4 - The lean stand-alone pt-tls-client can set up a RFC 6876 PT-TLS session
5 with a strongSwan policy enforcement point which uses the tnc-pdp charon plugin.
11 - Fixed a denial-of-service vulnerability triggered by specific XAuth usernames
12 and EAP identities (since 5.0.3), and PEM files (since 4.1.11). The crash
13 was caused by insufficient error handling in the is_asn1() function.
14 The vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2013-5018.
16 - The new charon-cmd command line IKE client can establish road warrior
17 connections using IKEv1 or IKEv2 with different authentication profiles.
18 It does not depend on any configuration files and can be configured using a
19 few simple command line options.
21 - The kernel-pfroute networking backend has been greatly improved. It now
22 can install virtual IPs on TUN devices on OS X and FreeBSD, allowing these
23 systems to act as a client in common road warrior scenarios.
25 - The new kernel-libipsec plugin uses TUN devices and libipsec to provide IPsec
26 processing in userland on Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X.
28 - The eap-radius plugin can now serve as an XAuth backend called xauth-radius,
29 directly verifying XAuth credentials using RADIUS User-Name/User-Password
30 attributes. This is more efficient than the existing xauth-eap+eap-radius
31 combination, and allows RADIUS servers without EAP support to act as AAA
34 - The new osx-attr plugin installs configuration attributes (currently DNS
35 servers) via SystemConfiguration on Mac OS X. The keychain plugin provides
36 certificates from the OS X keychain service.
38 - The sshkey plugin parses SSH public keys, which, together with the --agent
39 option for charon-cmd, allows the use of ssh-agent for authentication.
40 To configure SSH keys in ipsec.conf the left|rightrsasigkey options are
41 replaced with left|rightsigkey, which now take public keys in one of three
42 formats: SSH (RFC 4253, ssh: prefix), DNSKEY (RFC 3110, dns: prefix), and
43 PKCS#1 (the default, no prefix).
45 - Extraction of certificates and private keys from PKCS#12 files is now provided
46 by the new pkcs12 plugin or the openssl plugin. charon-cmd (--p12) as well
47 as charon (via P12 token in ipsec.secrets) can make use of this.
49 - IKEv2 can now negotiate transport mode and IPComp in NAT situations.
51 - IKEv2 exchange initiators now properly close an established IKE or CHILD_SA
52 on error conditions using an additional exchange, keeping state in sync
55 - Using a SQL database interface a Trusted Network Connect (TNC) Policy Manager
56 can generate specific measurement workitems for an arbitrary number of
57 Integrity Measurement Verifiers (IMVs) based on the history of the VPN user
60 - Several core classes in libstrongswan are now tested with unit tests. These
61 can be enabled with --enable-unit-tests and run with 'make check'. Coverage
62 reports can be generated with --enable-coverage and 'make coverage' (this
63 disables any optimization, so it should not be enabled when building
66 - The leak-detective developer tool has been greatly improved. It works much
67 faster/stabler with multiple threads, does not use deprecated malloc hooks
68 anymore and has been ported to OS X.
70 - chunk_hash() is now based on SipHash-2-4 with a random key. This provides
71 better distribution and prevents hash flooding attacks when used with
74 - All default plugins implement the get_features() method to define features
75 and their dependencies. The plugin loader has been improved, so that plugins
76 in a custom load statement can be ordered freely or to express preferences
77 without being affected by dependencies between plugin features.
79 - A centralized thread can take care for watching multiple file descriptors
80 concurrently. This removes the need for a dedicated listener threads in
81 various plugins. The number of "reserved" threads for such tasks has been
82 reduced to about five, depending on the plugin configuration.
84 - Plugins that can be controlled by a UNIX socket IPC mechanism gained network
85 transparency. Third party applications querying these plugins now can use
86 TCP connections from a different host.
88 - libipsec now supports AES-GCM.
94 - Fixed a security vulnerability in the openssl plugin which was reported by
95 Kevin Wojtysiak. The vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2013-2944.
96 Before the fix, if the openssl plugin's ECDSA signature verification was used,
97 due to a misinterpretation of the error code returned by the OpenSSL
98 ECDSA_verify() function, an empty or zeroed signature was accepted as a
101 - The handling of a couple of other non-security relevant openssl return codes
104 - The tnc_ifmap plugin now publishes virtual IPv4 and IPv6 addresses via its
105 TCG TNC IF-MAP 2.1 interface.
107 - The charon.initiator_only option causes charon to ignore IKE initiation
110 - The openssl plugin can now use the openssl-fips library.
116 - The new ipseckey plugin enables authentication based on trustworthy public
117 keys stored as IPSECKEY resource records in the DNS and protected by DNSSEC.
118 To do so it uses a DNSSEC enabled resolver, like the one provided by the new
119 unbound plugin, which is based on libldns and libunbound. Both plugins were
120 created by Reto Guadagnini.
122 - Implemented the TCG TNC IF-IMV 1.4 draft making access requestor identities
123 available to an IMV. The OS IMV stores the AR identity together with the
124 device ID in the attest database.
126 - The openssl plugin now uses the AES-NI accelerated version of AES-GCM
127 if the hardware supports it.
129 - The eap-radius plugin can now assign virtual IPs to IKE clients using the
130 Framed-IP-Address attribute by using the "%radius" named pool in the
131 rightsourceip ipsec.conf option. Cisco Banner attributes are forwarded to
132 Unity-capable IKEv1 clients during mode config. charon now sends Interim
133 Accounting updates if requested by the RADIUS server, reports
134 sent/received packets in Accounting messages, and adds a Terminate-Cause
137 - The recently introduced "ipsec listcounters" command can report connection
138 specific counters by passing a connection name, and global or connection
139 counters can be reset by the "ipsec resetcounters" command.
141 - The strongSwan libpttls library provides an experimental implementation of
142 PT-TLS (RFC 6876), a Posture Transport Protocol over TLS.
144 - The charon systime-fix plugin can disable certificate lifetime checks on
145 embedded systems if the system time is obviously out of sync after bootup.
146 Certificates lifetimes get checked once the system time gets sane, closing
147 or reauthenticating connections using expired certificates.
149 - The "ikedscp" ipsec.conf option can set DiffServ code points on outgoing
152 - The new xauth-noauth plugin allows to use basic RSA or PSK authentication with
153 clients that cannot be configured without XAuth authentication. The plugin
154 simply concludes the XAuth exchange successfully without actually performing
155 any authentication. Therefore, to use this backend it has to be selected
156 explicitly with rightauth2=xauth-noauth.
158 - The new charon-tkm IKEv2 daemon delegates security critical operations to a
159 separate process. This has the benefit that the network facing daemon has no
160 knowledge of keying material used to protect child SAs. Thus subverting
161 charon-tkm does not result in the compromise of cryptographic keys.
162 The extracted functionality has been implemented from scratch in a minimal TCB
163 (trusted computing base) in the Ada programming language. Further information
164 can be found at http://www.codelabs.ch/tkm/.
169 - Implemented all IETF Standard PA-TNC attributes and an OS IMC/IMV
170 pair using them to transfer operating system information.
172 - The new "ipsec listcounters" command prints a list of global counter values
173 about received and sent IKE messages and rekeyings.
175 - A new lookip plugin can perform fast lookup of tunnel information using a
176 clients virtual IP and can send notifications about established or deleted
177 tunnels. The "ipsec lookip" command can be used to query such information
178 or receive notifications.
180 - The new error-notify plugin catches some common error conditions and allows
181 an external application to receive notifications for them over a UNIX socket.
183 - IKE proposals can now use a PRF algorithm different to that defined for
184 integrity protection. If an algorithm with a "prf" prefix is defined
185 explicitly (such as prfsha1 or prfsha256), no implicit PRF algorithm based on
186 the integrity algorithm is added to the proposal.
188 - The pkcs11 plugin can now load leftcert certificates from a smartcard for a
189 specific ipsec.conf conn section and cacert CA certificates for a specific ca
192 - The load-tester plugin gained additional options for certificate generation
193 and can load keys and multiple CA certificates from external files. It can
194 install a dedicated outer IP address for each tunnel and tunnel initiation
195 batches can be triggered and monitored externally using the
196 "ipsec load-tester" tool.
198 - PKCS#7 container parsing has been modularized, and the openssl plugin
199 gained an alternative implementation to decrypt and verify such files.
200 In contrast to our own DER parser, OpenSSL can handle BER files, which is
201 required for interoperability of our scepclient with EJBCA.
203 - Support for the proprietary IKEv1 fragmentation extension has been added.
204 Fragments are always handled on receipt but only sent if supported by the peer
205 and if enabled with the new fragmentation ipsec.conf option.
207 - IKEv1 in charon can now parse certificates received in PKCS#7 containers and
208 supports NAT traversal as used by Windows clients. Patches courtesy of
211 - The new rdrand plugin provides a high quality / high performance random
212 source using the Intel rdrand instruction found on Ivy Bridge processors.
214 - The integration test environment was updated and now uses KVM and reproducible
215 guest images based on Debian.
221 - Introduced the sending of the standard IETF Assessment Result
222 PA-TNC attribute by all strongSwan Integrity Measurement Verifiers.
224 - Extended PTS Attestation IMC/IMV pair to provide full evidence of
225 the Linux IMA measurement process. All pertinent file information
226 of a Linux OS can be collected and stored in an SQL database.
228 - The PA-TNC and PB-TNC protocols can now process huge data payloads
229 >64 kB by distributing PA-TNC attributes over multiple PA-TNC messages
230 and these messages over several PB-TNC batches. As long as no
231 consolidated recommandation from all IMVs can be obtained, the TNC
232 server requests more client data by sending an empty SDATA batch.
234 - The rightgroups2 ipsec.conf option can require group membership during
235 a second authentication round, for example during XAuth authentication
236 against a RADIUS server.
238 - The xauth-pam backend can authenticate IKEv1 XAuth and Hybrid authenticated
239 clients against any PAM service. The IKEv2 eap-gtc plugin does not use
240 PAM directly anymore, but can use any XAuth backend to verify credentials,
243 - The new unity plugin brings support for some parts of the IKEv1 Cisco Unity
244 Extension. As client, charon narrows traffic selectors to the received
245 Split-Include attributes and automatically installs IPsec bypass policies
246 for received Local-LAN attributes. As server, charon sends Split-Include
247 attributes for leftsubnet definitions containing multiple subnets to Unity-
250 - An EAP-Nak payload is returned by clients if the gateway requests an EAP
251 method that the client does not support. Clients can also request a specific
252 EAP method by configuring that method with leftauth.
254 - The eap-dynamic plugin handles EAP-Nak payloads returned by clients and uses
255 these to select a different EAP method supported/requested by the client.
256 The plugin initially requests the first registered method or the first method
257 configured with charon.plugins.eap-dynamic.preferred.
259 - The new left/rightdns options specify connection specific DNS servers to
260 request/respond in IKEv2 configuration payloads or IKEv2 mode config. leftdns
261 can be any (comma separated) combination of %config4 and %config6 to request
262 multiple servers, both for IPv4 and IPv6. rightdns takes a list of DNS server
263 IP addresses to return.
265 - The left/rightsourceip options now accept multiple addresses or pools.
266 leftsourceip can be any (comma separated) combination of %config4, %config6
267 or fixed IP addresses to request. rightsourceip accepts multiple explicitly
268 specified or referenced named pools.
270 - Multiple connections can now share a single address pool when they use the
271 same definition in one of the rightsourceip pools.
273 - The options charon.interfaces_ignore and charon.interfaces_use allow one to
274 configure the network interfaces used by the daemon.
276 - The kernel-netlink plugin supports the charon.install_virtual_ip_on option,
277 which specifies the interface on which virtual IP addresses will be installed.
278 If it is not specified the current behavior of using the outbound interface
281 - The kernel-netlink plugin tries to keep the current source address when
282 looking for valid routes to reach other hosts.
284 - The autotools build has been migrated to use a config.h header. strongSwan
285 development headers will get installed during "make install" if
286 --with-dev-headers has been passed to ./configure.
288 - All crypto primitives gained return values for most operations, allowing
289 crypto backends to fail, for example when using hardware accelerators.
295 - The charon IKE daemon gained experimental support for the IKEv1 protocol.
296 Pluto has been removed from the 5.x series, and unless strongSwan is
297 configured with --disable-ikev1 or --disable-ikev2, charon handles both
298 keying protocols. The feature-set of IKEv1 in charon is almost on par with
299 pluto, but currently does not support AH or bundled AH+ESP SAs. Beside
300 RSA/ECDSA, PSK and XAuth, charon also supports the Hybrid authentication
301 mode. Informations for interoperability and migration is available at
302 http://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/CharonPlutoIKEv1.
