
1538 and Galois/Counter Modes based on existing CBC implementations. These
1539 new plugins bring support for AES and Camellia Counter and CCM algorithms
1540 and the AES GCM algorithms for use in IKEv2.
1542 - The new pkcs11 plugin brings full Smartcard support to the IKEv2 daemon and
1543 the pki utility using one or more PKCS#11 libraries. It currently supports
1544 RSA private and public key operations and loads X.509 certificates from
1547 - Implemented a general purpose TLS stack based on crypto and credential
1548 primitives of libstrongswan. libtls supports TLS versions 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2,
1549 ECDHE-ECDSA/RSA, DHE-RSA and RSA key exchange algorithms and RSA/ECDSA based
1550 client authentication.
1552 - Based on libtls, the eap-tls plugin brings certificate based EAP
1553 authentication for client and server. It is compatible to Windows 7 IKEv2
1554 Smartcard authentication and the OpenSSL based FreeRADIUS EAP-TLS backend.
1556 - Implemented the TNCCS 1.1 Trusted Network Connect protocol using the
1557 libtnc library on the strongSwan client and server side via the tnccs_11
1558 plugin and optionally connecting to a TNC@FHH-enhanced FreeRADIUS AAA server.
1559 Depending on the resulting TNC Recommendation, strongSwan clients are granted
1560 access to a network behind a strongSwan gateway (allow), are put into a
1561 remediation zone (isolate) or are blocked (none), respectively. Any number
1562 of Integrity Measurement Collector/Verifier pairs can be attached
1563 via the tnc-imc and tnc-imv charon plugins.
1565 - The IKEv1 daemon pluto now uses the same kernel interfaces as the IKEv2
1566 daemon charon. As a result of this, pluto now supports xfrm marks which
1567 were introduced in charon with 4.4.1.
1569 - Applets for Maemo 5 (Nokia) allow to easily configure and control IKEv2
1570 based VPN connections with EAP authentication on supported devices.
1572 - The RADIUS plugin eap-radius now supports multiple RADIUS servers for
1573 redundant setups. Servers are selected by a defined priority, server load and
1576 - The simple led plugin controls hardware LEDs through the Linux LED subsystem.
1577 It currently shows activity of the IKE daemon and is a good example how to
1578 implement a simple event listener.
1580 - Improved MOBIKE behavior in several corner cases, for instance, if the
1581 initial responder moves to a different address.
1583 - Fixed left-/rightnexthop option, which was broken since 4.4.0.
1585 - Fixed a bug not releasing a virtual IP address to a pool if the XAUTH
1586 identity was different from the IKE identity.
1588 - Fixed the alignment of ModeConfig messages on 4-byte boundaries in the
1589 case where the attributes are not a multiple of 4 bytes (e.g. Cisco's
1592 - Fixed the interoperability of the socket_raw and socket_default
1595 - Added man page for strongswan.conf
1601 - Support of xfrm marks in IPsec SAs and IPsec policies introduced
1602 with the Linux 2.6.34 kernel. For details see the example scenarios
1603 ikev2/nat-two-rw-mark, ikev2/rw-nat-mark-in-out and ikev2/net2net-psk-dscp.
1605 - The PLUTO_MARK_IN and PLUTO_ESP_ENC environment variables can be used
1606 in a user-specific updown script to set marks on inbound ESP or
1609 - The openssl plugin now supports X.509 certificate and CRL functions.
1611 - OCSP/CRL checking in IKEv2 has been moved to the revocation plugin, enabled
1612 by default. Please update manual load directives in strongswan.conf.
1614 - RFC3779 ipAddrBlock constraint checking has been moved to the addrblock
1615 plugin, disabled by default. Enable it and update manual load directives
1616 in strongswan.conf, if required.
1618 - The pki utility supports CRL generation using the --signcrl command.
1620 - The ipsec pki --self, --issue and --req commands now support output in
1621 PEM format using the --outform pem option.
1623 - The major refactoring of the IKEv1 Mode Config functionality now allows
1624 the transport and handling of any Mode Config attribute.
1626 - The RADIUS proxy plugin eap-radius now supports multiple servers. Configured
1627 servers are chosen randomly, with the option to prefer a specific server.
1628 Non-responding servers are degraded by the selection process.
1630 - The ipsec pool tool manages arbitrary configuration attributes stored
1631 in an SQL database. ipsec pool --help gives the details.
1633 - The new eap-simaka-sql plugin acts as a backend for EAP-SIM and EAP-AKA,
1634 reading triplets/quintuplets from an SQL database.
1636 - The High Availability plugin now supports a HA enabled in-memory address
1637 pool and Node reintegration without IKE_SA rekeying. The latter allows
1638 clients without IKE_SA rekeying support to keep connected during
1639 reintegration. Additionally, many other issues have been fixed in the ha
1642 - Fixed a potential remote code execution vulnerability resulting from
1643 the misuse of snprintf(). The vulnerability is exploitable by
1644 unauthenticated users.
1650 - The IKEv2 High Availability plugin has been integrated. It provides
1651 load sharing and failover capabilities in a cluster of currently two nodes,
1652 based on an extend ClusterIP kernel module. More information is available at
1653 https://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/HighAvailability.
1654 The development of the High Availability functionality was sponsored by
1655 secunet Security Networks AG.
1657 - Added IKEv1 and IKEv2 configuration support for the AES-GMAC
1658 authentication-only ESP cipher. Our aes_gmac kernel patch or a Linux
1659 2.6.34 kernel is required to make AES-GMAC available via the XFRM
1662 - Added support for Diffie-Hellman groups 22, 23 and 24 to the gmp, gcrypt
1663 and openssl plugins, usable by both pluto and charon. The new proposal
1664 keywords are modp1024s160, modp2048s224 and modp2048s256. Thanks to Joy Latten
1665 from IBM for his contribution.
1667 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon supports RAM-based virtual IP pools using
1668 the rightsourceip directive with a subnet from which addresses
1671 - The ipsec pki --gen and --pub commands now allow the output of
1672 private and public keys in PEM format using the --outform pem
1673 command line option.
1675 - The new DHCP plugin queries virtual IP addresses for clients from a DHCP
1676 server using broadcasts, or a defined server using the
1677 charon.plugins.dhcp.server strongswan.conf option. DNS/WINS server information
1678 is additionally served to clients if the DHCP server provides such
1679 information. The plugin is used in ipsec.conf configurations having
1680 rightsourceip set to %dhcp.
1682 - A new plugin called farp fakes ARP responses for virtual IP addresses
1683 handed out to clients from the IKEv2 daemon charon. The plugin lets a
1684 road-warrior act as a client on the local LAN if it uses a virtual IP
1685 from the responders subnet, e.g. acquired using the DHCP plugin.
1687 - The existing IKEv2 socket implementations have been migrated to the
1688 socket-default and the socket-raw plugins. The new socket-dynamic plugin
1689 binds sockets dynamically to ports configured via the left-/rightikeport
1690 ipsec.conf connection parameters.
1692 - The android charon plugin stores received DNS server information as "net.dns"
1693 system properties, as used by the Android platform.
1699 - The IKEv2 daemon supports RFC 3779 IP address block constraints
1700 carried as a critical X.509v3 extension in the peer certificate.
1702 - The ipsec pool --add|del dns|nbns command manages DNS and NBNS name
1703 server entries that are sent via the IKEv1 Mode Config or IKEv2
1704 Configuration Payload to remote clients.
1706 - The Camellia cipher can be used as an IKEv1 encryption algorithm.
1708 - The IKEv1 and IKEV2 daemons now check certificate path length constraints.
1710 - The new ipsec.conf conn option "inactivity" closes a CHILD_SA if no traffic
1711 was sent or received within the given interval. To close the complete IKE_SA
1712 if its only CHILD_SA was inactive, set the global strongswan.conf option
1713 "charon.inactivity_close_ike" to yes.
1715 - More detailed IKEv2 EAP payload information in debug output
1717 - IKEv2 EAP-SIM and EAP-AKA share joint libsimaka library
1719 - Added required userland changes for proper SHA256 and SHA384/512 in ESP that
1720 will be introduced with Linux 2.6.33. The "sha256"/"sha2_256" keyword now
1721 configures the kernel with 128 bit truncation, not the non-standard 96
1722 bit truncation used by previous releases. To use the old 96 bit truncation
1723 scheme, the new "sha256_96" proposal keyword has been introduced.
1725 - Fixed IPComp in tunnel mode, stripping out the duplicated outer header. This
1726 change makes IPcomp tunnel mode connections incompatible with previous
1727 releases; disable compression on such tunnels.
1729 - Fixed BEET mode connections on recent kernels by installing SAs with
1730 appropriate traffic selectors, based on a patch by Michael Rossberg.
1732 - Using extensions (such as BEET mode) and crypto algorithms (such as twofish,
1733 serpent, sha256_96) allocated in the private use space now require that we
1734 know its meaning, i.e. we are talking to strongSwan. Use the new
1735 "charon.send_vendor_id" option in strongswan.conf to let the remote peer know
1738 - Experimental support for draft-eronen-ipsec-ikev2-eap-auth, where the
1739 responder omits public key authentication in favor of a mutual authentication
1740 method. To enable EAP-only authentication, set rightauth=eap on the responder
1741 to rely only on the MSK constructed AUTH payload. This not-yet standardized
1742 extension requires the strongSwan vendor ID introduced above.
