4 - The new charon-cmd command line IKE client can establish road warrior
5 connections using IKEv1 or IKEv2 with different authentication profiles.
6 It does not depend on any configuration files and can be configured using a
7 few simple command line options.
9 - The kernel-pfroute networking backend has been greatly improved. It now
10 can install virtual IPs on TUN devices on OS X and FreeBSD, allowing these
11 systems to act as a client in common road warrior scenarios.
13 - The new kernel-libipsec plugin uses TUN devices and libipsec to provide IPsec
14 processing in userland on Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X.
16 - The new osx-attr plugin installs configuration attributes (currently DNS
17 servers) via SystemConfiguration on Mac OS X.
19 - The sshkey plugin parses SSH public keys, which, together with the --agent
20 option for charon-cmd, allows the use of ssh-agent for authentication.
21 To configure SSH keys in ipsec.conf the left|rightrsasigkey options are
22 replaced with left|rightsigkey, which now take public keys in one of three
23 formats: SSH (RFC 4253, ssh: prefix), DNSKEY (RFC 3110, dns: prefix), and
24 PKCS#1 (the default, no prefix).
26 - Extraction of certificates and private keys from PKCS#12 files is now provided
27 by the new pkcs12 plugin or the openssl plugin. charon-cmd (--p12) as well
28 as charon (via P12 token in ipsec.secrets) can make use of this.
30 - IKEv2 can now negotiate transport mode and IPComp in NAT situations.
32 - IKEv2 exchange initiators now properly closes an established IKE or CHILD_SA
33 on error conditions using an additional exchange, keeping state in sync
36 - Using a SQL database interface a Trusted Network Connect (TNC) Policy Manager
37 can generate specific measurement workitems for an arbitrary number of
38 Integrity Measurement Verifiers (IMVs) based on the history of the VPN user
41 - Several core classes in libstrongswan are now tested with unit tests. These
42 can be enabled with --enable-unit-tests and run with 'make check'. Coverage
43 reports can be generated with --enable-coverage and 'make coverage' (this
44 disables any optimization, so it should not be enabled when building
47 - chunk_hash() is now based on SipHash-2-4 with a random key. This provides
48 better distribution and prevents hash flooding attacks when used with
51 - All default plugins implement the get_features() method to define features
52 and their dependencies. The plugin loader has been improved, so that plugins
53 in a custom load statement can be ordered freely or to express preferences
54 without being affected by dependencies between plugin features.
56 - libipsec now supports AES-GCM.
62 - Fixed a security vulnerability in the openssl plugin which was reported by
63 Kevin Wojtysiak. The vulnerability has been registered as CVE-2013-2944.
64 Before the fix, if the openssl plugin's ECDSA signature verification was used,
65 due to a misinterpretation of the error code returned by the OpenSSL
66 ECDSA_verify() function, an empty or zeroed signature was accepted as a
69 - The handling of a couple of other non-security relevant openssl return codes
72 - The tnc_ifmap plugin now publishes virtual IPv4 and IPv6 addresses via its
73 TCG TNC IF-MAP 2.1 interface.
75 - The charon.initiator_only option causes charon to ignore IKE initiation
78 - The openssl plugin can now use the openssl-fips library.
84 - The new ipseckey plugin enables authentication based on trustworthy public
85 keys stored as IPSECKEY resource records in the DNS and protected by DNSSEC.
86 To do so it uses a DNSSEC enabled resolver, like the one provided by the new
87 unbound plugin, which is based on libldns and libunbound. Both plugins were
88 created by Reto Guadagnini.
90 - Implemented the TCG TNC IF-IMV 1.4 draft making access requestor identities
91 available to an IMV. The OS IMV stores the AR identity together with the
92 device ID in the attest database.
94 - The openssl plugin now uses the AES-NI accelerated version of AES-GCM
95 if the hardware supports it.
97 - The eap-radius plugin can now assign virtual IPs to IKE clients using the
98 Framed-IP-Address attribute by using the "%radius" named pool in the
99 rightsourceip ipsec.conf option. Cisco Banner attributes are forwarded to
100 Unity-capable IKEv1 clients during mode config. charon now sends Interim
101 Accounting updates if requested by the RADIUS server, reports
102 sent/received packets in Accounting messages, and adds a Terminate-Cause
105 - The recently introduced "ipsec listcounters" command can report connection
106 specific counters by passing a connection name, and global or connection
107 counters can be reset by the "ipsec resetcounters" command.
109 - The strongSwan libpttls library provides an experimental implementation of
110 PT-TLS (RFC 6876), a Posture Transport Protocol over TLS.
112 - The charon systime-fix plugin can disable certificate lifetime checks on
113 embedded systems if the system time is obviously out of sync after bootup.
114 Certificates lifetimes get checked once the system time gets sane, closing
115 or reauthenticating connections using expired certificates.
117 - The "ikedscp" ipsec.conf option can set DiffServ code points on outgoing
120 - The new xauth-noauth plugin allows to use basic RSA or PSK authentication with
121 clients that cannot be configured without XAuth authentication. The plugin
122 simply concludes the XAuth exchange successfully without actually performing
123 any authentication. Therefore, to use this backend it has to be selected
124 explicitly with rightauth2=xauth-noauth.
126 - The new charon-tkm IKEv2 daemon delegates security critical operations to a
127 separate process. This has the benefit that the network facing daemon has no
128 knowledge of keying material used to protect child SAs. Thus subverting
129 charon-tkm does not result in the compromise of cryptographic keys.
130 The extracted functionality has been implemented from scratch in a minimal TCB
131 (trusted computing base) in the Ada programming language. Further information
132 can be found at http://www.codelabs.ch/tkm/.
137 - Implemented all IETF Standard PA-TNC attributes and an OS IMC/IMV
138 pair using them to transfer operating system information.
140 - The new "ipsec listcounters" command prints a list of global counter values
141 about received and sent IKE messages and rekeyings.