304 - Charon's bus_t has been refactored so that loggers and other listeners are
305 now handled separately. The single lock was previously cause for deadlocks
306 if extensive listeners, such as the one provided by the updown plugin, wanted
307 to acquire locks that were held by other threads which in turn tried to log
308 messages, and thus were waiting to acquire the same lock currently held by
309 the thread calling the listener.
310 The implemented changes also allow the use of a read/write-lock for the
311 loggers which increases performance if multiple loggers are registered.
312 Besides several interface changes this last bit also changes the semantics
313 for loggers as these may now be called by multiple threads at the same time.
315 - Source routes are reinstalled if interfaces are reactivated or IP addresses
318 - The thread pool (processor_t) now has more control over the lifecycle of
319 a job (see job.h for details). In particular, it now controls the destruction
320 of jobs after execution and the cancellation of jobs during shutdown. Due to
321 these changes the requeueing feature, previously available to callback_job_t
322 only, is now available to all jobs (in addition to a new rescheduling
325 - In addition to trustchain key strength definitions for different public key
326 systems, the rightauth option now takes a list of signature hash algorithms
327 considered save for trustchain validation. For example, the setting
328 rightauth=rsa-2048-ecdsa-256-sha256-sha384-sha512 requires a trustchain
329 that uses at least RSA-2048 or ECDSA-256 keys and certificate signatures
330 using SHA-256 or better.
336 - Fixed a security vulnerability in the gmp plugin. If this plugin was used
337 for RSA signature verification an empty or zeroed signature was handled as
340 - Fixed several issues with reauthentication and address updates.
346 - The tnc-pdp plugin implements a RADIUS server interface allowing
347 a strongSwan TNC server to act as a Policy Decision Point.
349 - The eap-radius authentication backend enforces Session-Timeout attributes
350 using RFC4478 repeated authentication and acts upon RADIUS Dynamic
351 Authorization extensions, RFC 5176. Currently supported are disconnect
352 requests and CoA messages containing a Session-Timeout.
354 - The eap-radius plugin can forward arbitrary RADIUS attributes from and to
355 clients using custom IKEv2 notify payloads. The new radattr plugin reads
356 attributes to include from files and prints received attributes to the
359 - Added support for untruncated MD5 and SHA1 HMACs in ESP as used in
362 - The cmac plugin implements the AES-CMAC-96 and AES-CMAC-PRF-128 algorithms
363 as defined in RFC 4494 and RFC 4615, respectively.
365 - The resolve plugin automatically installs nameservers via resolvconf(8),
366 if it is installed, instead of modifying /etc/resolv.conf directly.
368 - The IKEv2 charon daemon supports now raw RSA public keys in RFC 3110
369 DNSKEY and PKCS#1 file format.
375 - Upgraded the TCG IF-IMC and IF-IMV C API to the upcoming version 1.3
376 which supports IF-TNCCS 2.0 long message types, the exclusive flags
377 and multiple IMC/IMV IDs. Both the TNC Client and Server as well as
378 the "Test", "Scanner", and "Attestation" IMC/IMV pairs were updated.
380 - Fully implemented the "TCG Attestation PTS Protocol: Binding to IF-M"
381 standard (TLV-based messages only). TPM-based remote attestation of
382 Linux IMA (Integrity Measurement Architecture) possible. Measurement
383 reference values are automatically stored in an SQLite database.
385 - The EAP-RADIUS authentication backend supports RADIUS accounting. It sends
386 start/stop messages containing Username, Framed-IP and Input/Output-Octets
387 attributes and has been tested against FreeRADIUS and Microsoft NPS.
389 - Added support for PKCS#8 encoded private keys via the libstrongswan
390 pkcs8 plugin. This is the default format used by some OpenSSL tools since
391 version 1.0.0 (e.g. openssl req with -keyout).
393 - Added session resumption support to the strongSwan TLS stack.
399 - Because of changing checksums before and after installation which caused
400 the integrity tests to fail we avoided directly linking libsimaka, libtls and
401 libtnccs to those libcharon plugins which make use of these dynamic libraries.
402 Instead we linked the libraries to the charon daemon. Unfortunately Ubuntu
403 11.10 activated the --as-needed ld option which discards explicit links
404 to dynamic libraries that are not actually used by the charon daemon itself,
405 thus causing failures during the loading of the plugins which depend on these
406 libraries for resolving external symbols.
408 - Therefore our approach of computing integrity checksums for plugins had to be
409 changed radically by moving the hash generation from the compilation to the
410 post-installation phase.
416 - The new libstrongswan certexpire plugin collects expiration information of
417 all used certificates and exports them to CSV files. It either directly
418 exports them or uses cron style scheduling for batch exports.
420 - starter passes unresolved hostnames to charon, allowing it to do name
421 resolution not before the connection attempt. This is especially useful with
422 connections between hosts using dynamic IP addresses. Thanks to Mirko Parthey
423 for the initial patch.
425 - The android plugin can now be used without the Android frontend patch and
426 provides DNS server registration and logging to logcat.
428 - Pluto and starter (plus stroke and whack) have been ported to Android.
430 - Support for ECDSA private and public key operations has been added to the
431 pkcs11 plugin. The plugin now also provides DH and ECDH via PKCS#11 and can
432 use tokens as random number generators (RNG). By default only private key
433 operations are enabled, more advanced features have to be enabled by their
434 option in strongswan.conf. This also applies to public key operations (even
435 for keys not stored on the token) which were enabled by default before.
437 - The libstrongswan plugin system now supports detailed plugin dependencies.
438 Many plugins have been extended to export its capabilities and requirements.
439 This allows the plugin loader to resolve plugin loading order automatically,
440 and in future releases, to dynamically load the required features on demand.
441 Existing third party plugins are source (but not binary) compatible if they
442 properly initialize the new get_features() plugin function to NULL.
444 - The tnc-ifmap plugin implements a TNC IF-MAP 2.0 client which can deliver
445 metadata about IKE_SAs via a SOAP interface to a MAP server. The tnc-ifmap
446 plugin requires the Apache Axis2/C library.
452 - Our private libraries (e.g. libstrongswan) are not installed directly in
453 prefix/lib anymore. Instead a subdirectory is used (prefix/lib/ipsec/ by
454 default). The plugins directory is also moved from libexec/ipsec/ to that
457 - The dynamic IMC/IMV libraries were moved from the plugins directory to
458 a new imcvs directory in the prefix/lib/ipsec/ subdirectory.
460 - Job priorities were introduced to prevent thread starvation caused by too
461 many threads handling blocking operations (such as CRL fetching). Refer to
462 strongswan.conf(5) for details.
464 - Two new strongswan.conf options allow to fine-tune performance on IKEv2
465 gateways by dropping IKE_SA_INIT requests on high load.
467 - IKEv2 charon daemon supports start PASS and DROP shunt policies
468 preventing traffic to go through IPsec connections. Installation of the
469 shunt policies either via the XFRM netfilter or PFKEYv2 IPsec kernel
472 - The history of policies installed in the kernel is now tracked so that e.g.
473 trap policies are correctly updated when reauthenticated SAs are terminated.
475 - IMC/IMV Scanner pair implementing the RFC 5792 PA-TNC (IF-M) protocol.
476 Using "netstat -l" the IMC scans open listening ports on the TNC client
477 and sends a port list to the IMV which based on a port policy decides if
478 the client is admitted to the network.
479 (--enable-imc-scanner/--enable-imv-scanner).
481 - IMC/IMV Test pair implementing the RFC 5792 PA-TNC (IF-M) protocol.
482 (--enable-imc-test/--enable-imv-test).
484 - The IKEv2 close action does not use the same value as the ipsec.conf dpdaction
485 setting, but the value defined by its own closeaction keyword. The action
486 is triggered if the remote peer closes a CHILD_SA unexpectedly.
492 - The whitelist plugin for the IKEv2 daemon maintains an in-memory identity
493 whitelist. Any connection attempt of peers not whitelisted will get rejected.
494 The 'ipsec whitelist' utility provides a simple command line frontend for
495 whitelist administration.
497 - The duplicheck plugin provides a specialized form of duplicate checking,
498 doing a liveness check on the old SA and optionally notify a third party
499 application about detected duplicates.
501 - The coupling plugin permanently couples two or more devices by limiting
502 authentication to previously used certificates.
504 - In the case that the peer config and child config don't have the same name
505 (usually in SQL database defined connections), ipsec up|route <peer config>
506 starts|routes all associated child configs and ipsec up|route <child config>
507 only starts|routes the specific child config.
509 - fixed the encoding and parsing of X.509 certificate policy statements (CPS).
511 - Duncan Salerno contributed the eap-sim-pcsc plugin implementing a
512 pcsc-lite based SIM card backend.
514 - The eap-peap plugin implements the EAP PEAP protocol. Interoperates
515 successfully with a FreeRADIUS server and Windows 7 Agile VPN clients.
517 - The IKEv2 daemon charon rereads strongswan.conf on SIGHUP and instructs
518 all plugins to reload. Currently only the eap-radius and the attr plugins
519 support configuration reloading.
521 - Added userland support to the IKEv2 daemon for Extended Sequence Numbers
522 support coming with Linux 2.6.39. To enable ESN on a connection, add
523 the 'esn' keyword to the proposal. The default proposal uses 32-bit sequence
524 numbers only ('noesn'), and the same value is used if no ESN mode is
525 specified. To negotiate ESN support with the peer, include both, e.g.
526 esp=aes128-sha1-esn-noesn.
528 - In addition to ESN, Linux 2.6.39 gained support for replay windows larger
529 than 32 packets. The new global strongswan.conf option 'charon.replay_window'
530 configures the size of the replay window, in packets.
536 - Sansar Choinyambuu implemented the RFC 5793 Posture Broker Protocol (BP)
537 compatible with Trusted Network Connect (TNC). The TNCCS 2.0 protocol
538 requires the tnccs_20, tnc_imc and tnc_imv plugins but does not depend
539 on the libtnc library. Any available IMV/IMC pairs conforming to the
540 Trusted Computing Group's TNC-IF-IMV/IMC 1.2 interface specification
541 can be loaded via /etc/tnc_config.
543 - Re-implemented the TNCCS 1.1 protocol by using the tnc_imc and tnc_imv
544 in place of the external libtnc library.
546 - The tnccs_dynamic plugin loaded on a TNC server in addition to the
547 tnccs_11 and tnccs_20 plugins, dynamically detects the IF-TNCCS
548 protocol version used by a TNC client and invokes an instance of
549 the corresponding protocol stack.
551 - IKE and ESP proposals can now be stored in an SQL database using a
552 new proposals table. The start_action field in the child_configs
553 tables allows the automatic starting or routing of connections stored
556 - The new certificate_authorities and certificate_distribution_points
557 tables make it possible to store CRL and OCSP Certificate Distribution
558 points in an SQL database.
560 - The new 'include' statement allows to recursively include other files in
561 strongswan.conf. Existing sections and values are thereby extended and
562 replaced, respectively.
564 - Due to the changes in the parser for strongswan.conf, the configuration
565 syntax for the attr plugin has changed. Previously, it was possible to
566 specify multiple values of a specific attribute type by adding multiple
567 key/value pairs with the same key (e.g. dns) to the plugins.attr section.
568 Because values with the same key now replace previously defined values
569 this is not possible anymore. As an alternative, multiple values can be
570 specified by separating them with a comma (e.g. dns = 1.2.3.4, 2.3.4.5).
572 - ipsec listalgs now appends (set in square brackets) to each crypto
573 algorithm listed the plugin that registered the function.
575 - Traffic Flow Confidentiality padding supported with Linux 2.6.38 can be used
576 by the IKEv2 daemon. The ipsec.conf 'tfc' keyword pads all packets to a given
577 boundary, the special value '%mtu' pads all packets to the path MTU.
579 - The new af-alg plugin can use various crypto primitives of the Linux Crypto
580 API using the AF_ALG interface introduced with 2.6.38. This removes the need
581 for additional userland implementations of symmetric cipher, hash, hmac and
584 - The IKEv2 daemon supports the INITIAL_CONTACT notify as initiator and
585 responder. The notify is sent when initiating configurations with a unique
586 policy, set in ipsec.conf via the global 'uniqueids' option.