1744 - The IKEv1 daemon ignores the Juniper SRX notification type 40001, thus
1745 allowing interoperability.
1751 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon can now use SQL-based address pools to deal out
1752 virtual IP addresses as a Mode Config server. The pool capability has been
1753 migrated from charon's sql plugin to a new attr-sql plugin which is loaded
1754 by libstrongswan and which can be used by both daemons either with a SQLite
1755 or MySQL database and the corresponding plugin.
1757 - Plugin names have been streamlined: EAP plugins now have a dash after eap
1758 (e.g. eap-sim), as it is used with the --enable-eap-sim ./configure option.
1759 Plugin configuration sections in strongswan.conf now use the same name as the
1760 plugin itself (i.e. with a dash). Make sure to update "load" directives and
1761 the affected plugin sections in existing strongswan.conf files.
1763 - The private/public key parsing and encoding has been split up into
1764 separate pkcs1, pgp, pem and dnskey plugins. The public key implementation
1765 plugins gmp, gcrypt and openssl can all make use of them.
1767 - The EAP-AKA plugin can use different backends for USIM/quintuplet
1768 calculations, very similar to the EAP-SIM plugin. The existing 3GPP2 software
1769 implementation has been migrated to a separate plugin.
1771 - The IKEv2 daemon charon gained basic PGP support. It can use locally installed
1772 peer certificates and can issue signatures based on RSA private keys.
1774 - The new 'ipsec pki' tool provides a set of commands to maintain a public
1775 key infrastructure. It currently supports operations to create RSA and ECDSA
1776 private/public keys, calculate fingerprints and issue or verify certificates.
1778 - Charon uses a monotonic time source for statistics and job queueing, behaving
1779 correctly if the system time changes (e.g. when using NTP).
1781 - In addition to time based rekeying, charon supports IPsec SA lifetimes based
1782 on processed volume or number of packets. They new ipsec.conf parameters
1783 'lifetime' (an alias to 'keylife'), 'lifebytes' and 'lifepackets' handle
1784 SA timeouts, while the parameters 'margintime' (an alias to rekeymargin),
1785 'marginbytes' and 'marginpackets' trigger the rekeying before a SA expires.
1786 The existing parameter 'rekeyfuzz' affects all margins.
1788 - If no CA/Gateway certificate is specified in the NetworkManager plugin,
1789 charon uses a set of trusted root certificates preinstalled by distributions.
1790 The directory containing CA certificates can be specified using the
1791 --with-nm-ca-dir=path configure option.
1793 - Fixed the encoding of the Email relative distinguished name in left|rightid
1796 - Fixed the broken parsing of PKCS#7 wrapped certificates by the pluto daemon.
1798 - Fixed smartcard-based authentication in the pluto daemon which was broken by
1799 the ECDSA support introduced with the 4.3.2 release.
1801 - A patch contributed by Heiko Hund fixes mixed IPv6 in IPv4 and vice versa
1802 tunnels established with the IKEv1 pluto daemon.
1804 - The pluto daemon now uses the libstrongswan x509 plugin for certificates and
1805 CRls and the struct id type was replaced by identification_t used by charon
1806 and the libstrongswan library.
1812 - IKEv2 charon daemon ported to FreeBSD and Mac OS X. Installation details can
1813 be found on wiki.strongswan.org.
1815 - ipsec statusall shows the number of bytes transmitted and received over
1816 ESP connections configured by the IKEv2 charon daemon.
1818 - The IKEv2 charon daemon supports include files in ipsec.secrets.
1824 - The configuration option --enable-integrity-test plus the strongswan.conf
1825 option libstrongswan.integrity_test = yes activate integrity tests
1826 of the IKE daemons charon and pluto, libstrongswan and all loaded
1827 plugins. Thus dynamic library misconfigurations and non-malicious file
1828 manipulations can be reliably detected.
1830 - The new default setting libstrongswan.ecp_x_coordinate_only=yes allows
1831 IKEv1 interoperability with MS Windows using the ECP DH groups 19 and 20.
1833 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon now supports the AES-CCM and AES-GCM ESP
1834 authenticated encryption algorithms.
1836 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon now supports V4 OpenPGP keys.
1838 - The RDN parser vulnerability discovered by Orange Labs research team
1839 was not completely fixed in version 4.3.2. Some more modifications
1840 had to be applied to the asn1_length() function to make it robust.
1846 - The new gcrypt plugin provides symmetric cipher, hasher, RNG, Diffie-Hellman
1847 and RSA crypto primitives using the LGPL licensed GNU gcrypt library.
1849 - libstrongswan features an integrated crypto selftest framework for registered
1850 algorithms. The test-vector plugin provides a first set of test vectors and
1851 allows pluto and charon to rely on tested crypto algorithms.
1853 - pluto can now use all libstrongswan plugins with the exception of x509 and xcbc.
1854 Thanks to the openssl plugin, the ECP Diffie-Hellman groups 19, 20, 21, 25, and
1855 26 as well as ECDSA-256, ECDSA-384, and ECDSA-521 authentication can be used
1858 - Applying their fuzzing tool, the Orange Labs vulnerability research team found
1859 another two DoS vulnerabilities, one in the rather old ASN.1 parser of Relative
1860 Distinguished Names (RDNs) and a second one in the conversion of ASN.1 UTCTIME
1861 and GENERALIZEDTIME strings to a time_t value.
1867 - The nm plugin now passes DNS/NBNS server information to NetworkManager,
1868 allowing a gateway administrator to set DNS/NBNS configuration on clients
1871 - The nm plugin also accepts CA certificates for gateway authentication. If
1872 a CA certificate is configured, strongSwan uses the entered gateway address
1873 as its idenitity, requiring the gateways certificate to contain the same as
1874 subjectAltName. This allows a gateway administrator to deploy the same
1875 certificates to Windows 7 and NetworkManager clients.
1877 - The command ipsec purgeike deletes IKEv2 SAs that don't have a CHILD SA.
1878 The command ipsec down <conn>{n} deletes CHILD SA instance n of connection
1879 <conn> whereas ipsec down <conn>{*} deletes all CHILD SA instances.
1880 The command ipsec down <conn>[n] deletes IKE SA instance n of connection
1881 <conn> plus dependent CHILD SAs whereas ipsec down <conn>[*] deletes all
1882 IKE SA instances of connection <conn>.
1884 - Fixed a regression introduced in 4.3.0 where EAP authentication calculated
1885 the AUTH payload incorrectly. Further, the EAP-MSCHAPv2 MSK key derivation
1886 has been updated to be compatible with the Windows 7 Release Candidate.
1888 - Refactored installation of triggering policies. Routed policies are handled
1889 outside of IKE_SAs to keep them installed in any case. A tunnel gets
1890 established only once, even if initiation is delayed due network outages.
1892 - Improved the handling of multiple acquire signals triggered by the kernel.
1894 - Fixed two DoS vulnerabilities in the charon daemon that were discovered by
1895 fuzzing techniques: 1) Sending a malformed IKE_SA_INIT request leaved an
1896 incomplete state which caused a null pointer dereference if a subsequent
1897 CREATE_CHILD_SA request was sent. 2) Sending an IKE_AUTH request with either
1898 a missing TSi or TSr payload caused a null pointer derefence because the
1899 checks for TSi and TSr were interchanged. The IKEv2 fuzzer used was
1900 developed by the Orange Labs vulnerability research team. The tool was
1901 initially written by Gabriel Campana and is now maintained by Laurent Butti.
1903 - Added support for AES counter mode in ESP in IKEv2 using the proposal
1904 keywords aes128ctr, aes192ctr and aes256ctr.
1906 - Further progress in refactoring pluto: Use of the curl and ldap plugins
1907 for fetching crls and OCSP. Use of the random plugin to get keying material
1908 from /dev/random or /dev/urandom. Use of the openssl plugin as an alternative
1909 to the aes, des, sha1, sha2, and md5 plugins. The blowfish, twofish, and
1910 serpent encryption plugins are now optional and are not enabled by default.
1916 - Support for the IKEv2 Multiple Authentication Exchanges extension (RFC4739).
1917 Initiators and responders can use several authentication rounds (e.g. RSA
1918 followed by EAP) to authenticate. The new ipsec.conf leftauth/rightauth and
1919 leftauth2/rightauth2 parameters define own authentication rounds or setup
1920 constraints for the remote peer. See the ipsec.conf man page for more detials.
1922 - If glibc printf hooks (register_printf_function) are not available,
1923 strongSwan can use the vstr string library to run on non-glibc systems.
1925 - The IKEv2 charon daemon can now configure the ESP CAMELLIA-CBC cipher
1926 (esp=camellia128|192|256).
1928 - Refactored the pluto and scepclient code to use basic functions (memory
1929 allocation, leak detective, chunk handling, printf_hooks, strongswan.conf
1930 attributes, ASN.1 parser, etc.) from the libstrongswan library.
1932 - Up to two DNS and WINS servers to be sent via IKEv1 ModeConfig can be
1933 configured in the pluto section of strongswan.conf.
1939 - The new server-side EAP RADIUS plugin (--enable-eap-radius)
1940 relays EAP messages to and from a RADIUS server. Successfully
1941 tested with with a freeradius server using EAP-MD5 and EAP-SIM.