143 - A new lookip plugin can perform fast lookup of tunnel information using a
144 clients virtual IP and can send notifications about established or deleted
145 tunnels. The "ipsec lookip" command can be used to query such information
146 or receive notifications.
148 - The new error-notify plugin catches some common error conditions and allows
149 an external application to receive notifications for them over a UNIX socket.
151 - IKE proposals can now use a PRF algorithm different to that defined for
152 integrity protection. If an algorithm with a "prf" prefix is defined
153 explicitly (such as prfsha1 or prfsha256), no implicit PRF algorithm based on
154 the integrity algorithm is added to the proposal.
156 - The pkcs11 plugin can now load leftcert certificates from a smartcard for a
157 specific ipsec.conf conn section and cacert CA certificates for a specific ca
160 - The load-tester plugin gained additional options for certificate generation
161 and can load keys and multiple CA certificates from external files. It can
162 install a dedicated outer IP address for each tunnel and tunnel initiation
163 batches can be triggered and monitored externally using the
164 "ipsec load-tester" tool.
166 - PKCS#7 container parsing has been modularized, and the openssl plugin
167 gained an alternative implementation to decrypt and verify such files.
168 In contrast to our own DER parser, OpenSSL can handle BER files, which is
169 required for interoperability of our scepclient with EJBCA.
171 - Support for the proprietary IKEv1 fragmentation extension has been added.
172 Fragments are always handled on receipt but only sent if supported by the peer
173 and if enabled with the new fragmentation ipsec.conf option.
175 - IKEv1 in charon can now parse certificates received in PKCS#7 containers and
176 supports NAT traversal as used by Windows clients. Patches courtesy of
179 - The new rdrand plugin provides a high quality / high performance random
180 source using the Intel rdrand instruction found on Ivy Bridge processors.
182 - The integration test environment was updated and now uses KVM and reproducible
183 guest images based on Debian.
189 - Introduced the sending of the standard IETF Assessment Result
190 PA-TNC attribute by all strongSwan Integrity Measurement Verifiers.
192 - Extended PTS Attestation IMC/IMV pair to provide full evidence of
193 the Linux IMA measurement process. All pertinent file information
194 of a Linux OS can be collected and stored in an SQL database.
196 - The PA-TNC and PB-TNC protocols can now process huge data payloads
197 >64 kB by distributing PA-TNC attributes over multiple PA-TNC messages
198 and these messages over several PB-TNC batches. As long as no
199 consolidated recommandation from all IMVs can be obtained, the TNC
200 server requests more client data by sending an empty SDATA batch.
202 - The rightgroups2 ipsec.conf option can require group membership during
203 a second authentication round, for example during XAuth authentication
204 against a RADIUS server.
206 - The xauth-pam backend can authenticate IKEv1 XAuth and Hybrid authenticated
207 clients against any PAM service. The IKEv2 eap-gtc plugin does not use
208 PAM directly anymore, but can use any XAuth backend to verify credentials,
211 - The new unity plugin brings support for some parts of the IKEv1 Cisco Unity
212 Extension. As client, charon narrows traffic selectors to the received
213 Split-Include attributes and automatically installs IPsec bypass policies
214 for received Local-LAN attributes. As server, charon sends Split-Include
215 attributes for leftsubnet definitions containing multiple subnets to Unity-
218 - An EAP-Nak payload is returned by clients if the gateway requests an EAP
219 method that the client does not support. Clients can also request a specific
220 EAP method by configuring that method with leftauth.
222 - The eap-dynamic plugin handles EAP-Nak payloads returned by clients and uses
223 these to select a different EAP method supported/requested by the client.
224 The plugin initially requests the first registered method or the first method
225 configured with charon.plugins.eap-dynamic.preferred.
227 - The new left/rightdns options specify connection specific DNS servers to
228 request/respond in IKEv2 configuration payloads or IKEv2 mode config. leftdns
229 can be any (comma separated) combination of %config4 and %config6 to request
230 multiple servers, both for IPv4 and IPv6. rightdns takes a list of DNS server
231 IP addresses to return.
233 - The left/rightsourceip options now accept multiple addresses or pools.
234 leftsourceip can be any (comma separated) combination of %config4, %config6
235 or fixed IP addresses to request. rightsourceip accepts multiple explicitly
236 specified or referenced named pools.
238 - Multiple connections can now share a single address pool when they use the
239 same definition in one of the rightsourceip pools.
241 - The options charon.interfaces_ignore and charon.interfaces_use allow one to
242 configure the network interfaces used by the daemon.
244 - The kernel-netlink plugin supports the charon.install_virtual_ip_on option,
245 which specifies the interface on which virtual IP addresses will be installed.
246 If it is not specified the current behavior of using the outbound interface
249 - The kernel-netlink plugin tries to keep the current source address when
250 looking for valid routes to reach other hosts.
252 - The autotools build has been migrated to use a config.h header. strongSwan
253 development headers will get installed during "make install" if
254 --with-dev-headers has been passed to ./configure.
256 - All crypto primitives gained return values for most operations, allowing
257 crypto backends to fail, for example when using hardware accelerators.
263 - The charon IKE daemon gained experimental support for the IKEv1 protocol.
264 Pluto has been removed from the 5.x series, and unless strongSwan is
265 configured with --disable-ikev1 or --disable-ikev2, charon handles both
266 keying protocols. The feature-set of IKEv1 in charon is almost on par with
267 pluto, but currently does not support AH or bundled AH+ESP SAs. Beside
268 RSA/ECDSA, PSK and XAuth, charon also supports the Hybrid authentication
269 mode. Informations for interoperability and migration is available at
270 http://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/CharonPlutoIKEv1.
272 - Charon's bus_t has been refactored so that loggers and other listeners are
273 now handled separately. The single lock was previously cause for deadlocks
274 if extensive listeners, such as the one provided by the updown plugin, wanted
275 to acquire locks that were held by other threads which in turn tried to log
276 messages, and thus were waiting to acquire the same lock currently held by
277 the thread calling the listener.