588 - The conftest conformance testing framework enables the IKEv2 stack to perform
589 many tests using a distinct tool and configuration frontend. Various hooks
590 can alter reserved bits, flags, add custom notifies and proposals, reorder
591 or drop messages and much more. It is enabled using the --enable-conftest
594 - The new libstrongswan constraints plugin provides advanced X.509 constraint
595 checking. In addition to X.509 pathLen constraints, the plugin checks for
596 nameConstraints and certificatePolicies, including policyMappings and
597 policyConstraints. The x509 certificate plugin and the pki tool have been
598 enhanced to support these extensions. The new left/rightcertpolicy ipsec.conf
599 connection keywords take OIDs a peer certificate must have.
601 - The left/rightauth ipsec.conf keywords accept values with a minimum strength
602 for trustchain public keys in bits, such as rsa-2048 or ecdsa-256.
604 - The revocation and x509 libstrongswan plugins and the pki tool gained basic
605 support for delta CRLs.
611 - IMPORTANT: the default keyexchange mode 'ike' is changing with release 4.5
612 from 'ikev1' to 'ikev2', thus commemorating the five year anniversary of the
613 IKEv2 RFC 4306 and its mature successor RFC 5996. The time has definitively
614 come for IKEv1 to go into retirement and to cede its place to the much more
615 robust, powerful and versatile IKEv2 protocol!
617 - Added new ctr, ccm and gcm plugins providing Counter, Counter with CBC-MAC
618 and Galois/Counter Modes based on existing CBC implementations. These
619 new plugins bring support for AES and Camellia Counter and CCM algorithms
620 and the AES GCM algorithms for use in IKEv2.
622 - The new pkcs11 plugin brings full Smartcard support to the IKEv2 daemon and
623 the pki utility using one or more PKCS#11 libraries. It currently supports
624 RSA private and public key operations and loads X.509 certificates from
627 - Implemented a general purpose TLS stack based on crypto and credential
628 primitives of libstrongswan. libtls supports TLS versions 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2,
629 ECDHE-ECDSA/RSA, DHE-RSA and RSA key exchange algorithms and RSA/ECDSA based
630 client authentication.
632 - Based on libtls, the eap-tls plugin brings certificate based EAP
633 authentication for client and server. It is compatible to Windows 7 IKEv2
634 Smartcard authentication and the OpenSSL based FreeRADIUS EAP-TLS backend.
636 - Implemented the TNCCS 1.1 Trusted Network Connect protocol using the
637 libtnc library on the strongSwan client and server side via the tnccs_11
638 plugin and optionally connecting to a TNC@FHH-enhanced FreeRADIUS AAA server.
639 Depending on the resulting TNC Recommendation, strongSwan clients are granted
640 access to a network behind a strongSwan gateway (allow), are put into a
641 remediation zone (isolate) or are blocked (none), respectively. Any number
642 of Integrity Measurement Collector/Verifier pairs can be attached
643 via the tnc-imc and tnc-imv charon plugins.
645 - The IKEv1 daemon pluto now uses the same kernel interfaces as the IKEv2
646 daemon charon. As a result of this, pluto now supports xfrm marks which
647 were introduced in charon with 4.4.1.
649 - Applets for Maemo 5 (Nokia) allow to easily configure and control IKEv2
650 based VPN connections with EAP authentication on supported devices.
652 - The RADIUS plugin eap-radius now supports multiple RADIUS servers for
653 redundant setups. Servers are selected by a defined priority, server load and
656 - The simple led plugin controls hardware LEDs through the Linux LED subsystem.
657 It currently shows activity of the IKE daemon and is a good example how to
658 implement a simple event listener.
660 - Improved MOBIKE behavior in several corner cases, for instance, if the
661 initial responder moves to a different address.
663 - Fixed left-/rightnexthop option, which was broken since 4.4.0.
665 - Fixed a bug not releasing a virtual IP address to a pool if the XAUTH
666 identity was different from the IKE identity.
668 - Fixed the alignment of ModeConfig messages on 4-byte boundaries in the
669 case where the attributes are not a multiple of 4 bytes (e.g. Cisco's
672 - Fixed the interoperability of the socket_raw and socket_default
675 - Added man page for strongswan.conf
681 - Support of xfrm marks in IPsec SAs and IPsec policies introduced
682 with the Linux 2.6.34 kernel. For details see the example scenarios
683 ikev2/nat-two-rw-mark, ikev2/rw-nat-mark-in-out and ikev2/net2net-psk-dscp.
685 - The PLUTO_MARK_IN and PLUTO_ESP_ENC environment variables can be used
686 in a user-specific updown script to set marks on inbound ESP or
689 - The openssl plugin now supports X.509 certificate and CRL functions.
691 - OCSP/CRL checking in IKEv2 has been moved to the revocation plugin, enabled
692 by default. Plase update manual load directives in strongswan.conf.
694 - RFC3779 ipAddrBlock constraint checking has been moved to the addrblock
695 plugin, disabled by default. Enable it and update manual load directives
696 in strongswan.conf, if required.
698 - The pki utility supports CRL generation using the --signcrl command.
700 - The ipsec pki --self, --issue and --req commands now support output in
701 PEM format using the --outform pem option.
703 - The major refactoring of the IKEv1 Mode Config functionality now allows
704 the transport and handling of any Mode Config attribute.
706 - The RADIUS proxy plugin eap-radius now supports multiple servers. Configured
707 servers are chosen randomly, with the option to prefer a specific server.
708 Non-responding servers are degraded by the selection process.
710 - The ipsec pool tool manages arbitrary configuration attributes stored
711 in an SQL database. ipsec pool --help gives the details.
713 - The new eap-simaka-sql plugin acts as a backend for EAP-SIM and EAP-AKA,
714 reading triplets/quintuplets from an SQL database.
716 - The High Availability plugin now supports a HA enabled in-memory address
717 pool and Node reintegration without IKE_SA rekeying. The latter allows
718 clients without IKE_SA rekeying support to keep connected during
719 reintegration. Additionally, many other issues have been fixed in the ha
722 - Fixed a potential remote code execution vulnerability resulting from
723 the misuse of snprintf(). The vulnerability is exploitable by
724 unauthenticated users.
730 - The IKEv2 High Availability plugin has been integrated. It provides
731 load sharing and failover capabilities in a cluster of currently two nodes,
732 based on an extend ClusterIP kernel module. More information is available at
733 http://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/HighAvailability.
734 The development of the High Availability functionality was sponsored by
735 secunet Security Networks AG.
737 - Added IKEv1 and IKEv2 configuration support for the AES-GMAC
738 authentication-only ESP cipher. Our aes_gmac kernel patch or a Linux
739 2.6.34 kernel is required to make AES-GMAC available via the XFRM
742 - Added support for Diffie-Hellman groups 22, 23 and 24 to the gmp, gcrypt
743 and openssl plugins, usable by both pluto and charon. The new proposal
744 keywords are modp1024s160, modp2048s224 and modp2048s256. Thanks to Joy Latten
745 from IBM for his contribution.
747 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon supports RAM-based virtual IP pools using
748 the rightsourceip directive with a subnet from which addresses
751 - The ipsec pki --gen and --pub commands now allow the output of
752 private and public keys in PEM format using the --outform pem
755 - The new DHCP plugin queries virtual IP addresses for clients from a DHCP
756 server using broadcasts, or a defined server using the
757 charon.plugins.dhcp.server strongswan.conf option. DNS/WINS server information
758 is additionally served to clients if the DHCP server provides such
759 information. The plugin is used in ipsec.conf configurations having
760 rightsourceip set to %dhcp.
762 - A new plugin called farp fakes ARP responses for virtual IP addresses
763 handed out to clients from the IKEv2 daemon charon. The plugin lets a
764 road-warrior act as a client on the local LAN if it uses a virtual IP
765 from the responders subnet, e.g. acquired using the DHCP plugin.
767 - The existing IKEv2 socket implementations have been migrated to the
768 socket-default and the socket-raw plugins. The new socket-dynamic plugin
769 binds sockets dynamically to ports configured via the left-/rightikeport
770 ipsec.conf connection parameters.
772 - The android charon plugin stores received DNS server information as "net.dns"
773 system properties, as used by the Android platform.
779 - The IKEv2 daemon supports RFC 3779 IP address block constraints
780 carried as a critical X.509v3 extension in the peer certificate.
782 - The ipsec pool --add|del dns|nbns command manages DNS and NBNS name
783 server entries that are sent via the IKEv1 Mode Config or IKEv2
784 Configuration Payload to remote clients.
786 - The Camellia cipher can be used as an IKEv1 encryption algorithm.
788 - The IKEv1 and IKEV2 daemons now check certificate path length constraints.
790 - The new ipsec.conf conn option "inactivity" closes a CHILD_SA if no traffic
791 was sent or received within the given interval. To close the complete IKE_SA
792 if its only CHILD_SA was inactive, set the global strongswan.conf option
793 "charon.inactivity_close_ike" to yes.
795 - More detailed IKEv2 EAP payload information in debug output
797 - IKEv2 EAP-SIM and EAP-AKA share joint libsimaka library
799 - Added required userland changes for proper SHA256 and SHA384/512 in ESP that
800 will be introduced with Linux 2.6.33. The "sha256"/"sha2_256" keyword now
801 configures the kernel with 128 bit truncation, not the non-standard 96
802 bit truncation used by previous releases. To use the old 96 bit truncation
803 scheme, the new "sha256_96" proposal keyword has been introduced.
805 - Fixed IPComp in tunnel mode, stripping out the duplicated outer header. This
806 change makes IPcomp tunnel mode connections incompatible with previous
807 releases; disable compression on such tunnels.
809 - Fixed BEET mode connections on recent kernels by installing SAs with
810 appropriate traffic selectors, based on a patch by Michael Rossberg.
812 - Using extensions (such as BEET mode) and crypto algorithms (such as twofish,
813 serpent, sha256_96) allocated in the private use space now require that we
814 know its meaning, i.e. we are talking to strongSwan. Use the new
815 "charon.send_vendor_id" option in strongswan.conf to let the remote peer know
818 - Experimental support for draft-eronen-ipsec-ikev2-eap-auth, where the
819 responder omits public key authentication in favor of a mutual authentication
820 method. To enable EAP-only authentication, set rightauth=eap on the responder
821 to rely only on the MSK constructed AUTH payload. This not-yet standardized
822 extension requires the strongSwan vendor ID introduced above.
824 - The IKEv1 daemon ignores the Juniper SRX notification type 40001, thus
825 allowing interoperability.
831 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon can now use SQL-based address pools to deal out
832 virtual IP addresses as a Mode Config server. The pool capability has been
833 migrated from charon's sql plugin to a new attr-sql plugin which is loaded
834 by libstrongswan and which can be used by both daemons either with a SQLite
835 or MySQL database and the corresponding plugin.
837 - Plugin names have been streamlined: EAP plugins now have a dash after eap
838 (e.g. eap-sim), as it is used with the --enable-eap-sim ./configure option.
839 Plugin configuration sections in strongswan.conf now use the same name as the
840 plugin itself (i.e. with a dash). Make sure to update "load" directives and
841 the affected plugin sections in existing strongswan.conf files.
843 - The private/public key parsing and encoding has been split up into
844 separate pkcs1, pgp, pem and dnskey plugins. The public key implementation
845 plugins gmp, gcrypt and openssl can all make use of them.
847 - The EAP-AKA plugin can use different backends for USIM/quintuplet
848 calculations, very similar to the EAP-SIM plugin. The existing 3GPP2 software
849 implementation has been migrated to a separate plugin.
851 - The IKEv2 daemon charon gained basic PGP support. It can use locally installed
852 peer certificates and can issue signatures based on RSA private keys.
854 - The new 'ipsec pki' tool provides a set of commands to maintain a public
855 key infrastructure. It currently supports operations to create RSA and ECDSA
856 private/public keys, calculate fingerprints and issue or verify certificates.
858 - Charon uses a monotonic time source for statistics and job queueing, behaving
859 correctly if the system time changes (e.g. when using NTP).
861 - In addition to time based rekeying, charon supports IPsec SA lifetimes based
862 on processed volume or number of packets. They new ipsec.conf paramaters
863 'lifetime' (an alias to 'keylife'), 'lifebytes' and 'lifepackets' handle
864 SA timeouts, while the parameters 'margintime' (an alias to rekeymargin),
865 'marginbytes' and 'marginpackets' trigger the rekeying before a SA expires.
866 The existing parameter 'rekeyfuzz' affects all margins.
868 - If no CA/Gateway certificate is specified in the NetworkManager plugin,
869 charon uses a set of trusted root certificates preinstalled by distributions.