1943 - A vulnerability in the Dead Peer Detection (RFC 3706) code was found by
1944 Gerd v. Egidy <gerd.von.egidy@intra2net.com> of Intra2net AG affecting
1945 all Openswan and strongSwan releases. A malicious (or expired ISAKMP)
1946 R_U_THERE or R_U_THERE_ACK Dead Peer Detection packet can cause the
1947 pluto IKE daemon to crash and restart. No authentication or encryption
1948 is required to trigger this bug. One spoofed UDP packet can cause the
1949 pluto IKE daemon to restart and be unresponsive for a few seconds while
1950 restarting. This DPD null state vulnerability has been officially
1951 registered as CVE-2009-0790 and is fixed by this release.
1953 - ASN.1 to time_t conversion caused a time wrap-around for
1954 dates after Jan 18 03:14:07 UTC 2038 on 32-bit platforms.
1955 As a workaround such dates are set to the maximum representable
1956 time, i.e. Jan 19 03:14:07 UTC 2038.
1958 - Distinguished Names containing wildcards (*) are not sent in the
1959 IDr payload anymore.
1965 - Fixed a use-after-free bug in the DPD timeout section of the
1966 IKEv1 pluto daemon which sporadically caused a segfault.
1968 - Fixed a crash in the IKEv2 charon daemon occurring with
1969 mixed RAM-based and SQL-based virtual IP address pools.
1971 - Fixed ASN.1 parsing of algorithmIdentifier objects where the
1972 parameters field is optional.
1974 - Ported nm plugin to NetworkManager 7.1.
1980 - Support of the EAP-MSCHAPv2 protocol enabled by the option
1981 --enable-eap-mschapv2. Requires the MD4 hash algorithm enabled
1982 either by --enable-md4 or --enable-openssl.
1984 - Assignment of up to two DNS and up to two WINS servers to peers via
1985 the IKEv2 Configuration Payload (CP). The IPv4 or IPv6 nameserver
1986 addresses are defined in strongswan.conf.
1988 - The strongSwan applet for the Gnome NetworkManager is now built and
1989 distributed as a separate tarball under the name NetworkManager-strongswan.
1995 - Fixed ESP NULL encryption broken by the refactoring of keymat.c.
1996 Also introduced proper initialization and disposal of keying material.
1998 - Fixed the missing listing of connection definitions in ipsec statusall
1999 broken by an unfortunate local variable overload.
2005 - Several performance improvements to handle thousands of tunnels with almost
2006 linear upscaling. All relevant data structures have been replaced by faster
2007 counterparts with better lookup times.
2009 - Better parallelization to run charon on multiple cores. Due to improved
2010 resource locking and other optimizations the daemon can take full
2011 advantage of 16 or even more cores.
2013 - The load-tester plugin can use a NULL Diffie-Hellman group and simulate
2014 unique identities and certificates by signing peer certificates using a CA
2017 - The redesigned stroke in-memory IP pool handles leases. The "ipsec leases"
2018 command queries assigned leases.
2020 - Added support for smartcards in charon by using the ENGINE API provided by
2021 OpenSSL, based on patches by Michael Roßberg.
2023 - The Padlock plugin supports the hardware RNG found on VIA CPUs to provide a
2024 reliable source of randomness.
2029 - Flexible configuration of logging subsystem allowing to log to multiple
2030 syslog facilities or to files using fine-grained log levels for each target.
2032 - Load testing plugin to do stress testing of the IKEv2 daemon against self
2033 or another host. Found and fixed issues during tests in the multi-threaded
2034 use of the OpenSSL plugin.
2036 - Added profiling code to synchronization primitives to find bottlenecks if
2037 running on multiple cores. Found and fixed an issue where parts of the
2038 Diffie-Hellman calculation acquired an exclusive lock. This greatly improves
2039 parallelization to multiple cores.
2041 - updown script invocation has been separated into a plugin of its own to
2042 further slim down the daemon core.
2044 - Separated IKE_SA/CHILD_SA key derivation process into a closed system,
2045 allowing future implementations to use a secured environment in e.g. kernel
2048 - The kernel interface of charon has been modularized. XFRM NETLINK (default)
2049 and PFKEY (--enable-kernel-pfkey) interface plugins for the native IPsec
2050 stack of the Linux 2.6 kernel as well as a PFKEY interface for the KLIPS
2051 IPsec stack (--enable-kernel-klips) are provided.
2053 - Basic Mobile IPv6 support has been introduced, securing Binding Update
2054 messages as well as tunneled traffic between Mobile Node and Home Agent.
2055 The installpolicy=no option allows peaceful cooperation with a dominant
2056 mip6d daemon and the new type=transport_proxy implements the special MIPv6
2057 IPsec transport proxy mode where the IKEv2 daemon uses the Care-of-Address
2058 but the IPsec SA is set up for the Home Address.
2060 - Implemented migration of Mobile IPv6 connections using the KMADDRESS
2061 field contained in XFRM_MSG_MIGRATE messages sent by the mip6d daemon
2062 via the Linux 2.6.28 (or appropriately patched) kernel.
2068 - IKEv2 charon daemon supports authentication based on raw public keys
2069 stored in the SQL database backend. The ipsec listpubkeys command
2070 lists the available raw public keys via the stroke interface.
2072 - Several MOBIKE improvements: Detect changes in NAT mappings in DPD exchanges,
2073 handle events if kernel detects NAT mapping changes in UDP-encapsulated
2074 ESP packets (requires kernel patch), reuse old addresses in MOBIKE updates as
2075 long as possible and other fixes.
2077 - Fixed a bug in addr_in_subnet() which caused insertion of wrong source
2078 routes for destination subnets having netwmasks not being a multiple of 8 bits.
2079 Thanks go to Wolfgang Steudel, TU Ilmenau for reporting this bug.
2085 - Fixed a Denial-of-Service vulnerability where an IKE_SA_INIT message with
2086 a KE payload containing zeroes only can cause a crash of the IKEv2 charon
2087 daemon due to a NULL pointer returned by the mpz_export() function of the
2088 GNU Multiprecision Library (GMP). Thanks go to Mu Dynamics Research Labs
2089 for making us aware of this problem.
2091 - The new agent plugin provides a private key implementation on top of an
2094 - The NetworkManager plugin has been extended to support certificate client
2095 authentication using RSA keys loaded from a file or using ssh-agent.
2097 - Daemon capability dropping has been ported to libcap and must be enabled
2098 explicitly --with-capabilities=libcap. Future version will support the
2099 newer libcap2 library.
2101 - ipsec listalgs lists the IKEv2 cryptografic algorithms registered with the
2102 charon keying daemon.
2108 - A NetworkManager plugin allows GUI-based configuration of road-warrior
2109 clients in a simple way. It features X509 based gateway authentication
2110 and EAP client authentication, tunnel setup/teardown and storing passwords
2111 in the Gnome Keyring.
2113 - A new EAP-GTC plugin implements draft-sheffer-ikev2-gtc-00.txt and allows
2114 username/password authentication against any PAM service on the gateway.
2115 The new EAP method interacts nicely with the NetworkManager plugin and allows
2116 client authentication against e.g. LDAP.
2118 - Improved support for the EAP-Identity method. The new ipsec.conf eap_identity
2119 parameter defines an additional identity to pass to the server in EAP
2122 - The "ipsec statusall" command now lists CA restrictions, EAP
2123 authentication types and EAP identities.
2125 - Fixed two multithreading deadlocks occurring when starting up
2126 several hundred tunnels concurrently.
2128 - Fixed the --enable-integrity-test configure option which
2129 computes a SHA-1 checksum over the libstrongswan library.
2135 - Consistent logging of IKE and CHILD SAs at the audit (AUD) level.
2137 - Improved the performance of the SQL-based virtual IP address pool
2138 by introducing an additional addresses table. The leases table
2139 storing only history information has become optional and can be
2140 disabled by setting charon.plugins.sql.lease_history = no in
2143 - The XFRM_STATE_AF_UNSPEC flag added to xfrm.h allows IPv4-over-IPv6
2144 and IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnels with the 2.6.26 and later Linux kernels.
2146 - management of different virtual IP pools for different
2147 network interfaces have become possible.
2149 - fixed a bug which prevented the assignment of more than 256
2150 virtual IP addresses from a pool managed by an sql database.
2152 - fixed a bug which did not delete own IPCOMP SAs in the kernel.
2158 - Added statistics functions to ipsec pool --status and ipsec pool --leases
2159 and input validation checks to various ipsec pool commands.
2161 - ipsec statusall now lists all loaded charon plugins and displays
2162 the negotiated IKEv2 cipher suite proposals.
2164 - The openssl plugin supports the elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman groups
2165 19, 20, 21, 25, and 26.
2167 - The openssl plugin supports ECDSA authentication using elliptic curve
2170 - Fixed a bug in stroke which caused multiple charon threads to close
2171 the file descriptors during packet transfers over the stroke socket.
2173 - ESP sequence numbers are now migrated in IPsec SA updates handled by
2174 MOBIKE. Works only with Linux kernels >= 2.6.17.
2180 - Fixed the strongswan.conf path configuration problem that occurred when
2181 --sysconfig was not set explicitly in ./configure.
2183 - Fixed a number of minor bugs that where discovered during the 4th
2184 IKEv2 interoperability workshop in San Antonio, TX.
2190 - Plugins for libstrongswan and charon can optionally be loaded according
2191 to a configuration in strongswan.conf. Most components provide a
2192 "load = " option followed by a space separated list of plugins to load.