278 The implemented changes also allow the use of a read/write-lock for the
279 loggers which increases performance if multiple loggers are registered.
280 Besides several interface changes this last bit also changes the semantics
281 for loggers as these may now be called by multiple threads at the same time.
283 - Source routes are reinstalled if interfaces are reactivated or IP addresses
286 - The thread pool (processor_t) now has more control over the lifecycle of
287 a job (see job.h for details). In particular, it now controls the destruction
288 of jobs after execution and the cancellation of jobs during shutdown. Due to
289 these changes the requeueing feature, previously available to callback_job_t
290 only, is now available to all jobs (in addition to a new rescheduling
293 - In addition to trustchain key strength definitions for different public key
294 systems, the rightauth option now takes a list of signature hash algorithms
295 considered save for trustchain validation. For example, the setting
296 rightauth=rsa-2048-ecdsa-256-sha256-sha384-sha512 requires a trustchain
297 that uses at least RSA-2048 or ECDSA-256 keys and certificate signatures
298 using SHA-256 or better.
304 - Fixed a security vulnerability in the gmp plugin. If this plugin was used
305 for RSA signature verification an empty or zeroed signature was handled as
308 - Fixed several issues with reauthentication and address updates.
314 - The tnc-pdp plugin implements a RADIUS server interface allowing
315 a strongSwan TNC server to act as a Policy Decision Point.
317 - The eap-radius authentication backend enforces Session-Timeout attributes
318 using RFC4478 repeated authentication and acts upon RADIUS Dynamic
319 Authorization extensions, RFC 5176. Currently supported are disconnect
320 requests and CoA messages containing a Session-Timeout.
322 - The eap-radius plugin can forward arbitrary RADIUS attributes from and to
323 clients using custom IKEv2 notify payloads. The new radattr plugin reads
324 attributes to include from files and prints received attributes to the
327 - Added support for untruncated MD5 and SHA1 HMACs in ESP as used in
330 - The cmac plugin implements the AES-CMAC-96 and AES-CMAC-PRF-128 algorithms
331 as defined in RFC 4494 and RFC 4615, respectively.
333 - The resolve plugin automatically installs nameservers via resolvconf(8),
334 if it is installed, instead of modifying /etc/resolv.conf directly.
336 - The IKEv2 charon daemon supports now raw RSA public keys in RFC 3110
337 DNSKEY and PKCS#1 file format.
343 - Upgraded the TCG IF-IMC and IF-IMV C API to the upcoming version 1.3
344 which supports IF-TNCCS 2.0 long message types, the exclusive flags
345 and multiple IMC/IMV IDs. Both the TNC Client and Server as well as
346 the "Test", "Scanner", and "Attestation" IMC/IMV pairs were updated.
348 - Fully implemented the "TCG Attestation PTS Protocol: Binding to IF-M"
349 standard (TLV-based messages only). TPM-based remote attestation of
350 Linux IMA (Integrity Measurement Architecture) possible. Measurement
351 reference values are automatically stored in an SQLite database.
353 - The EAP-RADIUS authentication backend supports RADIUS accounting. It sends
354 start/stop messages containing Username, Framed-IP and Input/Output-Octets
355 attributes and has been tested against FreeRADIUS and Microsoft NPS.
357 - Added support for PKCS#8 encoded private keys via the libstrongswan
358 pkcs8 plugin. This is the default format used by some OpenSSL tools since
359 version 1.0.0 (e.g. openssl req with -keyout).
361 - Added session resumption support to the strongSwan TLS stack.
367 - Because of changing checksums before and after installation which caused
368 the integrity tests to fail we avoided directly linking libsimaka, libtls and
369 libtnccs to those libcharon plugins which make use of these dynamic libraries.
370 Instead we linked the libraries to the charon daemon. Unfortunately Ubuntu
371 11.10 activated the --as-needed ld option which discards explicit links
372 to dynamic libraries that are not actually used by the charon daemon itself,
373 thus causing failures during the loading of the plugins which depend on these
374 libraries for resolving external symbols.
376 - Therefore our approach of computing integrity checksums for plugins had to be
377 changed radically by moving the hash generation from the compilation to the
378 post-installation phase.
384 - The new libstrongswan certexpire plugin collects expiration information of
385 all used certificates and exports them to CSV files. It either directly
386 exports them or uses cron style scheduling for batch exports.
388 - starter passes unresolved hostnames to charon, allowing it to do name
389 resolution not before the connection attempt. This is especially useful with
390 connections between hosts using dynamic IP addresses. Thanks to Mirko Parthey
391 for the initial patch.
393 - The android plugin can now be used without the Android frontend patch and
394 provides DNS server registration and logging to logcat.
396 - Pluto and starter (plus stroke and whack) have been ported to Android.
398 - Support for ECDSA private and public key operations has been added to the
399 pkcs11 plugin. The plugin now also provides DH and ECDH via PKCS#11 and can
400 use tokens as random number generators (RNG). By default only private key
401 operations are enabled, more advanced features have to be enabled by their
402 option in strongswan.conf. This also applies to public key operations (even
403 for keys not stored on the token) which were enabled by default before.
405 - The libstrongswan plugin system now supports detailed plugin dependencies.
406 Many plugins have been extended to export its capabilities and requirements.
407 This allows the plugin loader to resolve plugin loading order automatically,
408 and in future releases, to dynamically load the required features on demand.
409 Existing third party plugins are source (but not binary) compatible if they
410 properly initialize the new get_features() plugin function to NULL.
412 - The tnc-ifmap plugin implements a TNC IF-MAP 2.0 client which can deliver
413 metadata about IKE_SAs via a SOAP interface to a MAP server. The tnc-ifmap
414 plugin requires the Apache Axis2/C library.