870 The directory containing CA certificates can be specified using the
871 --with-nm-ca-dir=path configure option.
873 - Fixed the encoding of the Email relative distinguished name in left|rightid
876 - Fixed the broken parsing of PKCS#7 wrapped certificates by the pluto daemon.
878 - Fixed smartcard-based authentication in the pluto daemon which was broken by
879 the ECDSA support introduced with the 4.3.2 release.
881 - A patch contributed by Heiko Hund fixes mixed IPv6 in IPv4 and vice versa
882 tunnels established with the IKEv1 pluto daemon.
884 - The pluto daemon now uses the libstrongswan x509 plugin for certificates and
885 CRls and the struct id type was replaced by identification_t used by charon
886 and the libstrongswan library.
892 - IKEv2 charon daemon ported to FreeBSD and Mac OS X. Installation details can
893 be found on wiki.strongswan.org.
895 - ipsec statusall shows the number of bytes transmitted and received over
896 ESP connections configured by the IKEv2 charon daemon.
898 - The IKEv2 charon daemon supports include files in ipsec.secrets.
904 - The configuration option --enable-integrity-test plus the strongswan.conf
905 option libstrongswan.integrity_test = yes activate integrity tests
906 of the IKE daemons charon and pluto, libstrongswan and all loaded
907 plugins. Thus dynamic library misconfigurations and non-malicious file
908 manipulations can be reliably detected.
910 - The new default setting libstrongswan.ecp_x_coordinate_only=yes allows
911 IKEv1 interoperability with MS Windows using the ECP DH groups 19 and 20.
913 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon now supports the AES-CCM and AES-GCM ESP
914 authenticated encryption algorithms.
916 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon now supports V4 OpenPGP keys.
918 - The RDN parser vulnerability discovered by Orange Labs research team
919 was not completely fixed in version 4.3.2. Some more modifications
920 had to be applied to the asn1_length() function to make it robust.
926 - The new gcrypt plugin provides symmetric cipher, hasher, RNG, Diffie-Hellman
927 and RSA crypto primitives using the LGPL licensed GNU gcrypt library.
929 - libstrongswan features an integrated crypto selftest framework for registered
930 algorithms. The test-vector plugin provides a first set of test vectors and
931 allows pluto and charon to rely on tested crypto algorithms.
933 - pluto can now use all libstrongswan plugins with the exception of x509 and xcbc.
934 Thanks to the openssl plugin, the ECP Diffie-Hellman groups 19, 20, 21, 25, and
935 26 as well as ECDSA-256, ECDSA-384, and ECDSA-521 authentication can be used
938 - Applying their fuzzing tool, the Orange Labs vulnerability research team found
939 another two DoS vulnerabilities, one in the rather old ASN.1 parser of Relative
940 Distinguished Names (RDNs) and a second one in the conversion of ASN.1 UTCTIME
941 and GENERALIZEDTIME strings to a time_t value.
947 - The nm plugin now passes DNS/NBNS server information to NetworkManager,
948 allowing a gateway administrator to set DNS/NBNS configuration on clients
951 - The nm plugin also accepts CA certificates for gateway authentication. If
952 a CA certificate is configured, strongSwan uses the entered gateway address
953 as its idenitity, requiring the gateways certificate to contain the same as
954 subjectAltName. This allows a gateway administrator to deploy the same
955 certificates to Windows 7 and NetworkManager clients.
957 - The command ipsec purgeike deletes IKEv2 SAs that don't have a CHILD SA.
958 The command ipsec down <conn>{n} deletes CHILD SA instance n of connection
959 <conn> whereas ipsec down <conn>{*} deletes all CHILD SA instances.
960 The command ipsec down <conn>[n] deletes IKE SA instance n of connection
961 <conn> plus dependent CHILD SAs whereas ipsec down <conn>[*] deletes all
962 IKE SA instances of connection <conn>.
964 - Fixed a regression introduced in 4.3.0 where EAP authentication calculated
965 the AUTH payload incorrectly. Further, the EAP-MSCHAPv2 MSK key derivation
966 has been updated to be compatible with the Windows 7 Release Candidate.
968 - Refactored installation of triggering policies. Routed policies are handled
969 outside of IKE_SAs to keep them installed in any case. A tunnel gets
970 established only once, even if initiation is delayed due network outages.
972 - Improved the handling of multiple acquire signals triggered by the kernel.
974 - Fixed two DoS vulnerabilities in the charon daemon that were discovered by
975 fuzzing techniques: 1) Sending a malformed IKE_SA_INIT request leaved an
976 incomplete state which caused a null pointer dereference if a subsequent
977 CREATE_CHILD_SA request was sent. 2) Sending an IKE_AUTH request with either
978 a missing TSi or TSr payload caused a null pointer derefence because the
979 checks for TSi and TSr were interchanged. The IKEv2 fuzzer used was
980 developed by the Orange Labs vulnerability research team. The tool was
981 initially written by Gabriel Campana and is now maintained by Laurent Butti.
983 - Added support for AES counter mode in ESP in IKEv2 using the proposal
984 keywords aes128ctr, aes192ctr and aes256ctr.
986 - Further progress in refactoring pluto: Use of the curl and ldap plugins
987 for fetching crls and OCSP. Use of the random plugin to get keying material
988 from /dev/random or /dev/urandom. Use of the openssl plugin as an alternative
989 to the aes, des, sha1, sha2, and md5 plugins. The blowfish, twofish, and
990 serpent encryption plugins are now optional and are not enabled by default.
996 - Support for the IKEv2 Multiple Authentication Exchanges extension (RFC4739).
997 Initiators and responders can use several authentication rounds (e.g. RSA
998 followed by EAP) to authenticate. The new ipsec.conf leftauth/rightauth and
999 leftauth2/rightauth2 parameters define own authentication rounds or setup
1000 constraints for the remote peer. See the ipsec.conf man page for more detials.
1002 - If glibc printf hooks (register_printf_function) are not available,
1003 strongSwan can use the vstr string library to run on non-glibc systems.
1005 - The IKEv2 charon daemon can now configure the ESP CAMELLIA-CBC cipher
1006 (esp=camellia128|192|256).
1008 - Refactored the pluto and scepclient code to use basic functions (memory
1009 allocation, leak detective, chunk handling, printf_hooks, strongswan.conf
1010 attributes, ASN.1 parser, etc.) from the libstrongswan library.
1012 - Up to two DNS and WINS servers to be sent via IKEv1 ModeConfig can be
1013 configured in the pluto section of strongswan.conf.
1019 - The new server-side EAP RADIUS plugin (--enable-eap-radius)
1020 relays EAP messages to and from a RADIUS server. Successfully
1021 tested with with a freeradius server using EAP-MD5 and EAP-SIM.
1023 - A vulnerability in the Dead Peer Detection (RFC 3706) code was found by
1024 Gerd v. Egidy <gerd.von.egidy@intra2net.com> of Intra2net AG affecting
1025 all Openswan and strongSwan releases. A malicious (or expired ISAKMP)
1026 R_U_THERE or R_U_THERE_ACK Dead Peer Detection packet can cause the
1027 pluto IKE daemon to crash and restart. No authentication or encryption
1028 is required to trigger this bug. One spoofed UDP packet can cause the
1029 pluto IKE daemon to restart and be unresponsive for a few seconds while
1030 restarting. This DPD null state vulnerability has been officially
1031 registered as CVE-2009-0790 and is fixed by this release.
1033 - ASN.1 to time_t conversion caused a time wrap-around for
1034 dates after Jan 18 03:14:07 UTC 2038 on 32-bit platforms.
1035 As a workaround such dates are set to the maximum representable
1036 time, i.e. Jan 19 03:14:07 UTC 2038.
1038 - Distinguished Names containing wildcards (*) are not sent in the
1039 IDr payload anymore.
1045 - Fixed a use-after-free bug in the DPD timeout section of the
1046 IKEv1 pluto daemon which sporadically caused a segfault.
1048 - Fixed a crash in the IKEv2 charon daemon occurring with
1049 mixed RAM-based and SQL-based virtual IP address pools.
1051 - Fixed ASN.1 parsing of algorithmIdentifier objects where the
1052 parameters field is optional.
1054 - Ported nm plugin to NetworkManager 7.1.
1060 - Support of the EAP-MSCHAPv2 protocol enabled by the option
1061 --enable-eap-mschapv2. Requires the MD4 hash algorithm enabled
1062 either by --enable-md4 or --enable-openssl.
1064 - Assignment of up to two DNS and up to two WINS servers to peers via
1065 the IKEv2 Configuration Payload (CP). The IPv4 or IPv6 nameserver
1066 addresses are defined in strongswan.conf.
1068 - The strongSwan applet for the Gnome NetworkManager is now built and
1069 distributed as a separate tarball under the name NetworkManager-strongswan.
1075 - Fixed ESP NULL encryption broken by the refactoring of keymat.c.
1076 Also introduced proper initialization and disposal of keying material.
1078 - Fixed the missing listing of connection definitions in ipsec statusall
1079 broken by an unfortunate local variable overload.
1085 - Several performance improvements to handle thousands of tunnels with almost
1086 linear upscaling. All relevant data structures have been replaced by faster
1087 counterparts with better lookup times.
1089 - Better parallelization to run charon on multiple cores. Due to improved
1090 ressource locking and other optimizations the daemon can take full
1091 advantage of 16 or even more cores.
1093 - The load-tester plugin can use a NULL Diffie-Hellman group and simulate
1094 unique identities and certificates by signing peer certificates using a CA
1097 - The redesigned stroke in-memory IP pool handles leases. The "ipsec leases"
1098 command queries assigned leases.
1100 - Added support for smartcards in charon by using the ENGINE API provided by
1101 OpenSSL, based on patches by Michael Roßberg.
1103 - The Padlock plugin supports the hardware RNG found on VIA CPUs to provide a
1104 reliable source of randomness.
1109 - Flexible configuration of logging subsystem allowing to log to multiple
1110 syslog facilities or to files using fine-grained log levels for each target.
1112 - Load testing plugin to do stress testing of the IKEv2 daemon against self
1113 or another host. Found and fixed issues during tests in the multi-threaded
1114 use of the OpenSSL plugin.
1116 - Added profiling code to synchronization primitives to find bottlenecks if
1117 running on multiple cores. Found and fixed an issue where parts of the
1118 Diffie-Hellman calculation acquired an exclusive lock. This greatly improves
1119 parallelization to multiple cores.
1121 - updown script invocation has been separated into a plugin of its own to
1122 further slim down the daemon core.
1124 - Separated IKE_SA/CHILD_SA key derivation process into a closed system,
1125 allowing future implementations to use a secured environment in e.g. kernel
1128 - The kernel interface of charon has been modularized. XFRM NETLINK (default)
1129 and PFKEY (--enable-kernel-pfkey) interface plugins for the native IPsec
1130 stack of the Linux 2.6 kernel as well as a PFKEY interface for the KLIPS
1131 IPsec stack (--enable-kernel-klips) are provided.
1133 - Basic Mobile IPv6 support has been introduced, securing Binding Update
1134 messages as well as tunneled traffic between Mobile Node and Home Agent.
1135 The installpolicy=no option allows peaceful cooperation with a dominant
1136 mip6d daemon and the new type=transport_proxy implements the special MIPv6
1137 IPsec transport proxy mode where the IKEv2 daemon uses the Care-of-Address
1138 but the IPsec SA is set up for the Home Address.
1140 - Implemented migration of Mobile IPv6 connections using the KMADDRESS
1141 field contained in XFRM_MSG_MIGRATE messages sent by the mip6d daemon
1142 via the Linux 2.6.28 (or appropriately patched) kernel.
1148 - IKEv2 charon daemon supports authentication based on raw public keys
1149 stored in the SQL database backend. The ipsec listpubkeys command
1150 lists the available raw public keys via the stroke interface.
1152 - Several MOBIKE improvements: Detect changes in NAT mappings in DPD exchanges,
1153 handle events if kernel detects NAT mapping changes in UDP-encapsulated
1154 ESP packets (requires kernel patch), reuse old addesses in MOBIKE updates as
1155 long as possible and other fixes.
1157 - Fixed a bug in addr_in_subnet() which caused insertion of wrong source
1158 routes for destination subnets having netwmasks not being a multiple of 8 bits.