2193 This allows e.g. the fallback from a hardware crypto accelerator to
2194 to software-based crypto plugins.
2196 - Charons SQL plugin has been extended by a virtual IP address pool.
2197 Configurations with a rightsourceip=%poolname setting query a SQLite or
2198 MySQL database for leases. The "ipsec pool" command helps in administrating
2199 the pool database. See ipsec pool --help for the available options
2201 - The Authenticated Encryption Algorithms AES-CCM-8/12/16 and AES-GCM-8/12/16
2202 for ESP are now supported starting with the Linux 2.6.25 kernel. The
2203 syntax is e.g. esp=aes128ccm12 or esp=aes256gcm16.
2209 - Support for "Hash and URL" encoded certificate payloads has been implemented
2210 in the IKEv2 daemon charon. Using the "certuribase" option of a CA section
2211 allows to assign a base URL to all certificates issued by the specified CA.
2212 The final URL is then built by concatenating that base and the hex encoded
2213 SHA1 hash of the DER encoded certificate. Note that this feature is disabled
2214 by default and must be enabled using the option "charon.hash_and_url".
2216 - The IKEv2 daemon charon now supports the "uniqueids" option to close multiple
2217 IKE_SAs with the same peer. The option value "keep" prefers existing
2218 connection setups over new ones, where the value "replace" replaces existing
2221 - The crypto factory in libstrongswan additionally supports random number
2222 generators, plugins may provide other sources of randomness. The default
2223 plugin reads raw random data from /dev/(u)random.
2225 - Extended the credential framework by a caching option to allow plugins
2226 persistent caching of fetched credentials. The "cachecrl" option has been
2229 - The new trustchain verification introduced in 4.2.0 has been parallelized.
2230 Threads fetching CRL or OCSP information no longer block other threads.
2232 - A new IKEv2 configuration attribute framework has been introduced allowing
2233 plugins to provide virtual IP addresses, and in the future, other
2234 configuration attribute services (e.g. DNS/WINS servers).
2236 - The stroke plugin has been extended to provide virtual IP addresses from
2237 a pool defined in ipsec.conf. The "rightsourceip" parameter now accepts
2238 address pools in CIDR notation (e.g. 10.1.1.0/24). The parameter also accepts
2239 the value "%poolname", where "poolname" identifies a pool provided by a
2242 - Fixed compilation on uClibc and a couple of other minor bugs.
2244 - Set DPD defaults in ipsec starter to dpd_delay=30s and dpd_timeout=150s.
2246 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon now supports the ESP encryption algorithm CAMELLIA
2247 with key lengths of 128, 192, and 256 bits, as well as the authentication
2248 algorithm AES_XCBC_MAC. Configuration example: esp=camellia192-aesxcbc.
2254 - libstrongswan has been modularized to attach crypto algorithms,
2255 credential implementations (keys, certificates) and fetchers dynamically
2256 through plugins. Existing code has been ported to plugins:
2257 - RSA/Diffie-Hellman implementation using the GNU Multi Precision library
2258 - X509 certificate system supporting CRLs, OCSP and attribute certificates
2259 - Multiple plugins providing crypto algorithms in software
2260 - CURL and OpenLDAP fetcher
2262 - libstrongswan gained a relational database API which uses pluggable database
2263 providers. Plugins for MySQL and SQLite are available.
2265 - The IKEv2 keying daemon charon is more extensible. Generic plugins may provide
2266 connection configuration, credentials and EAP methods or control the daemon.
2267 Existing code has been ported to plugins:
2268 - EAP-AKA, EAP-SIM, EAP-MD5 and EAP-Identity
2269 - stroke configuration, credential and control (compatible to pluto)
2270 - XML bases management protocol to control and query the daemon
2271 The following new plugins are available:
2272 - An experimental SQL configuration, credential and logging plugin on
2273 top of either MySQL or SQLite
2274 - A unit testing plugin to run tests at daemon startup
2276 - The authentication and credential framework in charon has been heavily
2277 refactored to support modular credential providers, proper
2278 CERTREQ/CERT payload exchanges and extensible authorization rules.
2280 - The framework of strongSwan Manager has evolved to the web application
2281 framework libfast (FastCGI Application Server w/ Templates) and is usable
2282 by other applications.
2288 - IKE rekeying in NAT situations did not inherit the NAT conditions
2289 to the rekeyed IKE_SA so that the UDP encapsulation was lost with
2290 the next CHILD_SA rekeying.
2292 - Wrong type definition of the next_payload variable in id_payload.c
2293 caused an INVALID_SYNTAX error on PowerPC platforms.
2295 - Implemented IKEv2 EAP-SIM server and client test modules that use
2296 triplets stored in a file. For details on the configuration see
2297 the scenario 'ikev2/rw-eap-sim-rsa'.
2303 - Fixed error in the ordering of the certinfo_t records in the ocsp cache that
2304 caused multiple entries of the same serial number to be created.
2306 - Implementation of a simple EAP-MD5 module which provides CHAP
2307 authentication. This may be interesting in conjunction with certificate
2308 based server authentication, as weak passwords can't be brute forced
2309 (in contradiction to traditional IKEv2 PSK).
2311 - A complete software based implementation of EAP-AKA, using algorithms
2312 specified in 3GPP2 (S.S0055). This implementation does not use an USIM,
2313 but reads the secrets from ipsec.secrets. Make sure to read eap_aka.h
2316 - Support for vendor specific EAP methods using Expanded EAP types. The
2317 interface to EAP modules has been slightly changed, so make sure to
2318 check the changes if you're already rolling your own modules.
2324 - The default _updown script now dynamically inserts and removes ip6tables
2325 firewall rules if leftfirewall=yes is set in IPv6 connections. New IPv6
2326 net-net and roadwarrior (PSK/RSA) scenarios for both IKEv1 and IKEV2 were
2329 - Implemented RFC4478 repeated authentication to force EAP/Virtual-IP clients
2330 to reestablish an IKE_SA within a given timeframe.
2332 - strongSwan Manager supports configuration listing, initiation and termination
2333 of IKE and CHILD_SAs.
2335 - Fixes and improvements to multithreading code.
2337 - IKEv2 plugins have been renamed to libcharon-* to avoid naming conflicts.
2338 Make sure to remove the old plugins in $libexecdir/ipsec, otherwise they get
2345 - Removed recursive pthread mutexes since uClibc doesn't support them.
2351 - In NAT traversal situations and multiple queued Quick Modes,
2352 those pending connections inserted by auto=start after the
2353 port floating from 500 to 4500 were erroneously deleted.
2355 - Added a "forceencaps" connection parameter to enforce UDP encapsulation
2356 to surmount restrictive firewalls. NAT detection payloads are faked to
2357 simulate a NAT situation and trick the other peer into NAT mode (IKEv2 only).
2359 - Preview of strongSwan Manager, a web based configuration and monitoring
2360 application. It uses a new XML control interface to query the IKEv2 daemon
2361 (see https://wiki.strongswan.org/wiki/Manager).
2363 - Experimental SQLite configuration backend which will provide the configuration
2364 interface for strongSwan Manager in future releases.
2366 - Further improvements to MOBIKE support.
2372 - Since some third party IKEv2 implementations run into
2373 problems with strongSwan announcing MOBIKE capability per
2374 default, MOBIKE can be disabled on a per-connection-basis
2375 using the mobike=no option. Whereas mobike=no disables the
2376 sending of the MOBIKE_SUPPORTED notification and the floating
2377 to UDP port 4500 with the IKE_AUTH request even if no NAT
2378 situation has been detected, strongSwan will still support
2379 MOBIKE acting as a responder.
2381 - the default ipsec routing table plus its corresponding priority
2382 used for inserting source routes has been changed from 100 to 220.
2383 It can be configured using the --with-ipsec-routing-table and
2384 --with-ipsec-routing-table-prio options.
2386 - the --enable-integrity-test configure option tests the
2387 integrity of the libstrongswan crypto code during the charon
2390 - the --disable-xauth-vid configure option disables the sending
2391 of the XAUTH vendor ID. This can be used as a workaround when
2392 interoperating with some Windows VPN clients that get into
2393 trouble upon reception of an XAUTH VID without eXtended
2394 AUTHentication having been configured.
2396 - ipsec stroke now supports the rereadsecrets, rereadaacerts,
2397 rereadacerts, and listacerts options.
2403 - If a DNS lookup failure occurs when resolving right=%<FQDN>
2404 or right=<FQDN> combined with rightallowany=yes then the
2405 connection is not updated by ipsec starter thus preventing
2406 the disruption of an active IPsec connection. Only if the DNS
2407 lookup successfully returns with a changed IP address the
2408 corresponding connection definition is updated.
2410 - Routes installed by the keying daemons are now in a separate
2411 routing table with the ID 100 to avoid conflicts with the main
2412 table. Route lookup for IKEv2 traffic is done in userspace to ignore
2413 routes installed for IPsec, as IKE traffic shouldn't get encapsulated.
2419 - The pluto IKEv1 daemon now exhibits the same behaviour as its
2420 IKEv2 companion charon by inserting an explicit route via the
2421 _updown script only if a sourceip exists. This is admissible
2422 since routing through the IPsec tunnel is handled automatically
2423 by NETKEY's IPsec policies. As a consequence the left|rightnexthop
2424 parameter is not required any more.