420 - Our private libraries (e.g. libstrongswan) are not installed directly in
421 prefix/lib anymore. Instead a subdirectory is used (prefix/lib/ipsec/ by
422 default). The plugins directory is also moved from libexec/ipsec/ to that
425 - The dynamic IMC/IMV libraries were moved from the plugins directory to
426 a new imcvs directory in the prefix/lib/ipsec/ subdirectory.
428 - Job priorities were introduced to prevent thread starvation caused by too
429 many threads handling blocking operations (such as CRL fetching). Refer to
430 strongswan.conf(5) for details.
432 - Two new strongswan.conf options allow to fine-tune performance on IKEv2
433 gateways by dropping IKE_SA_INIT requests on high load.
435 - IKEv2 charon daemon supports start PASS and DROP shunt policies
436 preventing traffic to go through IPsec connections. Installation of the
437 shunt policies either via the XFRM netfilter or PFKEYv2 IPsec kernel
440 - The history of policies installed in the kernel is now tracked so that e.g.
441 trap policies are correctly updated when reauthenticated SAs are terminated.
443 - IMC/IMV Scanner pair implementing the RFC 5792 PA-TNC (IF-M) protocol.
444 Using "netstat -l" the IMC scans open listening ports on the TNC client
445 and sends a port list to the IMV which based on a port policy decides if
446 the client is admitted to the network.
447 (--enable-imc-scanner/--enable-imv-scanner).
449 - IMC/IMV Test pair implementing the RFC 5792 PA-TNC (IF-M) protocol.
450 (--enable-imc-test/--enable-imv-test).
452 - The IKEv2 close action does not use the same value as the ipsec.conf dpdaction
453 setting, but the value defined by its own closeaction keyword. The action
454 is triggered if the remote peer closes a CHILD_SA unexpectedly.
460 - The whitelist plugin for the IKEv2 daemon maintains an in-memory identity
461 whitelist. Any connection attempt of peers not whitelisted will get rejected.
462 The 'ipsec whitelist' utility provides a simple command line frontend for
463 whitelist administration.
465 - The duplicheck plugin provides a specialized form of duplicate checking,
466 doing a liveness check on the old SA and optionally notify a third party
467 application about detected duplicates.
469 - The coupling plugin permanently couples two or more devices by limiting
470 authentication to previously used certificates.
472 - In the case that the peer config and child config don't have the same name
473 (usually in SQL database defined connections), ipsec up|route <peer config>
474 starts|routes all associated child configs and ipsec up|route <child config>
475 only starts|routes the specific child config.
477 - fixed the encoding and parsing of X.509 certificate policy statements (CPS).
479 - Duncan Salerno contributed the eap-sim-pcsc plugin implementing a
480 pcsc-lite based SIM card backend.
482 - The eap-peap plugin implements the EAP PEAP protocol. Interoperates
483 successfully with a FreeRADIUS server and Windows 7 Agile VPN clients.
485 - The IKEv2 daemon charon rereads strongswan.conf on SIGHUP and instructs
486 all plugins to reload. Currently only the eap-radius and the attr plugins
487 support configuration reloading.
489 - Added userland support to the IKEv2 daemon for Extended Sequence Numbers
490 support coming with Linux 2.6.39. To enable ESN on a connection, add
491 the 'esn' keyword to the proposal. The default proposal uses 32-bit sequence
492 numbers only ('noesn'), and the same value is used if no ESN mode is
493 specified. To negotiate ESN support with the peer, include both, e.g.
494 esp=aes128-sha1-esn-noesn.
496 - In addition to ESN, Linux 2.6.39 gained support for replay windows larger
497 than 32 packets. The new global strongswan.conf option 'charon.replay_window'
498 configures the size of the replay window, in packets.
504 - Sansar Choinyambuu implemented the RFC 5793 Posture Broker Protocol (BP)
505 compatible with Trusted Network Connect (TNC). The TNCCS 2.0 protocol
506 requires the tnccs_20, tnc_imc and tnc_imv plugins but does not depend
507 on the libtnc library. Any available IMV/IMC pairs conforming to the
508 Trusted Computing Group's TNC-IF-IMV/IMC 1.2 interface specification
509 can be loaded via /etc/tnc_config.
511 - Re-implemented the TNCCS 1.1 protocol by using the tnc_imc and tnc_imv
512 in place of the external libtnc library.
514 - The tnccs_dynamic plugin loaded on a TNC server in addition to the
515 tnccs_11 and tnccs_20 plugins, dynamically detects the IF-TNCCS
516 protocol version used by a TNC client and invokes an instance of
517 the corresponding protocol stack.
519 - IKE and ESP proposals can now be stored in an SQL database using a
520 new proposals table. The start_action field in the child_configs
521 tables allows the automatic starting or routing of connections stored
524 - The new certificate_authorities and certificate_distribution_points
525 tables make it possible to store CRL and OCSP Certificate Distribution
526 points in an SQL database.
528 - The new 'include' statement allows to recursively include other files in
529 strongswan.conf. Existing sections and values are thereby extended and
530 replaced, respectively.
532 - Due to the changes in the parser for strongswan.conf, the configuration
533 syntax for the attr plugin has changed. Previously, it was possible to
534 specify multiple values of a specific attribute type by adding multiple
535 key/value pairs with the same key (e.g. dns) to the plugins.attr section.
536 Because values with the same key now replace previously defined values
537 this is not possible anymore. As an alternative, multiple values can be
538 specified by separating them with a comma (e.g. dns = 1.2.3.4, 2.3.4.5).
540 - ipsec listalgs now appends (set in square brackets) to each crypto
541 algorithm listed the plugin that registered the function.
543 - Traffic Flow Confidentiality padding supported with Linux 2.6.38 can be used
544 by the IKEv2 daemon. The ipsec.conf 'tfc' keyword pads all packets to a given
545 boundary, the special value '%mtu' pads all packets to the path MTU.