1159 Thanks go to Wolfgang Steudel, TU Ilmenau for reporting this bug.
1165 - Fixed a Denial-of-Service vulnerability where an IKE_SA_INIT message with
1166 a KE payload containing zeroes only can cause a crash of the IKEv2 charon
1167 daemon due to a NULL pointer returned by the mpz_export() function of the
1168 GNU Multiprecision Library (GMP). Thanks go to Mu Dynamics Research Labs
1169 for making us aware of this problem.
1171 - The new agent plugin provides a private key implementation on top of an
1174 - The NetworkManager plugin has been extended to support certificate client
1175 authentication using RSA keys loaded from a file or using ssh-agent.
1177 - Daemon capability dropping has been ported to libcap and must be enabled
1178 explicitly --with-capabilities=libcap. Future version will support the
1179 newer libcap2 library.
1181 - ipsec listalgs lists the IKEv2 cryptografic algorithms registered with the
1182 charon keying daemon.
1188 - A NetworkManager plugin allows GUI-based configuration of road-warrior
1189 clients in a simple way. It features X509 based gateway authentication
1190 and EAP client authentication, tunnel setup/teardown and storing passwords
1191 in the Gnome Keyring.
1193 - A new EAP-GTC plugin implements draft-sheffer-ikev2-gtc-00.txt and allows
1194 username/password authentication against any PAM service on the gateway.
1195 The new EAP method interacts nicely with the NetworkManager plugin and allows
1196 client authentication against e.g. LDAP.
1198 - Improved support for the EAP-Identity method. The new ipsec.conf eap_identity
1199 parameter defines an additional identity to pass to the server in EAP
1202 - The "ipsec statusall" command now lists CA restrictions, EAP
1203 authentication types and EAP identities.
1205 - Fixed two multithreading deadlocks occurring when starting up
1206 several hundred tunnels concurrently.
1208 - Fixed the --enable-integrity-test configure option which
1209 computes a SHA-1 checksum over the libstrongswan library.
1215 - Consistent logging of IKE and CHILD SAs at the audit (AUD) level.
1217 - Improved the performance of the SQL-based virtual IP address pool
1218 by introducing an additional addresses table. The leases table
1219 storing only history information has become optional and can be
1220 disabled by setting charon.plugins.sql.lease_history = no in
1223 - The XFRM_STATE_AF_UNSPEC flag added to xfrm.h allows IPv4-over-IPv6
1224 and IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnels with the 2.6.26 and later Linux kernels.
1226 - management of different virtual IP pools for different
1227 network interfaces have become possible.
1229 - fixed a bug which prevented the assignment of more than 256
1230 virtual IP addresses from a pool managed by an sql database.
1232 - fixed a bug which did not delete own IPCOMP SAs in the kernel.
1238 - Added statistics functions to ipsec pool --status and ipsec pool --leases
1239 and input validation checks to various ipsec pool commands.
1241 - ipsec statusall now lists all loaded charon plugins and displays
1242 the negotiated IKEv2 cipher suite proposals.
1244 - The openssl plugin supports the elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman groups
1245 19, 20, 21, 25, and 26.
1247 - The openssl plugin supports ECDSA authentication using elliptic curve
1250 - Fixed a bug in stroke which caused multiple charon threads to close
1251 the file descriptors during packet transfers over the stroke socket.
1253 - ESP sequence numbers are now migrated in IPsec SA updates handled by
1254 MOBIKE. Works only with Linux kernels >= 2.6.17.
1260 - Fixed the strongswan.conf path configuration problem that occurred when
1261 --sysconfig was not set explicitly in ./configure.
1263 - Fixed a number of minor bugs that where discovered during the 4th
1264 IKEv2 interoperability workshop in San Antonio, TX.
1270 - Plugins for libstrongswan and charon can optionally be loaded according
1271 to a configuration in strongswan.conf. Most components provide a
1272 "load = " option followed by a space separated list of plugins to load.
1273 This allows e.g. the fallback from a hardware crypto accelerator to
1274 to software-based crypto plugins.
1276 - Charons SQL plugin has been extended by a virtual IP address pool.
1277 Configurations with a rightsourceip=%poolname setting query a SQLite or
1278 MySQL database for leases. The "ipsec pool" command helps in administrating
1279 the pool database. See ipsec pool --help for the available options
1281 - The Authenticated Encryption Algorithms AES-CCM-8/12/16 and AES-GCM-8/12/16
1282 for ESP are now supported starting with the Linux 2.6.25 kernel. The
1283 syntax is e.g. esp=aes128ccm12 or esp=aes256gcm16.
1289 - Support for "Hash and URL" encoded certificate payloads has been implemented
1290 in the IKEv2 daemon charon. Using the "certuribase" option of a CA section
1291 allows to assign a base URL to all certificates issued by the specified CA.
1292 The final URL is then built by concatenating that base and the hex encoded
1293 SHA1 hash of the DER encoded certificate. Note that this feature is disabled
1294 by default and must be enabled using the option "charon.hash_and_url".
1296 - The IKEv2 daemon charon now supports the "uniqueids" option to close multiple
1297 IKE_SAs with the same peer. The option value "keep" prefers existing
1298 connection setups over new ones, where the value "replace" replaces existing
1301 - The crypto factory in libstrongswan additionally supports random number
1302 generators, plugins may provide other sources of randomness. The default
1303 plugin reads raw random data from /dev/(u)random.
1305 - Extended the credential framework by a caching option to allow plugins
1306 persistent caching of fetched credentials. The "cachecrl" option has been
1309 - The new trustchain verification introduced in 4.2.0 has been parallelized.
1310 Threads fetching CRL or OCSP information no longer block other threads.
1312 - A new IKEv2 configuration attribute framework has been introduced allowing
1313 plugins to provide virtual IP addresses, and in the future, other
1314 configuration attribute services (e.g. DNS/WINS servers).
1316 - The stroke plugin has been extended to provide virtual IP addresses from
1317 a pool defined in ipsec.conf. The "rightsourceip" parameter now accepts
1318 address pools in CIDR notation (e.g. 10.1.1.0/24). The parameter also accepts
1319 the value "%poolname", where "poolname" identifies a pool provided by a
1322 - Fixed compilation on uClibc and a couple of other minor bugs.
1324 - Set DPD defaults in ipsec starter to dpd_delay=30s and dpd_timeout=150s.
1326 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon now supports the ESP encryption algorithm CAMELLIA
1327 with key lengths of 128, 192, and 256 bits, as well as the authentication
1328 algorithm AES_XCBC_MAC. Configuration example: esp=camellia192-aesxcbc.
1334 - libstrongswan has been modularized to attach crypto algorithms,
1335 credential implementations (keys, certificates) and fetchers dynamically
1336 through plugins. Existing code has been ported to plugins:
1337 - RSA/Diffie-Hellman implementation using the GNU Multi Precision library
1338 - X509 certificate system supporting CRLs, OCSP and attribute certificates
1339 - Multiple plugins providing crypto algorithms in software
1340 - CURL and OpenLDAP fetcher
1342 - libstrongswan gained a relational database API which uses pluggable database
1343 providers. Plugins for MySQL and SQLite are available.
1345 - The IKEv2 keying daemon charon is more extensible. Generic plugins may provide
1346 connection configuration, credentials and EAP methods or control the daemon.
1347 Existing code has been ported to plugins:
1348 - EAP-AKA, EAP-SIM, EAP-MD5 and EAP-Identity
1349 - stroke configuration, credential and control (compatible to pluto)
1350 - XML bases management protocol to control and query the daemon
1351 The following new plugins are available:
1352 - An experimental SQL configuration, credential and logging plugin on
1353 top of either MySQL or SQLite
1354 - A unit testing plugin to run tests at daemon startup
1356 - The authentication and credential framework in charon has been heavily
1357 refactored to support modular credential providers, proper
1358 CERTREQ/CERT payload exchanges and extensible authorization rules.
1360 - The framework of strongSwan Manager has envolved to the web application
1361 framework libfast (FastCGI Application Server w/ Templates) and is usable
1362 by other applications.
1368 - IKE rekeying in NAT situations did not inherit the NAT conditions
1369 to the rekeyed IKE_SA so that the UDP encapsulation was lost with
1370 the next CHILD_SA rekeying.
1372 - Wrong type definition of the next_payload variable in id_payload.c
1373 caused an INVALID_SYNTAX error on PowerPC platforms.
1375 - Implemented IKEv2 EAP-SIM server and client test modules that use
1376 triplets stored in a file. For details on the configuration see
1377 the scenario 'ikev2/rw-eap-sim-rsa'.
1383 - Fixed error in the ordering of the certinfo_t records in the ocsp cache that
1384 caused multiple entries of the same serial number to be created.
1386 - Implementation of a simple EAP-MD5 module which provides CHAP
1387 authentication. This may be interesting in conjunction with certificate
1388 based server authentication, as weak passwords can't be brute forced
1389 (in contradiction to traditional IKEv2 PSK).
1391 - A complete software based implementation of EAP-AKA, using algorithms
1392 specified in 3GPP2 (S.S0055). This implementation does not use an USIM,
1393 but reads the secrets from ipsec.secrets. Make sure to read eap_aka.h
1396 - Support for vendor specific EAP methods using Expanded EAP types. The
1397 interface to EAP modules has been slightly changed, so make sure to
1398 check the changes if you're already rolling your own modules.
1404 - The default _updown script now dynamically inserts and removes ip6tables
1405 firewall rules if leftfirewall=yes is set in IPv6 connections. New IPv6
1406 net-net and roadwarrior (PSK/RSA) scenarios for both IKEv1 and IKEV2 were
1409 - Implemented RFC4478 repeated authentication to force EAP/Virtual-IP clients
1410 to reestablish an IKE_SA within a given timeframe.
1412 - strongSwan Manager supports configuration listing, initiation and termination
1413 of IKE and CHILD_SAs.
1415 - Fixes and improvements to multithreading code.
1417 - IKEv2 plugins have been renamed to libcharon-* to avoid naming conflicts.
1418 Make sure to remove the old plugins in $libexecdir/ipsec, otherwise they get
1425 - Removed recursive pthread mutexes since uClibc doesn't support them.
1431 - In NAT traversal situations and multiple queued Quick Modes,
1432 those pending connections inserted by auto=start after the
1433 port floating from 500 to 4500 were erronously deleted.
1435 - Added a "forceencaps" connection parameter to enforce UDP encapsulation
1436 to surmount restrictive firewalls. NAT detection payloads are faked to
1437 simulate a NAT situation and trick the other peer into NAT mode (IKEv2 only).
1439 - Preview of strongSwan Manager, a web based configuration and monitoring
1440 application. It uses a new XML control interface to query the IKEv2 daemon
1441 (see http://wiki.strongswan.org/wiki/Manager).
1443 - Experimental SQLite configuration backend which will provide the configuration
1444 interface for strongSwan Manager in future releases.
1446 - Further improvements to MOBIKE support.
1452 - Since some third party IKEv2 implementations run into
1453 problems with strongSwan announcing MOBIKE capability per
1454 default, MOBIKE can be disabled on a per-connection-basis
1455 using the mobike=no option. Whereas mobike=no disables the
1456 sending of the MOBIKE_SUPPORTED notification and the floating
1457 to UDP port 4500 with the IKE_AUTH request even if no NAT
1458 situation has been detected, strongSwan will still support
1459 MOBIKE acting as a responder.
1461 - the default ipsec routing table plus its corresponding priority
1462 used for inserting source routes has been changed from 100 to 220.
1463 It can be configured using the --with-ipsec-routing-table and
1464 --with-ipsec-routing-table-prio options.
1466 - the --enable-integrity-test configure option tests the
1467 integrity of the libstrongswan crypto code during the charon
1470 - the --disable-xauth-vid configure option disables the sending
1471 of the XAUTH vendor ID. This can be used as a workaround when
1472 interoperating with some Windows VPN clients that get into
1473 trouble upon reception of an XAUTH VID without eXtended
1474 AUTHentication having been configured.
1476 - ipsec stroke now supports the rereadsecrets, rereadaacerts,
1477 rereadacerts, and listacerts options.
1483 - If a DNS lookup failure occurs when resolving right=%<FQDN>
1484 or right=<FQDN> combined with rightallowany=yes then the
1485 connection is not updated by ipsec starter thus preventing
1486 the disruption of an active IPsec connection. Only if the DNS
1487 lookup successfully returns with a changed IP address the
1488 corresponding connection definition is updated.
1490 - Routes installed by the keying daemons are now in a separate
1491 routing table with the ID 100 to avoid conflicts with the main
1492 table. Route lookup for IKEv2 traffic is done in userspace to ignore
1493 routes installed for IPsec, as IKE traffic shouldn't get encapsulated.