2426 - The new IKEv1 parameter right|leftallowany parameters helps to handle
2427 the case where both peers possess dynamic IP addresses that are
2428 usually resolved using DynDNS or a similar service. The configuration
2433 can be used by the initiator to start up a connection to a peer
2434 by resolving peer.foo.bar into the currently allocated IP address.
2435 Thanks to the rightallowany flag the connection behaves later on
2440 so that the peer can rekey the connection as an initiator when his
2441 IP address changes. An alternative notation is
2445 which will implicitly set rightallowany=yes.
2447 - ipsec starter now fails more gracefully in the presence of parsing
2448 errors. Flawed ca and conn section are discarded and pluto is started
2449 if non-fatal errors only were encountered. If right=%peer.foo.bar
2450 cannot be resolved by DNS then right=%any will be used so that passive
2451 connections as a responder are still possible.
2453 - The new pkcs11initargs parameter that can be placed in the
2454 setup config section of /etc/ipsec.conf allows the definition
2455 of an argument string that is used with the PKCS#11 C_Initialize()
2456 function. This non-standard feature is required by the NSS softoken
2457 library. This patch was contributed by Robert Varga.
2459 - Fixed a bug in ipsec starter introduced by strongswan-2.8.5
2460 which caused a segmentation fault in the presence of unknown
2461 or misspelt keywords in ipsec.conf. This bug fix was contributed
2464 - Partial support for MOBIKE in IKEv2. The initiator acts on interface/
2465 address configuration changes and updates IKE and IPsec SAs dynamically.
2471 - IKEv2 peer configuration selection now can be based on a given
2472 certification authority using the rightca= statement.
2474 - IKEv2 authentication based on RSA signatures now can handle multiple
2475 certificates issued for a given peer ID. This allows a smooth transition
2476 in the case of a peer certificate renewal.
2478 - IKEv2: Support for requesting a specific virtual IP using leftsourceip on the
2479 client and returning requested virtual IPs using rightsourceip=%config
2480 on the server. If the server does not support configuration payloads, the
2481 client enforces its leftsourceip parameter.
2483 - The ./configure options --with-uid/--with-gid allow pluto and charon
2484 to drop their privileges to a minimum and change to an other UID/GID. This
2485 improves the systems security, as a possible intruder may only get the
2486 CAP_NET_ADMIN capability.
2488 - Further modularization of charon: Pluggable control interface and
2489 configuration backend modules provide extensibility. The control interface
2490 for stroke is included, and further interfaces using DBUS (NetworkManager)
2491 or XML are on the way. A backend for storing configurations in the daemon
2492 is provided and more advanced backends (using e.g. a database) are trivial
2495 - Fixed a compilation failure in libfreeswan occurring with Linux kernel
2502 - Support for an additional Diffie-Hellman exchange when creating/rekeying
2503 a CHILD_SA in IKEv2 (PFS). PFS is enabled when the proposal contains a
2504 DH group (e.g. "esp=aes128-sha1-modp1536"). Further, DH group negotiation
2505 is implemented properly for rekeying.
2507 - Support for the AES-XCBC-96 MAC algorithm for IPsec SAs when using IKEv2
2508 (requires linux >= 2.6.20). It is enabled using e.g. "esp=aes256-aesxcbc".
2510 - Working IPv4-in-IPv6 and IPv6-in-IPv4 tunnels for linux >= 2.6.21.
2512 - Added support for EAP modules which do not establish an MSK.
2514 - Removed the dependencies from the /usr/include/linux/ headers by
2515 including xfrm.h, ipsec.h, and pfkeyv2.h in the distribution.
2517 - crlNumber is now listed by ipsec listcrls
2519 - The xauth_modules.verify_secret() function now passes the
2526 - Server side cookie support. If to may IKE_SAs are in CONNECTING state,
2527 cookies are enabled and protect against DoS attacks with faked source
2528 addresses. Number of IKE_SAs in CONNECTING state is also limited per
2529 peer address to avoid resource exhaustion. IKE_SA_INIT messages are
2530 compared to properly detect retransmissions and incoming retransmits are
2531 detected even if the IKE_SA is blocked (e.g. doing OCSP fetches).
2533 - The IKEv2 daemon charon now supports dynamic http- and ldap-based CRL
2534 fetching enabled by crlcheckinterval > 0 and caching fetched CRLs
2535 enabled by cachecrls=yes.
2537 - Added the configuration options --enable-nat-transport which enables
2538 the potentially insecure NAT traversal for IPsec transport mode and
2539 --disable-vendor-id which disables the sending of the strongSwan
2542 - Fixed a long-standing bug in the pluto IKEv1 daemon which caused
2543 a segmentation fault if a malformed payload was detected in the
2544 IKE MR2 message and pluto tried to send an encrypted notification
2547 - Added the NATT_IETF_02_N Vendor ID in order to support IKEv1 connections
2548 with Windows 2003 Server which uses a wrong VID hash.
2554 - Support of SHA2_384 hash function for protecting IKEv1
2555 negotiations and support of SHA2 signatures in X.509 certificates.
2557 - Fixed a serious bug in the computation of the SHA2-512 HMAC
2558 function. Introduced automatic self-test of all IKEv1 hash
2559 and hmac functions during pluto startup. Failure of a self-test
2560 currently issues a warning only but does not exit pluto [yet].
2562 - Support for SHA2-256/384/512 PRF and HMAC functions in IKEv2.
2564 - Full support of CA information sections. ipsec listcainfos
2565 now shows all collected crlDistributionPoints and OCSP
2568 - Support of the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) for IKEv2.
2569 This feature requires the HTTP fetching capabilities of the libcurl
2570 library which must be enabled by setting the --enable-http configure
2573 - Refactored core of the IKEv2 message processing code, allowing better
2574 code reuse and separation.
2576 - Virtual IP support in IKEv2 using INTERNAL_IP4/6_ADDRESS configuration
2577 payload. Additionally, the INTERNAL_IP4/6_DNS attribute is interpreted
2578 by the requestor and installed in a resolv.conf file.
2580 - The IKEv2 daemon charon installs a route for each IPsec policy to use
2581 the correct source address even if an application does not explicitly
2584 - Integrated the EAP framework into charon which loads pluggable EAP library
2585 modules. The ipsec.conf parameter authby=eap initiates EAP authentication
2586 on the client side, while the "eap" parameter on the server side defines
2587 the EAP method to use for client authentication.
2588 A generic client side EAP-Identity module and an EAP-SIM authentication
2589 module using a third party card reader implementation are included.
2591 - Added client side support for cookies.
2593 - Integrated the fixes done at the IKEv2 interoperability bakeoff, including
2594 strict payload order, correct INVALID_KE_PAYLOAD rejection and other minor
2595 fixes to enhance interoperability with other implementations.
2601 - strongSwan now interoperates with the NCP Secure Entry Client,
2602 the Shrew Soft VPN Client, and the Cisco VPN client, doing both
2603 XAUTH and Mode Config.
2605 - UNITY attributes are now recognized and UNITY_BANNER is set
2606 to a default string.
2612 - IKEv1: Support for extended authentication (XAUTH) in combination
2613 with ISAKMP Main Mode RSA or PSK authentication. Both client and
2614 server side were implemented. Handling of user credentials can
2615 be done by a run-time loadable XAUTH module. By default user
2616 credentials are stored in ipsec.secrets.
2618 - IKEv2: Support for reauthentication when rekeying
2620 - IKEv2: Support for transport mode
2622 - fixed a lot of bugs related to byte order
2624 - various other bugfixes
2630 - IKEv1: Implementation of ModeConfig push mode via the new connection
2631 keyword modeconfig=push allows interoperability with Cisco VPN gateways.
2633 - IKEv1: The command ipsec statusall now shows "DPD active" for all
2634 ISAKMP SAs that are under active Dead Peer Detection control.
2636 - IKEv2: Charon's logging and debugging framework has been completely rewritten.
2637 Instead of logger, special printf() functions are used to directly
2638 print objects like hosts (%H) identifications (%D), certificates (%Q),
2639 etc. The number of debugging levels have been reduced to:
2641 0 (audit), 1 (control), 2 (controlmore), 3 (raw), 4 (private)
2643 The debugging levels can either be specified statically in ipsec.conf as
2646 charondebug="lib 1, cfg 3, net 2"
2648 or changed at runtime via stroke as
2650 ipsec stroke loglevel cfg 2
2656 - Implemented full support for IPv6-in-IPv6 tunnels.
2658 - Added configuration options for dead peer detection in IKEv2. dpd_action
2659 types "clear", "hold" and "restart" are supported. The dpd_timeout
2660 value is not used, as the normal retransmission policy applies to
2661 detect dead peers. The dpd_delay parameter enables sending of empty
2662 informational message to detect dead peers in case of inactivity.
2664 - Added support for preshared keys in IKEv2. PSK keys configured in
2665 ipsec.secrets are loaded. The authby parameter specifies the authentication
2666 method to authentificate ourself, the other peer may use PSK or RSA.
2668 - Changed retransmission policy to respect the keyingtries parameter.
2670 - Added private key decryption. PEM keys encrypted with AES-128/192/256
2671 or 3DES are supported.
2673 - Implemented DES/3DES algorithms in libstrongswan. 3DES can be used to
2674 encrypt IKE traffic.