547 - The new af-alg plugin can use various crypto primitives of the Linux Crypto
548 API using the AF_ALG interface introduced with 2.6.38. This removes the need
549 for additional userland implementations of symmetric cipher, hash, hmac and
552 - The IKEv2 daemon supports the INITIAL_CONTACT notify as initiator and
553 responder. The notify is sent when initiating configurations with a unique
554 policy, set in ipsec.conf via the global 'uniqueids' option.
556 - The conftest conformance testing framework enables the IKEv2 stack to perform
557 many tests using a distinct tool and configuration frontend. Various hooks
558 can alter reserved bits, flags, add custom notifies and proposals, reorder
559 or drop messages and much more. It is enabled using the --enable-conftest
562 - The new libstrongswan constraints plugin provides advanced X.509 constraint
563 checking. In addition to X.509 pathLen constraints, the plugin checks for
564 nameConstraints and certificatePolicies, including policyMappings and
565 policyConstraints. The x509 certificate plugin and the pki tool have been
566 enhanced to support these extensions. The new left/rightcertpolicy ipsec.conf
567 connection keywords take OIDs a peer certificate must have.
569 - The left/rightauth ipsec.conf keywords accept values with a minimum strength
570 for trustchain public keys in bits, such as rsa-2048 or ecdsa-256.
572 - The revocation and x509 libstrongswan plugins and the pki tool gained basic
573 support for delta CRLs.
579 - IMPORTANT: the default keyexchange mode 'ike' is changing with release 4.5
580 from 'ikev1' to 'ikev2', thus commemorating the five year anniversary of the
581 IKEv2 RFC 4306 and its mature successor RFC 5996. The time has definitively
582 come for IKEv1 to go into retirement and to cede its place to the much more
583 robust, powerful and versatile IKEv2 protocol!
585 - Added new ctr, ccm and gcm plugins providing Counter, Counter with CBC-MAC
586 and Galois/Counter Modes based on existing CBC implementations. These
587 new plugins bring support for AES and Camellia Counter and CCM algorithms
588 and the AES GCM algorithms for use in IKEv2.
590 - The new pkcs11 plugin brings full Smartcard support to the IKEv2 daemon and
591 the pki utility using one or more PKCS#11 libraries. It currently supports
592 RSA private and public key operations and loads X.509 certificates from
595 - Implemented a general purpose TLS stack based on crypto and credential
596 primitives of libstrongswan. libtls supports TLS versions 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2,
597 ECDHE-ECDSA/RSA, DHE-RSA and RSA key exchange algorithms and RSA/ECDSA based
598 client authentication.
600 - Based on libtls, the eap-tls plugin brings certificate based EAP
601 authentication for client and server. It is compatible to Windows 7 IKEv2
602 Smartcard authentication and the OpenSSL based FreeRADIUS EAP-TLS backend.
604 - Implemented the TNCCS 1.1 Trusted Network Connect protocol using the
605 libtnc library on the strongSwan client and server side via the tnccs_11
606 plugin and optionally connecting to a TNC@FHH-enhanced FreeRADIUS AAA server.
607 Depending on the resulting TNC Recommendation, strongSwan clients are granted
608 access to a network behind a strongSwan gateway (allow), are put into a
609 remediation zone (isolate) or are blocked (none), respectively. Any number
610 of Integrity Measurement Collector/Verifier pairs can be attached
611 via the tnc-imc and tnc-imv charon plugins.
613 - The IKEv1 daemon pluto now uses the same kernel interfaces as the IKEv2
614 daemon charon. As a result of this, pluto now supports xfrm marks which
615 were introduced in charon with 4.4.1.
617 - Applets for Maemo 5 (Nokia) allow to easily configure and control IKEv2
618 based VPN connections with EAP authentication on supported devices.
620 - The RADIUS plugin eap-radius now supports multiple RADIUS servers for
621 redundant setups. Servers are selected by a defined priority, server load and
624 - The simple led plugin controls hardware LEDs through the Linux LED subsystem.
625 It currently shows activity of the IKE daemon and is a good example how to
626 implement a simple event listener.
628 - Improved MOBIKE behavior in several corner cases, for instance, if the
629 initial responder moves to a different address.
631 - Fixed left-/rightnexthop option, which was broken since 4.4.0.
633 - Fixed a bug not releasing a virtual IP address to a pool if the XAUTH
634 identity was different from the IKE identity.
636 - Fixed the alignment of ModeConfig messages on 4-byte boundaries in the
637 case where the attributes are not a multiple of 4 bytes (e.g. Cisco's
640 - Fixed the interoperability of the socket_raw and socket_default
643 - Added man page for strongswan.conf
649 - Support of xfrm marks in IPsec SAs and IPsec policies introduced
650 with the Linux 2.6.34 kernel. For details see the example scenarios
651 ikev2/nat-two-rw-mark, ikev2/rw-nat-mark-in-out and ikev2/net2net-psk-dscp.
653 - The PLUTO_MARK_IN and PLUTO_ESP_ENC environment variables can be used
654 in a user-specific updown script to set marks on inbound ESP or
657 - The openssl plugin now supports X.509 certificate and CRL functions.
659 - OCSP/CRL checking in IKEv2 has been moved to the revocation plugin, enabled
660 by default. Plase update manual load directives in strongswan.conf.
662 - RFC3779 ipAddrBlock constraint checking has been moved to the addrblock
663 plugin, disabled by default. Enable it and update manual load directives
664 in strongswan.conf, if required.
666 - The pki utility supports CRL generation using the --signcrl command.
668 - The ipsec pki --self, --issue and --req commands now support output in
669 PEM format using the --outform pem option.
671 - The major refactoring of the IKEv1 Mode Config functionality now allows
672 the transport and handling of any Mode Config attribute.
674 - The RADIUS proxy plugin eap-radius now supports multiple servers. Configured
675 servers are chosen randomly, with the option to prefer a specific server.