1499 - The pluto IKEv1 daemon now exhibits the same behaviour as its
1500 IKEv2 companion charon by inserting an explicit route via the
1501 _updown script only if a sourceip exists. This is admissible
1502 since routing through the IPsec tunnel is handled automatically
1503 by NETKEY's IPsec policies. As a consequence the left|rightnexthop
1504 parameter is not required any more.
1506 - The new IKEv1 parameter right|leftallowany parameters helps to handle
1507 the case where both peers possess dynamic IP addresses that are
1508 usually resolved using DynDNS or a similar service. The configuration
1513 can be used by the initiator to start up a connection to a peer
1514 by resolving peer.foo.bar into the currently allocated IP address.
1515 Thanks to the rightallowany flag the connection behaves later on
1520 so that the peer can rekey the connection as an initiator when his
1521 IP address changes. An alternative notation is
1525 which will implicitly set rightallowany=yes.
1527 - ipsec starter now fails more gracefully in the presence of parsing
1528 errors. Flawed ca and conn section are discarded and pluto is started
1529 if non-fatal errors only were encountered. If right=%peer.foo.bar
1530 cannot be resolved by DNS then right=%any will be used so that passive
1531 connections as a responder are still possible.
1533 - The new pkcs11initargs parameter that can be placed in the
1534 setup config section of /etc/ipsec.conf allows the definition
1535 of an argument string that is used with the PKCS#11 C_Initialize()
1536 function. This non-standard feature is required by the NSS softoken
1537 library. This patch was contributed by Robert Varga.
1539 - Fixed a bug in ipsec starter introduced by strongswan-2.8.5
1540 which caused a segmentation fault in the presence of unknown
1541 or misspelt keywords in ipsec.conf. This bug fix was contributed
1544 - Partial support for MOBIKE in IKEv2. The initiator acts on interface/
1545 address configuration changes and updates IKE and IPsec SAs dynamically.
1551 - IKEv2 peer configuration selection now can be based on a given
1552 certification authority using the rightca= statement.
1554 - IKEv2 authentication based on RSA signatures now can handle multiple
1555 certificates issued for a given peer ID. This allows a smooth transition
1556 in the case of a peer certificate renewal.
1558 - IKEv2: Support for requesting a specific virtual IP using leftsourceip on the
1559 client and returning requested virtual IPs using rightsourceip=%config
1560 on the server. If the server does not support configuration payloads, the
1561 client enforces its leftsourceip parameter.
1563 - The ./configure options --with-uid/--with-gid allow pluto and charon
1564 to drop their privileges to a minimum and change to an other UID/GID. This
1565 improves the systems security, as a possible intruder may only get the
1566 CAP_NET_ADMIN capability.
1568 - Further modularization of charon: Pluggable control interface and
1569 configuration backend modules provide extensibility. The control interface
1570 for stroke is included, and further interfaces using DBUS (NetworkManager)
1571 or XML are on the way. A backend for storing configurations in the daemon
1572 is provided and more advanced backends (using e.g. a database) are trivial
1575 - Fixed a compilation failure in libfreeswan occurring with Linux kernel
1582 - Support for an additional Diffie-Hellman exchange when creating/rekeying
1583 a CHILD_SA in IKEv2 (PFS). PFS is enabled when the proposal contains a
1584 DH group (e.g. "esp=aes128-sha1-modp1536"). Further, DH group negotiation
1585 is implemented properly for rekeying.
1587 - Support for the AES-XCBC-96 MAC algorithm for IPsec SAs when using IKEv2
1588 (requires linux >= 2.6.20). It is enabled using e.g. "esp=aes256-aesxcbc".
1590 - Working IPv4-in-IPv6 and IPv6-in-IPv4 tunnels for linux >= 2.6.21.
1592 - Added support for EAP modules which do not establish an MSK.
1594 - Removed the dependencies from the /usr/include/linux/ headers by
1595 including xfrm.h, ipsec.h, and pfkeyv2.h in the distribution.
1597 - crlNumber is now listed by ipsec listcrls
1599 - The xauth_modules.verify_secret() function now passes the
1606 - Server side cookie support. If to may IKE_SAs are in CONNECTING state,
1607 cookies are enabled and protect against DoS attacks with faked source
1608 addresses. Number of IKE_SAs in CONNECTING state is also limited per
1609 peer address to avoid resource exhaustion. IKE_SA_INIT messages are
1610 compared to properly detect retransmissions and incoming retransmits are
1611 detected even if the IKE_SA is blocked (e.g. doing OCSP fetches).
1613 - The IKEv2 daemon charon now supports dynamic http- and ldap-based CRL
1614 fetching enabled by crlcheckinterval > 0 and caching fetched CRLs
1615 enabled by cachecrls=yes.
1617 - Added the configuration options --enable-nat-transport which enables
1618 the potentially insecure NAT traversal for IPsec transport mode and
1619 --disable-vendor-id which disables the sending of the strongSwan
1622 - Fixed a long-standing bug in the pluto IKEv1 daemon which caused
1623 a segmentation fault if a malformed payload was detected in the
1624 IKE MR2 message and pluto tried to send an encrypted notification
1627 - Added the NATT_IETF_02_N Vendor ID in order to support IKEv1 connections
1628 with Windows 2003 Server which uses a wrong VID hash.
1634 - Support of SHA2_384 hash function for protecting IKEv1
1635 negotiations and support of SHA2 signatures in X.509 certificates.
1637 - Fixed a serious bug in the computation of the SHA2-512 HMAC
1638 function. Introduced automatic self-test of all IKEv1 hash
1639 and hmac functions during pluto startup. Failure of a self-test
1640 currently issues a warning only but does not exit pluto [yet].
1642 - Support for SHA2-256/384/512 PRF and HMAC functions in IKEv2.
1644 - Full support of CA information sections. ipsec listcainfos
1645 now shows all collected crlDistributionPoints and OCSP
1648 - Support of the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) for IKEv2.
1649 This feature requires the HTTP fetching capabilities of the libcurl
1650 library which must be enabled by setting the --enable-http configure
1653 - Refactored core of the IKEv2 message processing code, allowing better
1654 code reuse and separation.
1656 - Virtual IP support in IKEv2 using INTERNAL_IP4/6_ADDRESS configuration
1657 payload. Additionally, the INTERNAL_IP4/6_DNS attribute is interpreted
1658 by the requestor and installed in a resolv.conf file.
1660 - The IKEv2 daemon charon installs a route for each IPsec policy to use
1661 the correct source address even if an application does not explicitly
1664 - Integrated the EAP framework into charon which loads pluggable EAP library
1665 modules. The ipsec.conf parameter authby=eap initiates EAP authentication
1666 on the client side, while the "eap" parameter on the server side defines
1667 the EAP method to use for client authentication.
1668 A generic client side EAP-Identity module and an EAP-SIM authentication
1669 module using a third party card reader implementation are included.
1671 - Added client side support for cookies.
1673 - Integrated the fixes done at the IKEv2 interoperability bakeoff, including
1674 strict payload order, correct INVALID_KE_PAYLOAD rejection and other minor
1675 fixes to enhance interoperability with other implementations.
1681 - strongSwan now interoperates with the NCP Secure Entry Client,
1682 the Shrew Soft VPN Client, and the Cisco VPN client, doing both
1683 XAUTH and Mode Config.
1685 - UNITY attributes are now recognized and UNITY_BANNER is set
1686 to a default string.
1692 - IKEv1: Support for extended authentication (XAUTH) in combination
1693 with ISAKMP Main Mode RSA or PSK authentication. Both client and
1694 server side were implemented. Handling of user credentials can
1695 be done by a run-time loadable XAUTH module. By default user
1696 credentials are stored in ipsec.secrets.
1698 - IKEv2: Support for reauthentication when rekeying
1700 - IKEv2: Support for transport mode
1702 - fixed a lot of bugs related to byte order
1704 - various other bugfixes
1710 - IKEv1: Implementation of ModeConfig push mode via the new connection
1711 keyword modeconfig=push allows interoperability with Cisco VPN gateways.
1713 - IKEv1: The command ipsec statusall now shows "DPD active" for all
1714 ISAKMP SAs that are under active Dead Peer Detection control.
1716 - IKEv2: Charon's logging and debugging framework has been completely rewritten.
1717 Instead of logger, special printf() functions are used to directly
1718 print objects like hosts (%H) identifications (%D), certificates (%Q),
1719 etc. The number of debugging levels have been reduced to:
1721 0 (audit), 1 (control), 2 (controlmore), 3 (raw), 4 (private)
1723 The debugging levels can either be specified statically in ipsec.conf as
1726 charondebug="lib 1, cfg 3, net 2"
1728 or changed at runtime via stroke as
1730 ipsec stroke loglevel cfg 2
1736 - Implemented full support for IPv6-in-IPv6 tunnels.
1738 - Added configuration options for dead peer detection in IKEv2. dpd_action
1739 types "clear", "hold" and "restart" are supported. The dpd_timeout
1740 value is not used, as the normal retransmission policy applies to
1741 detect dead peers. The dpd_delay parameter enables sending of empty
1742 informational message to detect dead peers in case of inactivity.
1744 - Added support for preshared keys in IKEv2. PSK keys configured in
1745 ipsec.secrets are loaded. The authby parameter specifies the authentication
1746 method to authentificate ourself, the other peer may use PSK or RSA.
1748 - Changed retransmission policy to respect the keyingtries parameter.
1750 - Added private key decryption. PEM keys encrypted with AES-128/192/256
1751 or 3DES are supported.
1753 - Implemented DES/3DES algorithms in libstrongswan. 3DES can be used to
1754 encrypt IKE traffic.
1756 - Implemented SHA-256/384/512 in libstrongswan, allows usage of certificates
1757 signed with such a hash algorithm.
1759 - Added initial support for updown scripts. The actions up-host/client and
1760 down-host/client are executed. The leftfirewall=yes parameter
1761 uses the default updown script to insert dynamic firewall rules, a custom
1762 updown script may be specified with the leftupdown parameter.
1768 - Added support for the auto=route ipsec.conf parameter and the
1769 ipsec route/unroute commands for IKEv2. This allows to set up IKE_SAs and
1770 CHILD_SAs dynamically on demand when traffic is detected by the
1773 - Added support for rekeying IKE_SAs in IKEv2 using the ikelifetime parameter.
1774 As specified in IKEv2, no reauthentication is done (unlike in IKEv1), only
1775 new keys are generated using perfect forward secrecy. An optional flag
1776 which enforces reauthentication will be implemented later.
1778 - "sha" and "sha1" are now treated as synonyms in the ike= and esp=
1779 algorithm configuration statements.
1785 - Full X.509 certificate trust chain verification has been implemented.
1786 End entity certificates can be exchanged via CERT payloads. The current
1787 default is leftsendcert=always, since CERTREQ payloads are not supported
1788 yet. Optional CRLs must be imported locally into /etc/ipsec.d/crls.
1790 - Added support for leftprotoport/rightprotoport parameters in IKEv2. IKEv2
1791 would offer more possibilities for traffic selection, but the Linux kernel
1792 currently does not support it. That's why we stick with these simple
1793 ipsec.conf rules for now.
1795 - Added Dead Peer Detection (DPD) which checks liveliness of remote peer if no
1796 IKE or ESP traffic is received. DPD is currently hardcoded (dpdaction=clear,
1799 - Initial NAT traversal support in IKEv2. Charon includes NAT detection
1800 notify payloads to detect NAT routers between the peers. It switches
1801 to port 4500, uses UDP encapsulated ESP packets, handles peer address
1802 changes gracefully and sends keep alive message periodically.
1804 - Reimplemented IKE_SA state machine for charon, which allows simultaneous
1805 rekeying, more shared code, cleaner design, proper retransmission
1806 and a more extensible code base.
1808 - The mixed PSK/RSA roadwarrior detection capability introduced by the
1809 strongswan-2.7.0 release necessitated the pre-parsing of the IKE proposal
1810 payloads by the responder right before any defined IKE Main Mode state had
1811 been established. Although any form of bad proposal syntax was being correctly
1812 detected by the payload parser, the subsequent error handler didn't check
1813 the state pointer before logging current state information, causing an
1814 immediate crash of the pluto keying daemon due to a NULL pointer.