2676 - Implemented SHA-256/384/512 in libstrongswan, allows usage of certificates
2677 signed with such a hash algorithm.
2679 - Added initial support for updown scripts. The actions up-host/client and
2680 down-host/client are executed. The leftfirewall=yes parameter
2681 uses the default updown script to insert dynamic firewall rules, a custom
2682 updown script may be specified with the leftupdown parameter.
2688 - Added support for the auto=route ipsec.conf parameter and the
2689 ipsec route/unroute commands for IKEv2. This allows to set up IKE_SAs and
2690 CHILD_SAs dynamically on demand when traffic is detected by the
2693 - Added support for rekeying IKE_SAs in IKEv2 using the ikelifetime parameter.
2694 As specified in IKEv2, no reauthentication is done (unlike in IKEv1), only
2695 new keys are generated using perfect forward secrecy. An optional flag
2696 which enforces reauthentication will be implemented later.
2698 - "sha" and "sha1" are now treated as synonyms in the ike= and esp=
2699 algorithm configuration statements.
2705 - Full X.509 certificate trust chain verification has been implemented.
2706 End entity certificates can be exchanged via CERT payloads. The current
2707 default is leftsendcert=always, since CERTREQ payloads are not supported
2708 yet. Optional CRLs must be imported locally into /etc/ipsec.d/crls.
2710 - Added support for leftprotoport/rightprotoport parameters in IKEv2. IKEv2
2711 would offer more possibilities for traffic selection, but the Linux kernel
2712 currently does not support it. That's why we stick with these simple
2713 ipsec.conf rules for now.
2715 - Added Dead Peer Detection (DPD) which checks liveliness of remote peer if no
2716 IKE or ESP traffic is received. DPD is currently hardcoded (dpdaction=clear,
2719 - Initial NAT traversal support in IKEv2. Charon includes NAT detection
2720 notify payloads to detect NAT routers between the peers. It switches
2721 to port 4500, uses UDP encapsulated ESP packets, handles peer address
2722 changes gracefully and sends keep alive message periodically.
2724 - Reimplemented IKE_SA state machine for charon, which allows simultaneous
2725 rekeying, more shared code, cleaner design, proper retransmission
2726 and a more extensible code base.
2728 - The mixed PSK/RSA roadwarrior detection capability introduced by the
2729 strongswan-2.7.0 release necessitated the pre-parsing of the IKE proposal
2730 payloads by the responder right before any defined IKE Main Mode state had
2731 been established. Although any form of bad proposal syntax was being correctly
2732 detected by the payload parser, the subsequent error handler didn't check
2733 the state pointer before logging current state information, causing an
2734 immediate crash of the pluto keying daemon due to a NULL pointer.
2740 - Added algorithm selection to charon: New default algorithms for
2741 ike=aes128-sha-modp2048, as both daemons support it. The default
2742 for IPsec SAs is now esp=aes128-sha,3des-md5. charon handles
2743 the ike/esp parameter the same way as pluto. As this syntax does
2744 not allow specification of a pseudo random function, the same
2745 algorithm as for integrity is used (currently sha/md5). Supported
2747 Encryption: aes128, aes192, aes256
2748 Integrity/PRF: md5, sha (using hmac)
2749 DH-Groups: modp768, 1024, 1536, 2048, 4096, 8192
2751 Encryption: aes128, aes192, aes256, 3des, blowfish128,
2752 blowfish192, blowfish256
2753 Integrity: md5, sha1
2754 More IKE encryption algorithms will come after porting libcrypto into
2757 - initial support for rekeying CHILD_SAs using IKEv2. Currently no
2758 perfect forward secrecy is used. The rekeying parameters rekey,
2759 rekeymargin, rekeyfuzz and keylife from ipsec.conf are now supported
2760 when using IKEv2. WARNING: charon currently is unable to handle
2761 simultaneous rekeying. To avoid such a situation, use a large
2762 rekeyfuzz, or even better, set rekey=no on one peer.
2764 - support for host2host, net2net, host2net (roadwarrior) tunnels
2765 using predefined RSA certificates (see uml scenarios for
2766 configuration examples).
2768 - new build environment featuring autotools. Features such
2769 as HTTP, LDAP and smartcard support may be enabled using
2770 the ./configure script. Changing install directories
2771 is possible, too. See ./configure --help for more details.
2773 - better integration of charon with ipsec starter, which allows
2774 (almost) transparent operation with both daemons. charon
2775 handles ipsec commands up, down, status, statusall, listall,
2776 listcerts and allows proper load, reload and delete of connections
2783 - initial support of the IKEv2 protocol. Connections in
2784 ipsec.conf designated by keyexchange=ikev2 are negotiated
2785 by the new IKEv2 charon keying daemon whereas those marked
2786 by keyexchange=ikev1 or the default keyexchange=ike are
2787 handled thy the IKEv1 pluto keying daemon. Currently only
2788 a limited subset of functions are available with IKEv2
2789 (Default AES encryption, authentication based on locally
2790 imported X.509 certificates, unencrypted private RSA keys
2791 in PKCS#1 file format, limited functionality of the ipsec
2798 - the dynamic iptables rules from the _updown_x509 template
2799 for KLIPS and the _updown_policy template for NETKEY have
2800 been merged into the default _updown script. The existing
2801 left|rightfirewall keyword causes the automatic insertion
2802 and deletion of ACCEPT rules for tunneled traffic upon
2803 the successful setup and teardown of an IPsec SA, respectively.
2804 left|rightfirwall can be used with KLIPS under any Linux 2.4
2805 kernel or with NETKEY under a Linux kernel version >= 2.6.16
2806 in conjunction with iptables >= 1.3.5. For NETKEY under a Linux
2807 kernel version < 2.6.16 which does not support IPsec policy
2808 matching yet, please continue to use a copy of the _updown_espmark
2809 template loaded via the left|rightupdown keyword.
2811 - a new left|righthostaccess keyword has been introduced which
2812 can be used in conjunction with left|rightfirewall and the
2813 default _updown script. By default leftfirewall=yes inserts
2814 a bi-directional iptables FORWARD rule for a local client network
2815 with a netmask different from 255.255.255.255 (single host).
2816 This does not allow to access the VPN gateway host via its
2817 internal network interface which is part of the client subnet
2818 because an iptables INPUT and OUTPUT rule would be required.
2819 lefthostaccess=yes will cause this additional ACCEPT rules to
2822 - mixed PSK|RSA roadwarriors are now supported. The ISAKMP proposal
2823 payload is preparsed in order to find out whether the roadwarrior
2824 requests PSK or RSA so that a matching connection candidate can
2831 - the new _updown_policy template allows ipsec policy based
2832 iptables firewall rules. Required are iptables version
2833 >= 1.3.5 and linux kernel >= 2.6.16. This script obsoletes
2834 the _updown_espmark template, so that no INPUT mangle rules
2835 are required any more.
2837 - added support of DPD restart mode
2839 - ipsec starter now allows the use of wildcards in include
2840 statements as e.g. in "include /etc/my_ipsec/*.conf".
2841 Patch courtesy of Matthias Haas.
2843 - the Netscape OID 'employeeNumber' is now recognized and can be
2844 used as a Relative Distinguished Name in certificates.
2850 - /etc/init.d/ipsec or /etc/rc.d/ipsec is now a copy of the ipsec
2851 command and not of ipsec setup any more.
2853 - ipsec starter now supports AH authentication in conjunction with
2854 ESP encryption. AH authentication is configured in ipsec.conf
2855 via the auth=ah parameter.
2857 - The command ipsec scencrypt|scdecrypt <args> is now an alias for
2858 ipsec whack --scencrypt|scdecrypt <args>.
2860 - get_sa_info() now determines for the native netkey IPsec stack
2861 the exact time of the last use of an active eroute. This information
2862 is used by the Dead Peer Detection algorithm and is also displayed by
2863 the ipsec status command.
2869 - running under the native Linux 2.6 IPsec stack, the function
2870 get_sa_info() is called by ipsec auto --status to display the current
2871 number of transmitted bytes per IPsec SA.
2873 - get_sa_info() is also used by the Dead Peer Detection process to detect
2874 recent ESP activity. If ESP traffic was received from the peer within
2875 the last dpd_delay interval then no R_Y_THERE notification must be sent.
2877 - strongSwan now supports the Relative Distinguished Name "unstructuredName"
2878 in ID_DER_ASN1_DN identities. The following notations are possible:
2880 rightid="unstructuredName=John Doe"
2881 rightid="UN=John Doe"
2883 - fixed a long-standing bug which caused PSK-based roadwarrior connections
2884 to segfault in the function id.c:same_id() called by keys.c:get_secret()
2885 if an FQDN, USER_FQDN, or Key ID was defined, as in the following example.
2892 - the ipsec command now supports most ipsec auto commands (e.g. ipsec listall).
2894 - ipsec starter didn't set host_addr and client.addr ports in whack msg.
2896 - in order to guarantee backwards-compatibility with the script-based
2897 auto function (e.g. auto --replace), the ipsec starter scripts stores
2898 the defaultroute information in the temporary file /var/run/ipsec.info.
2900 - The compile-time option USE_XAUTH_VID enables the sending of the XAUTH
2901 Vendor ID which is expected by Cisco PIX 7 boxes that act as IKE Mode Config
2904 - the ipsec starter now also recognizes the parameters authby=never and
2905 type=passthrough|pass|drop|reject.