676 Non-responding servers are degraded by the selection process.
678 - The ipsec pool tool manages arbitrary configuration attributes stored
679 in an SQL database. ipsec pool --help gives the details.
681 - The new eap-simaka-sql plugin acts as a backend for EAP-SIM and EAP-AKA,
682 reading triplets/quintuplets from an SQL database.
684 - The High Availability plugin now supports a HA enabled in-memory address
685 pool and Node reintegration without IKE_SA rekeying. The latter allows
686 clients without IKE_SA rekeying support to keep connected during
687 reintegration. Additionally, many other issues have been fixed in the ha
690 - Fixed a potential remote code execution vulnerability resulting from
691 the misuse of snprintf(). The vulnerability is exploitable by
692 unauthenticated users.
698 - The IKEv2 High Availability plugin has been integrated. It provides
699 load sharing and failover capabilities in a cluster of currently two nodes,
700 based on an extend ClusterIP kernel module. More information is available at
701 http://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/HighAvailability.
702 The development of the High Availability functionality was sponsored by
703 secunet Security Networks AG.
705 - Added IKEv1 and IKEv2 configuration support for the AES-GMAC
706 authentication-only ESP cipher. Our aes_gmac kernel patch or a Linux
707 2.6.34 kernel is required to make AES-GMAC available via the XFRM
710 - Added support for Diffie-Hellman groups 22, 23 and 24 to the gmp, gcrypt
711 and openssl plugins, usable by both pluto and charon. The new proposal
712 keywords are modp1024s160, modp2048s224 and modp2048s256. Thanks to Joy Latten
713 from IBM for his contribution.
715 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon supports RAM-based virtual IP pools using
716 the rightsourceip directive with a subnet from which addresses
719 - The ipsec pki --gen and --pub commands now allow the output of
720 private and public keys in PEM format using the --outform pem
723 - The new DHCP plugin queries virtual IP addresses for clients from a DHCP
724 server using broadcasts, or a defined server using the
725 charon.plugins.dhcp.server strongswan.conf option. DNS/WINS server information
726 is additionally served to clients if the DHCP server provides such
727 information. The plugin is used in ipsec.conf configurations having
728 rightsourceip set to %dhcp.
730 - A new plugin called farp fakes ARP responses for virtual IP addresses
731 handed out to clients from the IKEv2 daemon charon. The plugin lets a
732 road-warrior act as a client on the local LAN if it uses a virtual IP
733 from the responders subnet, e.g. acquired using the DHCP plugin.
735 - The existing IKEv2 socket implementations have been migrated to the
736 socket-default and the socket-raw plugins. The new socket-dynamic plugin
737 binds sockets dynamically to ports configured via the left-/rightikeport
738 ipsec.conf connection parameters.
740 - The android charon plugin stores received DNS server information as "net.dns"
741 system properties, as used by the Android platform.
747 - The IKEv2 daemon supports RFC 3779 IP address block constraints
748 carried as a critical X.509v3 extension in the peer certificate.
750 - The ipsec pool --add|del dns|nbns command manages DNS and NBNS name
751 server entries that are sent via the IKEv1 Mode Config or IKEv2
752 Configuration Payload to remote clients.
754 - The Camellia cipher can be used as an IKEv1 encryption algorithm.
756 - The IKEv1 and IKEV2 daemons now check certificate path length constraints.
758 - The new ipsec.conf conn option "inactivity" closes a CHILD_SA if no traffic
759 was sent or received within the given interval. To close the complete IKE_SA
760 if its only CHILD_SA was inactive, set the global strongswan.conf option
761 "charon.inactivity_close_ike" to yes.
763 - More detailed IKEv2 EAP payload information in debug output
765 - IKEv2 EAP-SIM and EAP-AKA share joint libsimaka library
767 - Added required userland changes for proper SHA256 and SHA384/512 in ESP that
768 will be introduced with Linux 2.6.33. The "sha256"/"sha2_256" keyword now
769 configures the kernel with 128 bit truncation, not the non-standard 96
770 bit truncation used by previous releases. To use the old 96 bit truncation
771 scheme, the new "sha256_96" proposal keyword has been introduced.
773 - Fixed IPComp in tunnel mode, stripping out the duplicated outer header. This
774 change makes IPcomp tunnel mode connections incompatible with previous
775 releases; disable compression on such tunnels.
777 - Fixed BEET mode connections on recent kernels by installing SAs with
778 appropriate traffic selectors, based on a patch by Michael Rossberg.
780 - Using extensions (such as BEET mode) and crypto algorithms (such as twofish,
781 serpent, sha256_96) allocated in the private use space now require that we
782 know its meaning, i.e. we are talking to strongSwan. Use the new
783 "charon.send_vendor_id" option in strongswan.conf to let the remote peer know
786 - Experimental support for draft-eronen-ipsec-ikev2-eap-auth, where the
787 responder omits public key authentication in favor of a mutual authentication
788 method. To enable EAP-only authentication, set rightauth=eap on the responder
789 to rely only on the MSK constructed AUTH payload. This not-yet standardized
790 extension requires the strongSwan vendor ID introduced above.
792 - The IKEv1 daemon ignores the Juniper SRX notification type 40001, thus
793 allowing interoperability.
799 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon can now use SQL-based address pools to deal out
800 virtual IP addresses as a Mode Config server. The pool capability has been
801 migrated from charon's sql plugin to a new attr-sql plugin which is loaded
802 by libstrongswan and which can be used by both daemons either with a SQLite
803 or MySQL database and the corresponding plugin.
805 - Plugin names have been streamlined: EAP plugins now have a dash after eap
806 (e.g. eap-sim), as it is used with the --enable-eap-sim ./configure option.
807 Plugin configuration sections in strongswan.conf now use the same name as the
808 plugin itself (i.e. with a dash). Make sure to update "load" directives and
809 the affected plugin sections in existing strongswan.conf files.