1820 - Added algorithm selection to charon: New default algorithms for
1821 ike=aes128-sha-modp2048, as both daemons support it. The default
1822 for IPsec SAs is now esp=aes128-sha,3des-md5. charon handles
1823 the ike/esp parameter the same way as pluto. As this syntax does
1824 not allow specification of a pseudo random function, the same
1825 algorithm as for integrity is used (currently sha/md5). Supported
1827 Encryption: aes128, aes192, aes256
1828 Integrity/PRF: md5, sha (using hmac)
1829 DH-Groups: modp768, 1024, 1536, 2048, 4096, 8192
1831 Encryption: aes128, aes192, aes256, 3des, blowfish128,
1832 blowfish192, blowfish256
1833 Integrity: md5, sha1
1834 More IKE encryption algorithms will come after porting libcrypto into
1837 - initial support for rekeying CHILD_SAs using IKEv2. Currently no
1838 perfect forward secrecy is used. The rekeying parameters rekey,
1839 rekeymargin, rekeyfuzz and keylife from ipsec.conf are now supported
1840 when using IKEv2. WARNING: charon currently is unable to handle
1841 simultaneous rekeying. To avoid such a situation, use a large
1842 rekeyfuzz, or even better, set rekey=no on one peer.
1844 - support for host2host, net2net, host2net (roadwarrior) tunnels
1845 using predefined RSA certificates (see uml scenarios for
1846 configuration examples).
1848 - new build environment featuring autotools. Features such
1849 as HTTP, LDAP and smartcard support may be enabled using
1850 the ./configure script. Changing install directories
1851 is possible, too. See ./configure --help for more details.
1853 - better integration of charon with ipsec starter, which allows
1854 (almost) transparent operation with both daemons. charon
1855 handles ipsec commands up, down, status, statusall, listall,
1856 listcerts and allows proper load, reload and delete of connections
1863 - initial support of the IKEv2 protocol. Connections in
1864 ipsec.conf designated by keyexchange=ikev2 are negotiated
1865 by the new IKEv2 charon keying daemon whereas those marked
1866 by keyexchange=ikev1 or the default keyexchange=ike are
1867 handled thy the IKEv1 pluto keying daemon. Currently only
1868 a limited subset of functions are available with IKEv2
1869 (Default AES encryption, authentication based on locally
1870 imported X.509 certificates, unencrypted private RSA keys
1871 in PKCS#1 file format, limited functionality of the ipsec
1878 - the dynamic iptables rules from the _updown_x509 template
1879 for KLIPS and the _updown_policy template for NETKEY have
1880 been merged into the default _updown script. The existing
1881 left|rightfirewall keyword causes the automatic insertion
1882 and deletion of ACCEPT rules for tunneled traffic upon
1883 the successful setup and teardown of an IPsec SA, respectively.
1884 left|rightfirwall can be used with KLIPS under any Linux 2.4
1885 kernel or with NETKEY under a Linux kernel version >= 2.6.16
1886 in conjunction with iptables >= 1.3.5. For NETKEY under a Linux
1887 kernel version < 2.6.16 which does not support IPsec policy
1888 matching yet, please continue to use a copy of the _updown_espmark
1889 template loaded via the left|rightupdown keyword.
1891 - a new left|righthostaccess keyword has been introduced which
1892 can be used in conjunction with left|rightfirewall and the
1893 default _updown script. By default leftfirewall=yes inserts
1894 a bi-directional iptables FORWARD rule for a local client network
1895 with a netmask different from 255.255.255.255 (single host).
1896 This does not allow to access the VPN gateway host via its
1897 internal network interface which is part of the client subnet
1898 because an iptables INPUT and OUTPUT rule would be required.
1899 lefthostaccess=yes will cause this additional ACCEPT rules to
1902 - mixed PSK|RSA roadwarriors are now supported. The ISAKMP proposal
1903 payload is preparsed in order to find out whether the roadwarrior
1904 requests PSK or RSA so that a matching connection candidate can
1911 - the new _updown_policy template allows ipsec policy based
1912 iptables firewall rules. Required are iptables version
1913 >= 1.3.5 and linux kernel >= 2.6.16. This script obsoletes
1914 the _updown_espmark template, so that no INPUT mangle rules
1915 are required any more.
1917 - added support of DPD restart mode
1919 - ipsec starter now allows the use of wildcards in include
1920 statements as e.g. in "include /etc/my_ipsec/*.conf".
1921 Patch courtesy of Matthias Haas.
1923 - the Netscape OID 'employeeNumber' is now recognized and can be
1924 used as a Relative Distinguished Name in certificates.
1930 - /etc/init.d/ipsec or /etc/rc.d/ipsec is now a copy of the ipsec
1931 command and not of ipsec setup any more.
1933 - ipsec starter now supports AH authentication in conjunction with
1934 ESP encryption. AH authentication is configured in ipsec.conf
1935 via the auth=ah parameter.
1937 - The command ipsec scencrypt|scdecrypt <args> is now an alias for
1938 ipsec whack --scencrypt|scdecrypt <args>.
1940 - get_sa_info() now determines for the native netkey IPsec stack
1941 the exact time of the last use of an active eroute. This information
1942 is used by the Dead Peer Detection algorithm and is also displayed by
1943 the ipsec status command.
1949 - running under the native Linux 2.6 IPsec stack, the function
1950 get_sa_info() is called by ipsec auto --status to display the current
1951 number of transmitted bytes per IPsec SA.
1953 - get_sa_info() is also used by the Dead Peer Detection process to detect
1954 recent ESP activity. If ESP traffic was received from the peer within
1955 the last dpd_delay interval then no R_Y_THERE notification must be sent.
1957 - strongSwan now supports the Relative Distinguished Name "unstructuredName"
1958 in ID_DER_ASN1_DN identities. The following notations are possible:
1960 rightid="unstructuredName=John Doe"
1961 rightid="UN=John Doe"
1963 - fixed a long-standing bug which caused PSK-based roadwarrior connections
1964 to segfault in the function id.c:same_id() called by keys.c:get_secret()
1965 if an FQDN, USER_FQDN, or Key ID was defined, as in the following example.
1972 - the ipsec command now supports most ipsec auto commands (e.g. ipsec listall).
1974 - ipsec starter didn't set host_addr and client.addr ports in whack msg.
1976 - in order to guarantee backwards-compatibility with the script-based
1977 auto function (e.g. auto --replace), the ipsec starter scripts stores
1978 the defaultroute information in the temporary file /var/run/ipsec.info.
1980 - The compile-time option USE_XAUTH_VID enables the sending of the XAUTH
1981 Vendor ID which is expected by Cisco PIX 7 boxes that act as IKE Mode Config
1984 - the ipsec starter now also recognizes the parameters authby=never and
1985 type=passthrough|pass|drop|reject.
1991 - ipsec starter now supports the also parameter which allows
1992 a modular structure of the connection definitions. Thus
1993 "ipsec start" is now ready to replace "ipsec setup".
1999 - Mathieu Lafon's popular ipsec starter tool has been added to the
2000 strongSwan distribution. Many thanks go to Stephan Scholz from astaro
2001 for his integration work. ipsec starter is a C program which is going
2002 to replace the various shell and awk starter scripts (setup, _plutoload,
2003 _plutostart, _realsetup, _startklips, _confread, and auto). Since
2004 ipsec.conf is now parsed only once, the starting of multiple tunnels is
2005 accelerated tremedously.
2007 - Added support of %defaultroute to the ipsec starter. If the IP address
2008 changes, a HUP signal to the ipsec starter will automatically
2009 reload pluto's connections.
2011 - moved most compile time configurations from pluto/Makefile to
2012 Makefile.inc by defining the options USE_LIBCURL, USE_LDAP,
2013 USE_SMARTCARD, and USE_NAT_TRAVERSAL_TRANSPORT_MODE.
2015 - removed the ipsec verify and ipsec newhostkey commands
2017 - fixed some 64-bit issues in formatted print statements
2019 - The scepclient functionality implementing the Simple Certificate
2020 Enrollment Protocol (SCEP) is nearly complete but hasn't been
2027 - CA certicates are now automatically loaded from a smartcard
2028 or USB crypto token and appear in the ipsec auto --listcacerts
2035 - when using "ipsec whack --scencrypt <data>" with a PKCS#11
2036 library that does not support the C_Encrypt() Cryptoki
2037 function (e.g. OpenSC), the RSA encryption is done in
2038 software using the public key fetched from the smartcard.
2040 - The scepclient function now allows to define the
2041 validity of a self-signed certificate using the --days,
2042 --startdate, and --enddate options. The default validity
2043 has been changed from one year to five years.
2049 - the config setup parameter pkcs11proxy=yes opens pluto's PKCS#11
2050 interface to other applications for RSA encryption and decryption
2051 via the whack interface. Notation:
2053 ipsec whack --scencrypt <data>
2054 [--inbase 16|hex|64|base64|256|text|ascii]
2055 [--outbase 16|hex|64|base64|256|text|ascii]
2058 ipsec whack --scdecrypt <data>
2059 [--inbase 16|hex|64|base64|256|text|ascii]
2060 [--outbase 16|hex|64|base64|256|text|ascii]
2063 The default setting for inbase and outbase is hex.
2065 The new proxy interface can be used for securing symmetric
2066 encryption keys required by the cryptoloop or dm-crypt
2067 disk encryption schemes, especially in the case when
2068 pkcs11keepstate=yes causes pluto to lock the pkcs11 slot
2071 - if the file /etc/ipsec.secrets is lacking during the startup of
2072 pluto then the root-readable file /etc/ipsec.d/private/myKey.der
2073 containing a 2048 bit RSA private key and a matching self-signed
2074 certificate stored in the file /etc/ipsec.d/certs/selfCert.der
2075 is automatically generated by calling the function
2077 ipsec scepclient --out pkcs1 --out cert-self
2079 scepclient was written by Jan Hutter and Martin Willi, students
2080 at the University of Applied Sciences in Rapperswil, Switzerland.
2086 - the current extension of the PKCS#7 framework introduced
2087 a parsing error in PKCS#7 wrapped X.509 certificates that are
2088 e.g. transmitted by Windows XP when multi-level CAs are used.
2089 the parsing syntax has been fixed.
2091 - added a patch by Gerald Richter which tolerates multiple occurrences
2092 of the ipsec0 interface when using KLIPS.
2098 - with gawk-3.1.4 the word "default2 has become a protected
2099 keyword for use in switch statements and cannot be used any
2100 more in the strongSwan scripts. This problem has been
2101 solved by renaming "default" to "defaults" and "setdefault"
2102 in the scripts _confread and auto, respectively.
2104 - introduced the parameter leftsendcert with the values
2106 always|yes (the default, always send a cert)
2107 ifasked (send the cert only upon a cert request)
2108 never|no (never send a cert, used for raw RSA keys and
2111 - fixed the initialization of the ESP key length to a default of
2112 128 bits in the case that the peer does not send a key length
2113 attribute for AES encryption.
2115 - applied Herbert Xu's uniqueIDs patch
2117 - applied Herbert Xu's CLOEXEC patches
2123 - CRLs can now be cached also in the case when the issuer's
2124 certificate does not contain a subjectKeyIdentifier field.
2125 In that case the subjectKeyIdentifier is computed by pluto as the
2126 160 bit SHA-1 hash of the issuer's public key in compliance
2127 with section 4.2.1.2 of RFC 3280.
2129 - Fixed a bug introduced by strongswan-2.5.1 which eliminated
2130 not only multiple Quick Modes of a given connection but also
2131 multiple connections between two security gateways.
2137 - Under the native IPsec of the Linux 2.6 kernel, a %trap eroute
2138 installed either by setting auto=route in ipsec.conf or by
2139 a connection put into hold, generates an XFRM_AQUIRE event
2140 for each packet that wants to use the not-yet exisiting
2141 tunnel. Up to now each XFRM_AQUIRE event led to an entry in
2142 the Quick Mode queue, causing multiple IPsec SA to be
2143 established in rapid succession. Starting with strongswan-2.5.1
2144 only a single IPsec SA is established per host-pair connection.
2146 - Right after loading the PKCS#11 module, all smartcard slots are
2147 searched for certificates. The result can be viewed using
2150 ipsec auto --listcards
2152 The certificate objects found in the slots are numbered
2153 starting with #1, #2, etc. This position number can be used to address
2154 certificates (leftcert=%smartcard) and keys (: PIN %smartcard)
2155 in ipsec.conf and ipsec.secrets, respectively:
2157 %smartcard (selects object #1)
2158 %smartcard#1 (selects object #1)
2159 %smartcard#3 (selects object #3)
2161 As an alternative the existing retrieval scheme can be used:
2163 %smartcard:45 (selects object with id=45)
2164 %smartcard0 (selects first object in slot 0)
2165 %smartcard4:45 (selects object in slot 4 with id=45)
2167 - Depending on the settings of CKA_SIGN and CKA_DECRYPT
2168 private key flags either C_Sign() or C_Decrypt() is used
2169 to generate a signature.