2911 - ipsec starter now supports the also parameter which allows
2912 a modular structure of the connection definitions. Thus
2913 "ipsec start" is now ready to replace "ipsec setup".
2919 - Mathieu Lafon's popular ipsec starter tool has been added to the
2920 strongSwan distribution. Many thanks go to Stephan Scholz from astaro
2921 for his integration work. ipsec starter is a C program which is going
2922 to replace the various shell and awk starter scripts (setup, _plutoload,
2923 _plutostart, _realsetup, _startklips, _confread, and auto). Since
2924 ipsec.conf is now parsed only once, the starting of multiple tunnels is
2925 accelerated tremedously.
2927 - Added support of %defaultroute to the ipsec starter. If the IP address
2928 changes, a HUP signal to the ipsec starter will automatically
2929 reload pluto's connections.
2931 - moved most compile time configurations from pluto/Makefile to
2932 Makefile.inc by defining the options USE_LIBCURL, USE_LDAP,
2933 USE_SMARTCARD, and USE_NAT_TRAVERSAL_TRANSPORT_MODE.
2935 - removed the ipsec verify and ipsec newhostkey commands
2937 - fixed some 64-bit issues in formatted print statements
2939 - The scepclient functionality implementing the Simple Certificate
2940 Enrollment Protocol (SCEP) is nearly complete but hasn't been
2947 - CA certificates are now automatically loaded from a smartcard
2948 or USB crypto token and appear in the ipsec auto --listcacerts
2955 - when using "ipsec whack --scencrypt <data>" with a PKCS#11
2956 library that does not support the C_Encrypt() Cryptoki
2957 function (e.g. OpenSC), the RSA encryption is done in
2958 software using the public key fetched from the smartcard.
2960 - The scepclient function now allows to define the
2961 validity of a self-signed certificate using the --days,
2962 --startdate, and --enddate options. The default validity
2963 has been changed from one year to five years.
2969 - the config setup parameter pkcs11proxy=yes opens pluto's PKCS#11
2970 interface to other applications for RSA encryption and decryption
2971 via the whack interface. Notation:
2973 ipsec whack --scencrypt <data>
2974 [--inbase 16|hex|64|base64|256|text|ascii]
2975 [--outbase 16|hex|64|base64|256|text|ascii]
2978 ipsec whack --scdecrypt <data>
2979 [--inbase 16|hex|64|base64|256|text|ascii]
2980 [--outbase 16|hex|64|base64|256|text|ascii]
2983 The default setting for inbase and outbase is hex.
2985 The new proxy interface can be used for securing symmetric
2986 encryption keys required by the cryptoloop or dm-crypt
2987 disk encryption schemes, especially in the case when
2988 pkcs11keepstate=yes causes pluto to lock the pkcs11 slot
2991 - if the file /etc/ipsec.secrets is lacking during the startup of
2992 pluto then the root-readable file /etc/ipsec.d/private/myKey.der
2993 containing a 2048 bit RSA private key and a matching self-signed
2994 certificate stored in the file /etc/ipsec.d/certs/selfCert.der
2995 is automatically generated by calling the function
2997 ipsec scepclient --out pkcs1 --out cert-self
2999 scepclient was written by Jan Hutter and Martin Willi, students
3000 at the University of Applied Sciences in Rapperswil, Switzerland.
3006 - the current extension of the PKCS#7 framework introduced
3007 a parsing error in PKCS#7 wrapped X.509 certificates that are
3008 e.g. transmitted by Windows XP when multi-level CAs are used.
3009 the parsing syntax has been fixed.
3011 - added a patch by Gerald Richter which tolerates multiple occurrences
3012 of the ipsec0 interface when using KLIPS.
3018 - with gawk-3.1.4 the word "default2 has become a protected
3019 keyword for use in switch statements and cannot be used any
3020 more in the strongSwan scripts. This problem has been
3021 solved by renaming "default" to "defaults" and "setdefault"
3022 in the scripts _confread and auto, respectively.
3024 - introduced the parameter leftsendcert with the values
3026 always|yes (the default, always send a cert)
3027 ifasked (send the cert only upon a cert request)
3028 never|no (never send a cert, used for raw RSA keys and
3031 - fixed the initialization of the ESP key length to a default of
3032 128 bits in the case that the peer does not send a key length
3033 attribute for AES encryption.
3035 - applied Herbert Xu's uniqueIDs patch
3037 - applied Herbert Xu's CLOEXEC patches
3043 - CRLs can now be cached also in the case when the issuer's
3044 certificate does not contain a subjectKeyIdentifier field.
3045 In that case the subjectKeyIdentifier is computed by pluto as the
3046 160 bit SHA-1 hash of the issuer's public key in compliance
3047 with section 4.2.1.2 of RFC 3280.
3049 - Fixed a bug introduced by strongswan-2.5.1 which eliminated
3050 not only multiple Quick Modes of a given connection but also
3051 multiple connections between two security gateways.
3057 - Under the native IPsec of the Linux 2.6 kernel, a %trap eroute
3058 installed either by setting auto=route in ipsec.conf or by
3059 a connection put into hold, generates an XFRM_AQUIRE event
3060 for each packet that wants to use the not-yet existing
3061 tunnel. Up to now each XFRM_AQUIRE event led to an entry in
3062 the Quick Mode queue, causing multiple IPsec SA to be
3063 established in rapid succession. Starting with strongswan-2.5.1
3064 only a single IPsec SA is established per host-pair connection.
3066 - Right after loading the PKCS#11 module, all smartcard slots are
3067 searched for certificates. The result can be viewed using
3070 ipsec auto --listcards
3072 The certificate objects found in the slots are numbered
3073 starting with #1, #2, etc. This position number can be used to address
3074 certificates (leftcert=%smartcard) and keys (: PIN %smartcard)
3075 in ipsec.conf and ipsec.secrets, respectively:
3077 %smartcard (selects object #1)
3078 %smartcard#1 (selects object #1)
3079 %smartcard#3 (selects object #3)
3081 As an alternative the existing retrieval scheme can be used:
3083 %smartcard:45 (selects object with id=45)
3084 %smartcard0 (selects first object in slot 0)
3085 %smartcard4:45 (selects object in slot 4 with id=45)
3087 - Depending on the settings of CKA_SIGN and CKA_DECRYPT
3088 private key flags either C_Sign() or C_Decrypt() is used
3089 to generate a signature.
3091 - The output buffer length parameter siglen in C_Sign()
3092 is now initialized to the actual size of the output
3093 buffer prior to the function call. This fixes the
3094 CKR_BUFFER_TOO_SMALL error that could occur when using
3095 the OpenSC PKCS#11 module.
3097 - Changed the initialization of the PKCS#11 CK_MECHANISM in
3098 C_SignInit() to mech = { CKM_RSA_PKCS, NULL_PTR, 0 }.
3100 - Refactored the RSA public/private key code and transferred it
3101 from keys.c to the new pkcs1.c file as a preparatory step
3102 towards the release of the SCEP client.
3108 - The loading of a PKCS#11 smartcard library module during
3109 runtime does not require OpenSC library functions any more
3110 because the corresponding code has been integrated into
3111 smartcard.c. Also the RSAREF pkcs11 header files have been
3112 included in a newly created pluto/rsaref directory so that
3113 no external include path has to be defined any longer.
3115 - A long-awaited feature has been implemented at last:
3116 The local caching of CRLs fetched via HTTP or LDAP, activated
3117 by the parameter cachecrls=yes in the config setup section
3118 of ipsec.conf. The dynamically fetched CRLs are stored under
3119 a unique file name containing the issuer's subjectKeyID
3120 in /etc/ipsec.d/crls.
3122 - Applied a one-line patch courtesy of Michael Richardson
3123 from the Openswan project which fixes the kernel-oops
3124 in KLIPS when an snmp daemon is running on the same box.
3130 - Eliminated null length CRL distribution point strings.
3132 - Fixed a trust path evaluation bug introduced with 2.4.3
3138 - Improved the joint OCSP / CRL revocation policy.
3139 OCSP responses have precedence over CRL entries.
3141 - Introduced support of CRLv2 reason codes.
3143 - Fixed a bug with key-pad equipped readers which caused
3144 pluto to prompt for the pin via the console when the first
3145 occasion to enter the pin via the key-pad was missed.
3147 - When pluto is built with LDAP_V3 enabled, the library
3148 liblber required by newer versions of openldap is now
3155 - Added the _updown_espmark template which requires all
3156 incoming ESP traffic to be marked with a default mark
3159 - Introduced the pkcs11keepstate parameter in the config setup
3160 section of ipsec.conf. With pkcs11keepstate=yes the PKCS#11
3161 session and login states are kept as long as possible during
3162 the lifetime of pluto. This means that a PIN entry via a key
3163 pad has to be done only once.
3165 - Introduced the pkcs11module parameter in the config setup
3166 section of ipsec.conf which specifies the PKCS#11 module
3167 to be used with smart cards. Example:
3169 pkcs11module=/usr/lib/pkcs11/opensc-pkcs11.lo
3171 - Added support of smartcard readers equipped with a PIN pad.
3173 - Added patch by Jay Pfeifer which detects when netkey
3174 modules have been statically built into the Linux 2.6 kernel.