811 - The private/public key parsing and encoding has been split up into
812 separate pkcs1, pgp, pem and dnskey plugins. The public key implementation
813 plugins gmp, gcrypt and openssl can all make use of them.
815 - The EAP-AKA plugin can use different backends for USIM/quintuplet
816 calculations, very similar to the EAP-SIM plugin. The existing 3GPP2 software
817 implementation has been migrated to a separate plugin.
819 - The IKEv2 daemon charon gained basic PGP support. It can use locally installed
820 peer certificates and can issue signatures based on RSA private keys.
822 - The new 'ipsec pki' tool provides a set of commands to maintain a public
823 key infrastructure. It currently supports operations to create RSA and ECDSA
824 private/public keys, calculate fingerprints and issue or verify certificates.
826 - Charon uses a monotonic time source for statistics and job queueing, behaving
827 correctly if the system time changes (e.g. when using NTP).
829 - In addition to time based rekeying, charon supports IPsec SA lifetimes based
830 on processed volume or number of packets. They new ipsec.conf paramaters
831 'lifetime' (an alias to 'keylife'), 'lifebytes' and 'lifepackets' handle
832 SA timeouts, while the parameters 'margintime' (an alias to rekeymargin),
833 'marginbytes' and 'marginpackets' trigger the rekeying before a SA expires.
834 The existing parameter 'rekeyfuzz' affects all margins.
836 - If no CA/Gateway certificate is specified in the NetworkManager plugin,
837 charon uses a set of trusted root certificates preinstalled by distributions.
838 The directory containing CA certificates can be specified using the
839 --with-nm-ca-dir=path configure option.
841 - Fixed the encoding of the Email relative distinguished name in left|rightid
844 - Fixed the broken parsing of PKCS#7 wrapped certificates by the pluto daemon.
846 - Fixed smartcard-based authentication in the pluto daemon which was broken by
847 the ECDSA support introduced with the 4.3.2 release.
849 - A patch contributed by Heiko Hund fixes mixed IPv6 in IPv4 and vice versa
850 tunnels established with the IKEv1 pluto daemon.
852 - The pluto daemon now uses the libstrongswan x509 plugin for certificates and
853 CRls and the struct id type was replaced by identification_t used by charon
854 and the libstrongswan library.
860 - IKEv2 charon daemon ported to FreeBSD and Mac OS X. Installation details can
861 be found on wiki.strongswan.org.
863 - ipsec statusall shows the number of bytes transmitted and received over
864 ESP connections configured by the IKEv2 charon daemon.
866 - The IKEv2 charon daemon supports include files in ipsec.secrets.
872 - The configuration option --enable-integrity-test plus the strongswan.conf
873 option libstrongswan.integrity_test = yes activate integrity tests
874 of the IKE daemons charon and pluto, libstrongswan and all loaded
875 plugins. Thus dynamic library misconfigurations and non-malicious file
876 manipulations can be reliably detected.
878 - The new default setting libstrongswan.ecp_x_coordinate_only=yes allows
879 IKEv1 interoperability with MS Windows using the ECP DH groups 19 and 20.
881 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon now supports the AES-CCM and AES-GCM ESP
882 authenticated encryption algorithms.
884 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon now supports V4 OpenPGP keys.
886 - The RDN parser vulnerability discovered by Orange Labs research team
887 was not completely fixed in version 4.3.2. Some more modifications
888 had to be applied to the asn1_length() function to make it robust.
894 - The new gcrypt plugin provides symmetric cipher, hasher, RNG, Diffie-Hellman
895 and RSA crypto primitives using the LGPL licensed GNU gcrypt library.
897 - libstrongswan features an integrated crypto selftest framework for registered
898 algorithms. The test-vector plugin provides a first set of test vectors and
899 allows pluto and charon to rely on tested crypto algorithms.
901 - pluto can now use all libstrongswan plugins with the exception of x509 and xcbc.
902 Thanks to the openssl plugin, the ECP Diffie-Hellman groups 19, 20, 21, 25, and
903 26 as well as ECDSA-256, ECDSA-384, and ECDSA-521 authentication can be used
906 - Applying their fuzzing tool, the Orange Labs vulnerability research team found
907 another two DoS vulnerabilities, one in the rather old ASN.1 parser of Relative
908 Distinguished Names (RDNs) and a second one in the conversion of ASN.1 UTCTIME
909 and GENERALIZEDTIME strings to a time_t value.
915 - The nm plugin now passes DNS/NBNS server information to NetworkManager,
916 allowing a gateway administrator to set DNS/NBNS configuration on clients
919 - The nm plugin also accepts CA certificates for gateway authentication. If
920 a CA certificate is configured, strongSwan uses the entered gateway address
921 as its idenitity, requiring the gateways certificate to contain the same as
922 subjectAltName. This allows a gateway administrator to deploy the same
923 certificates to Windows 7 and NetworkManager clients.
925 - The command ipsec purgeike deletes IKEv2 SAs that don't have a CHILD SA.
926 The command ipsec down <conn>{n} deletes CHILD SA instance n of connection
927 <conn> whereas ipsec down <conn>{*} deletes all CHILD SA instances.
928 The command ipsec down <conn>[n] deletes IKE SA instance n of connection
929 <conn> plus dependent CHILD SAs whereas ipsec down <conn>[*] deletes all
930 IKE SA instances of connection <conn>.
932 - Fixed a regression introduced in 4.3.0 where EAP authentication calculated
933 the AUTH payload incorrectly. Further, the EAP-MSCHAPv2 MSK key derivation
934 has been updated to be compatible with the Windows 7 Release Candidate.
936 - Refactored installation of triggering policies. Routed policies are handled
937 outside of IKE_SAs to keep them installed in any case. A tunnel gets
938 established only once, even if initiation is delayed due network outages.