2171 - The output buffer length parameter siglen in C_Sign()
2172 is now initialized to the actual size of the output
2173 buffer prior to the function call. This fixes the
2174 CKR_BUFFER_TOO_SMALL error that could occur when using
2175 the OpenSC PKCS#11 module.
2177 - Changed the initialization of the PKCS#11 CK_MECHANISM in
2178 C_SignInit() to mech = { CKM_RSA_PKCS, NULL_PTR, 0 }.
2180 - Refactored the RSA public/private key code and transferred it
2181 from keys.c to the new pkcs1.c file as a preparatory step
2182 towards the release of the SCEP client.
2188 - The loading of a PKCS#11 smartcard library module during
2189 runtime does not require OpenSC library functions any more
2190 because the corresponding code has been integrated into
2191 smartcard.c. Also the RSAREF pkcs11 header files have been
2192 included in a newly created pluto/rsaref directory so that
2193 no external include path has to be defined any longer.
2195 - A long-awaited feature has been implemented at last:
2196 The local caching of CRLs fetched via HTTP or LDAP, activated
2197 by the parameter cachecrls=yes in the config setup section
2198 of ipsec.conf. The dynamically fetched CRLs are stored under
2199 a unique file name containing the issuer's subjectKeyID
2200 in /etc/ipsec.d/crls.
2202 - Applied a one-line patch courtesy of Michael Richardson
2203 from the Openswan project which fixes the kernel-oops
2204 in KLIPS when an snmp daemon is running on the same box.
2210 - Eliminated null length CRL distribution point strings.
2212 - Fixed a trust path evaluation bug introduced with 2.4.3
2218 - Improved the joint OCSP / CRL revocation policy.
2219 OCSP responses have precedence over CRL entries.
2221 - Introduced support of CRLv2 reason codes.
2223 - Fixed a bug with key-pad equipped readers which caused
2224 pluto to prompt for the pin via the console when the first
2225 occasion to enter the pin via the key-pad was missed.
2227 - When pluto is built with LDAP_V3 enabled, the library
2228 liblber required by newer versions of openldap is now
2235 - Added the _updown_espmark template which requires all
2236 incoming ESP traffic to be marked with a default mark
2239 - Introduced the pkcs11keepstate parameter in the config setup
2240 section of ipsec.conf. With pkcs11keepstate=yes the PKCS#11
2241 session and login states are kept as long as possible during
2242 the lifetime of pluto. This means that a PIN entry via a key
2243 pad has to be done only once.
2245 - Introduced the pkcs11module parameter in the config setup
2246 section of ipsec.conf which specifies the PKCS#11 module
2247 to be used with smart cards. Example:
2249 pkcs11module=/usr/lib/pkcs11/opensc-pkcs11.lo
2251 - Added support of smartcard readers equipped with a PIN pad.
2253 - Added patch by Jay Pfeifer which detects when netkey
2254 modules have been statically built into the Linux 2.6 kernel.
2256 - Added two patches by Herbert Xu. The first uses ip xfrm
2257 instead of setkey to flush the IPsec policy database. The
2258 second sets the optional flag in inbound IPComp SAs only.
2260 - Applied Ulrich Weber's patch which fixes an interoperability
2261 problem between native IPsec and KLIPS systems caused by
2262 setting the replay window to 32 instead of 0 for ipcomp.
2268 - Fixed a bug which caused an unwanted Mode Config request
2269 to be initiated in the case where "right" was used to denote
2270 the local side in ipsec.conf and "left" the remote side,
2271 contrary to the recommendation that "right" be remote and
2278 - updated Vendor ID to strongSwan-2.4.0
2280 - updated copyright statement to include David Buechi and
2287 - strongSwan now communicates with attached smartcards and
2288 USB crypto tokens via the standardized PKCS #11 interface.
2289 By default the OpenSC library from www.opensc.org is used
2290 but any other PKCS#11 library could be dynamically linked.
2291 strongSwan's PKCS#11 API was implemented by David Buechi
2292 and Michael Meier, both graduates of the Zurich University
2293 of Applied Sciences in Winterthur, Switzerland.
2295 - When a %trap eroute is triggered by an outgoing IP packet
2296 then the native IPsec stack of the Linux 2.6 kernel [often/
2297 always?] returns an XFRM_ACQUIRE message with an undefined
2298 protocol family field and the connection setup fails.
2299 As a workaround IPv4 (AF_INET) is now assumed.
2301 - the results of the UML test scenarios are now enhanced
2302 with block diagrams of the virtual network topology used
2303 in a particular test.
2309 - fixed IV used to decrypt informational messages.
2310 This bug was introduced with Mode Config functionality.
2312 - fixed NCP Vendor ID.
2314 - undid one of Ulrich Weber's maximum udp size patches
2315 because it caused a segmentation fault with NAT-ed
2318 - added UML scenarios wildcards and attr-cert which
2319 demonstrate the implementation of IPsec policies based
2320 on wildcard parameters contained in Distinguished Names and
2321 on X.509 attribute certificates, respectively.
2327 - Added basic Mode Config functionality
2329 - Added Mathieu Lafon's patch which upgrades the status of
2330 the NAT-Traversal implementation to RFC 3947.
2332 - The _startklips script now also loads the xfrm4_tunnel
2335 - Added Ulrich Weber's netlink replay window size and
2336 maximum udp size patches.
2338 - UML testing now uses the Linux 2.6.10 UML kernel by default.
2344 - Eric Marchionni and Patrik Rayo, both recent graduates from
2345 the Zuercher Hochschule Winterthur in Switzerland, created a
2346 User-Mode-Linux test setup for strongSwan. For more details
2347 please read the INSTALL and README documents in the testing
2350 - Full support of group attributes based on X.509 attribute
2351 certificates. Attribute certificates can be generated
2352 using the openac facility. For more details see
2356 The group attributes can be used in connection definitions
2357 in order to give IPsec access to specific user groups.
2358 This is done with the new parameter left|rightgroups as in
2360 rightgroups="Research, Sales"
2362 giving access to users possessing the group attributes
2363 Research or Sales, only.
2365 - In Quick Mode clients with subnet mask /32 are now
2366 coded as IP_V4_ADDRESS or IP_V6_ADDRESS. This should
2367 fix rekeying problems with the SafeNet/SoftRemote and NCP
2368 Secure Entry Clients.
2370 - Changed the defaults of the ikelifetime and keylife parameters
2371 to 3h and 1h, respectively. The maximum allowable values are
2372 now both set to 24 h.
2374 - Suppressed notification wars between two IPsec peers that
2375 could e.g. be triggered by incorrect ISAKMP encryption.
2377 - Public RSA keys can now have identical IDs if either the
2378 issuing CA or the serial number is different. The serial
2379 number of a certificate is now shown by the command
2381 ipsec auto --listpubkeys
2387 - Added Tuomo Soini's sourceip feature which allows a strongSwan
2388 roadwarrior to use a fixed Virtual IP (see README section 2.6)
2389 and reduces the well-known four tunnel case on VPN gateways to
2390 a single tunnel definition (see README section 2.4).
2392 - Fixed a bug occurring with NAT-Traversal enabled when the responder
2393 suddenly turns initiator and the initiator cannot find a matching
2394 connection because of the floated IKE port 4500.
2396 - Removed misleading ipsec verify command from barf.
2398 - Running under the native IP stack, ipsec --version now shows
2399 the Linux kernel version (courtesy to the Openswan project).
2405 - Introduced the ipsec auto --listalgs monitoring command which lists
2406 all currently registered IKE and ESP algorithms.
2408 - Fixed a bug in the ESP algorithm selection occurring when the strict flag
2409 is set and the first proposed transform does not match.
2411 - Fixed another deadlock in the use of the lock_certs_and_keys() mutex,
2412 occurring when a smartcard is present.
2414 - Prevented that a superseded Phase1 state can trigger a DPD_TIMEOUT event.
2416 - Fixed the printing of the notification names (null)
2418 - Applied another of Herbert Xu's Netlink patches.
2424 - Support of Dead Peer Detection. The connection parameter
2426 dpdaction=clear|hold
2428 activates DPD for the given connection.
2430 - The default Opportunistic Encryption (OE) policy groups are not
2431 automatically included anymore. Those wishing to activate OE can include
2432 the policy group with the following statement in ipsec.conf:
2434 include /etc/ipsec.d/examples/oe.conf
2436 The default for [right|left]rsasigkey is now set to %cert.
2438 - strongSwan now has a Vendor ID of its own which can be activated
2439 using the compile option VENDORID
2441 - Applied Herbert Xu's patch which sets the compression algorithm correctly.
2443 - Applied Herbert Xu's patch fixing an ESPINUDP problem
2445 - Applied Herbert Xu's patch setting source/destination port numbers.
2447 - Reapplied one of Herbert Xu's NAT-Traversal patches which got
2448 lost during the migration from SuperFreeS/WAN.
2450 - Fixed a deadlock in the use of the lock_certs_and_keys() mutex.
2452 - Fixed the unsharing of alg parameters when instantiating group
2459 - Thomas Walpuski made me aware of a potential DoS attack via
2460 a PKCS#7-wrapped certificate bundle which could overwrite valid CA
2461 certificates in Pluto's authority certificate store. This vulnerability
2462 was fixed by establishing trust in CA candidate certificates up to a
2463 trusted root CA prior to insertion into Pluto's chained list.
2465 - replaced the --assign option by the -v option in the auto awk script
2466 in order to make it run with mawk under debian/woody.
2472 - Split of the status information between ipsec auto --status (concise)
2473 and ipsec auto --statusall (verbose). Both commands can be used with
2474 an optional connection selector:
2476 ipsec auto --status[all] <connection_name>
2478 - Added the description of X.509 related features to the ipsec_auto(8)
2481 - Hardened the ASN.1 parser in debug mode, especially the printing
2482 of malformed distinguished names.
2484 - The size of an RSA public key received in a certificate is now restricted to
2486 512 bits <= modulus length <= 8192 bits.
2488 - Fixed the debug mode enumeration.
2494 - Fixed another PKCS#7 vulnerability which could lead to an
2495 endless loop while following the X.509 trust chain.
2501 - Fixed the PKCS#7 vulnerability discovered by Thomas Walpuski
2502 that accepted end certificates having identical issuer and subject
2503 distinguished names in a multi-tier X.509 trust chain.
2509 - Removed all remaining references to ipsec_netlink.h in KLIPS.
2515 - The new "ca" section allows to define the following parameters:
2518 cacert=koolCA.pem # cacert of kool CA
2519 ocspuri=http://ocsp.kool.net:8001 # ocsp server
2520 ldapserver=ldap.kool.net # default ldap server
2521 crluri=http://www.kool.net/kool.crl # crl distribution point
2522 crluri2="ldap:///O=Kool, C= .." # crl distribution point #2
2523 auto=add # add, ignore
2525 The ca definitions can be monitored via the command
2527 ipsec auto --listcainfos
2529 - Fixed cosmetic corruption of /proc filesystem by integrating
2530 D. Hugh Redelmeier's freeswan-2.06 kernel fixes.
2536 - Added support for the 818043 NAT-Traversal update of Microsoft's
2537 Windows 2000/XP IPsec client which sends an ID_FQDN during Quick Mode.
2539 - A symbolic link to libcrypto is now added in the kernel sources
2540 during kernel compilation
2542 - Fixed a couple of 64 bit issues (mostly casts to int).
2543 Thanks to Ken Bantoft who checked my sources on a 64 bit platform.
2545 - Replaced s[n]printf() statements in the kernel by ipsec_snprintf().
2546 Credits go to D. Hugh Redelmeier, Michael Richardson, and Sam Sgro
2547 of the FreeS/WAN team who solved this problem with the 2.4.25 kernel.
2553 - an empty ASN.1 SEQUENCE OF or SET OF object (e.g. a subjectAltName
2554 certificate extension which contains no generalName item) can cause
2555 a pluto crash. This bug has been fixed. Additionally the ASN.1 parser has
2556 been hardened to make it more robust against malformed ASN.1 objects.
2558 - applied Herbert Xu's NAT-T patches which fixes NAT-T under the native
2559 Linux 2.6 IPsec stack.
2565 - based on freeswan-2.04, x509-1.5.3, nat-0.6c, alg-0.8.1rc12
projects / strongswan.git / blob