3176 - Added two patches by Herbert Xu. The first uses ip xfrm
3177 instead of setkey to flush the IPsec policy database. The
3178 second sets the optional flag in inbound IPComp SAs only.
3180 - Applied Ulrich Weber's patch which fixes an interoperability
3181 problem between native IPsec and KLIPS systems caused by
3182 setting the replay window to 32 instead of 0 for ipcomp.
3188 - Fixed a bug which caused an unwanted Mode Config request
3189 to be initiated in the case where "right" was used to denote
3190 the local side in ipsec.conf and "left" the remote side,
3191 contrary to the recommendation that "right" be remote and
3198 - updated Vendor ID to strongSwan-2.4.0
3200 - updated copyright statement to include David Buechi and
3207 - strongSwan now communicates with attached smartcards and
3208 USB crypto tokens via the standardized PKCS #11 interface.
3209 By default the OpenSC library from www.opensc.org is used
3210 but any other PKCS#11 library could be dynamically linked.
3211 strongSwan's PKCS#11 API was implemented by David Buechi
3212 and Michael Meier, both graduates of the Zurich University
3213 of Applied Sciences in Winterthur, Switzerland.
3215 - When a %trap eroute is triggered by an outgoing IP packet
3216 then the native IPsec stack of the Linux 2.6 kernel [often/
3217 always?] returns an XFRM_ACQUIRE message with an undefined
3218 protocol family field and the connection setup fails.
3219 As a workaround IPv4 (AF_INET) is now assumed.
3221 - the results of the UML test scenarios are now enhanced
3222 with block diagrams of the virtual network topology used
3223 in a particular test.
3229 - fixed IV used to decrypt informational messages.
3230 This bug was introduced with Mode Config functionality.
3232 - fixed NCP Vendor ID.
3234 - undid one of Ulrich Weber's maximum udp size patches
3235 because it caused a segmentation fault with NAT-ed
3238 - added UML scenarios wildcards and attr-cert which
3239 demonstrate the implementation of IPsec policies based
3240 on wildcard parameters contained in Distinguished Names and
3241 on X.509 attribute certificates, respectively.
3247 - Added basic Mode Config functionality
3249 - Added Mathieu Lafon's patch which upgrades the status of
3250 the NAT-Traversal implementation to RFC 3947.
3252 - The _startklips script now also loads the xfrm4_tunnel
3255 - Added Ulrich Weber's netlink replay window size and
3256 maximum udp size patches.
3258 - UML testing now uses the Linux 2.6.10 UML kernel by default.
3264 - Eric Marchionni and Patrik Rayo, both recent graduates from
3265 the Zuercher Hochschule Winterthur in Switzerland, created a
3266 User-Mode-Linux test setup for strongSwan. For more details
3267 please read the INSTALL and README documents in the testing
3270 - Full support of group attributes based on X.509 attribute
3271 certificates. Attribute certificates can be generated
3272 using the openac facility. For more details see
3276 The group attributes can be used in connection definitions
3277 in order to give IPsec access to specific user groups.
3278 This is done with the new parameter left|rightgroups as in
3280 rightgroups="Research, Sales"
3282 giving access to users possessing the group attributes
3283 Research or Sales, only.
3285 - In Quick Mode clients with subnet mask /32 are now
3286 coded as IP_V4_ADDRESS or IP_V6_ADDRESS. This should
3287 fix rekeying problems with the SafeNet/SoftRemote and NCP
3288 Secure Entry Clients.
3290 - Changed the defaults of the ikelifetime and keylife parameters
3291 to 3h and 1h, respectively. The maximum allowable values are
3292 now both set to 24 h.
3294 - Suppressed notification wars between two IPsec peers that
3295 could e.g. be triggered by incorrect ISAKMP encryption.
3297 - Public RSA keys can now have identical IDs if either the
3298 issuing CA or the serial number is different. The serial
3299 number of a certificate is now shown by the command
3301 ipsec auto --listpubkeys
3307 - Added Tuomo Soini's sourceip feature which allows a strongSwan
3308 roadwarrior to use a fixed Virtual IP (see README section 2.6)
3309 and reduces the well-known four tunnel case on VPN gateways to
3310 a single tunnel definition (see README section 2.4).
3312 - Fixed a bug occurring with NAT-Traversal enabled when the responder
3313 suddenly turns initiator and the initiator cannot find a matching
3314 connection because of the floated IKE port 4500.
3316 - Removed misleading ipsec verify command from barf.
3318 - Running under the native IP stack, ipsec --version now shows
3319 the Linux kernel version (courtesy to the Openswan project).
3325 - Introduced the ipsec auto --listalgs monitoring command which lists
3326 all currently registered IKE and ESP algorithms.
3328 - Fixed a bug in the ESP algorithm selection occurring when the strict flag
3329 is set and the first proposed transform does not match.
3331 - Fixed another deadlock in the use of the lock_certs_and_keys() mutex,
3332 occurring when a smartcard is present.
3334 - Prevented that a superseded Phase1 state can trigger a DPD_TIMEOUT event.
3336 - Fixed the printing of the notification names (null)
3338 - Applied another of Herbert Xu's Netlink patches.
3344 - Support of Dead Peer Detection. The connection parameter
3346 dpdaction=clear|hold
3348 activates DPD for the given connection.
3350 - The default Opportunistic Encryption (OE) policy groups are not
3351 automatically included anymore. Those wishing to activate OE can include
3352 the policy group with the following statement in ipsec.conf:
3354 include /etc/ipsec.d/examples/oe.conf
3356 The default for [right|left]rsasigkey is now set to %cert.
3358 - strongSwan now has a Vendor ID of its own which can be activated
3359 using the compile option VENDORID
3361 - Applied Herbert Xu's patch which sets the compression algorithm correctly.
3363 - Applied Herbert Xu's patch fixing an ESPINUDP problem
3365 - Applied Herbert Xu's patch setting source/destination port numbers.
3367 - Reapplied one of Herbert Xu's NAT-Traversal patches which got
3368 lost during the migration from SuperFreeS/WAN.
3370 - Fixed a deadlock in the use of the lock_certs_and_keys() mutex.
3372 - Fixed the unsharing of alg parameters when instantiating group
3379 - Thomas Walpuski made me aware of a potential DoS attack via
3380 a PKCS#7-wrapped certificate bundle which could overwrite valid CA
3381 certificates in Pluto's authority certificate store. This vulnerability
3382 was fixed by establishing trust in CA candidate certificates up to a
3383 trusted root CA prior to insertion into Pluto's chained list.
3385 - replaced the --assign option by the -v option in the auto awk script
3386 in order to make it run with mawk under debian/woody.
3392 - Split of the status information between ipsec auto --status (concise)
3393 and ipsec auto --statusall (verbose). Both commands can be used with
3394 an optional connection selector:
3396 ipsec auto --status[all] <connection_name>
3398 - Added the description of X.509 related features to the ipsec_auto(8)
3401 - Hardened the ASN.1 parser in debug mode, especially the printing
3402 of malformed distinguished names.
3404 - The size of an RSA public key received in a certificate is now restricted to
3406 512 bits <= modulus length <= 8192 bits.
3408 - Fixed the debug mode enumeration.
3414 - Fixed another PKCS#7 vulnerability which could lead to an
3415 endless loop while following the X.509 trust chain.
3421 - Fixed the PKCS#7 vulnerability discovered by Thomas Walpuski
3422 that accepted end certificates having identical issuer and subject
3423 distinguished names in a multi-tier X.509 trust chain.
3429 - Removed all remaining references to ipsec_netlink.h in KLIPS.
3435 - The new "ca" section allows to define the following parameters:
3438 cacert=koolCA.pem # cacert of kool CA
3439 ocspuri=http://ocsp.kool.net:8001 # ocsp server
3440 ldapserver=ldap.kool.net # default ldap server
3441 crluri=http://www.kool.net/kool.crl # crl distribution point
3442 crluri2="ldap:///O=Kool, C= .." # crl distribution point #2
3443 auto=add # add, ignore
3445 The ca definitions can be monitored via the command
3447 ipsec auto --listcainfos
3449 - Fixed cosmetic corruption of /proc filesystem by integrating
3450 D. Hugh Redelmeier's freeswan-2.06 kernel fixes.
3456 - Added support for the 818043 NAT-Traversal update of Microsoft's
3457 Windows 2000/XP IPsec client which sends an ID_FQDN during Quick Mode.
3459 - A symbolic link to libcrypto is now added in the kernel sources
3460 during kernel compilation
3462 - Fixed a couple of 64 bit issues (mostly casts to int).
3463 Thanks to Ken Bantoft who checked my sources on a 64 bit platform.
3465 - Replaced s[n]printf() statements in the kernel by ipsec_snprintf().
3466 Credits go to D. Hugh Redelmeier, Michael Richardson, and Sam Sgro
3467 of the FreeS/WAN team who solved this problem with the 2.4.25 kernel.
3473 - an empty ASN.1 SEQUENCE OF or SET OF object (e.g. a subjectAltName
3474 certificate extension which contains no generalName item) can cause
3475 a pluto crash. This bug has been fixed. Additionally the ASN.1 parser has
3476 been hardened to make it more robust against malformed ASN.1 objects.
3478 - applied Herbert Xu's NAT-T patches which fixes NAT-T under the native
3479 Linux 2.6 IPsec stack.
3485 - based on freeswan-2.04, x509-1.5.3, nat-0.6c, alg-0.8.1rc12