940 - Improved the handling of multiple acquire signals triggered by the kernel.
942 - Fixed two DoS vulnerabilities in the charon daemon that were discovered by
943 fuzzing techniques: 1) Sending a malformed IKE_SA_INIT request leaved an
944 incomplete state which caused a null pointer dereference if a subsequent
945 CREATE_CHILD_SA request was sent. 2) Sending an IKE_AUTH request with either
946 a missing TSi or TSr payload caused a null pointer derefence because the
947 checks for TSi and TSr were interchanged. The IKEv2 fuzzer used was
948 developed by the Orange Labs vulnerability research team. The tool was
949 initially written by Gabriel Campana and is now maintained by Laurent Butti.
951 - Added support for AES counter mode in ESP in IKEv2 using the proposal
952 keywords aes128ctr, aes192ctr and aes256ctr.
954 - Further progress in refactoring pluto: Use of the curl and ldap plugins
955 for fetching crls and OCSP. Use of the random plugin to get keying material
956 from /dev/random or /dev/urandom. Use of the openssl plugin as an alternative
957 to the aes, des, sha1, sha2, and md5 plugins. The blowfish, twofish, and
958 serpent encryption plugins are now optional and are not enabled by default.
964 - Support for the IKEv2 Multiple Authentication Exchanges extension (RFC4739).
965 Initiators and responders can use several authentication rounds (e.g. RSA
966 followed by EAP) to authenticate. The new ipsec.conf leftauth/rightauth and
967 leftauth2/rightauth2 parameters define own authentication rounds or setup
968 constraints for the remote peer. See the ipsec.conf man page for more detials.
970 - If glibc printf hooks (register_printf_function) are not available,
971 strongSwan can use the vstr string library to run on non-glibc systems.
973 - The IKEv2 charon daemon can now configure the ESP CAMELLIA-CBC cipher
974 (esp=camellia128|192|256).
976 - Refactored the pluto and scepclient code to use basic functions (memory
977 allocation, leak detective, chunk handling, printf_hooks, strongswan.conf
978 attributes, ASN.1 parser, etc.) from the libstrongswan library.
980 - Up to two DNS and WINS servers to be sent via IKEv1 ModeConfig can be
981 configured in the pluto section of strongswan.conf.
987 - The new server-side EAP RADIUS plugin (--enable-eap-radius)
988 relays EAP messages to and from a RADIUS server. Successfully
989 tested with with a freeradius server using EAP-MD5 and EAP-SIM.
991 - A vulnerability in the Dead Peer Detection (RFC 3706) code was found by
992 Gerd v. Egidy <gerd.von.egidy@intra2net.com> of Intra2net AG affecting
993 all Openswan and strongSwan releases. A malicious (or expired ISAKMP)
994 R_U_THERE or R_U_THERE_ACK Dead Peer Detection packet can cause the
995 pluto IKE daemon to crash and restart. No authentication or encryption
996 is required to trigger this bug. One spoofed UDP packet can cause the
997 pluto IKE daemon to restart and be unresponsive for a few seconds while
998 restarting. This DPD null state vulnerability has been officially
999 registered as CVE-2009-0790 and is fixed by this release.
1001 - ASN.1 to time_t conversion caused a time wrap-around for
1002 dates after Jan 18 03:14:07 UTC 2038 on 32-bit platforms.
1003 As a workaround such dates are set to the maximum representable
1004 time, i.e. Jan 19 03:14:07 UTC 2038.
1006 - Distinguished Names containing wildcards (*) are not sent in the
1007 IDr payload anymore.
1013 - Fixed a use-after-free bug in the DPD timeout section of the
1014 IKEv1 pluto daemon which sporadically caused a segfault.
1016 - Fixed a crash in the IKEv2 charon daemon occurring with
1017 mixed RAM-based and SQL-based virtual IP address pools.
1019 - Fixed ASN.1 parsing of algorithmIdentifier objects where the
1020 parameters field is optional.
1022 - Ported nm plugin to NetworkManager 7.1.
1028 - Support of the EAP-MSCHAPv2 protocol enabled by the option
1029 --enable-eap-mschapv2. Requires the MD4 hash algorithm enabled
1030 either by --enable-md4 or --enable-openssl.
1032 - Assignment of up to two DNS and up to two WINS servers to peers via
1033 the IKEv2 Configuration Payload (CP). The IPv4 or IPv6 nameserver
1034 addresses are defined in strongswan.conf.
1036 - The strongSwan applet for the Gnome NetworkManager is now built and
1037 distributed as a separate tarball under the name NetworkManager-strongswan.
1043 - Fixed ESP NULL encryption broken by the refactoring of keymat.c.
1044 Also introduced proper initialization and disposal of keying material.
1046 - Fixed the missing listing of connection definitions in ipsec statusall
1047 broken by an unfortunate local variable overload.
1053 - Several performance improvements to handle thousands of tunnels with almost
1054 linear upscaling. All relevant data structures have been replaced by faster
1055 counterparts with better lookup times.
1057 - Better parallelization to run charon on multiple cores. Due to improved
1058 ressource locking and other optimizations the daemon can take full
1059 advantage of 16 or even more cores.
1061 - The load-tester plugin can use a NULL Diffie-Hellman group and simulate
1062 unique identities and certificates by signing peer certificates using a CA
1065 - The redesigned stroke in-memory IP pool handles leases. The "ipsec leases"
1066 command queries assigned leases.
1068 - Added support for smartcards in charon by using the ENGINE API provided by
1069 OpenSSL, based on patches by Michael RoĂŸberg.
1071 - The Padlock plugin supports the hardware RNG found on VIA CPUs to provide a
1072 reliable source of randomness.
1077 - Flexible configuration of logging subsystem allowing to log to multiple
1078 syslog facilities or to files using fine-grained log levels for each target.
1080 - Load testing plugin to do stress testing of the IKEv2 daemon against self
1081 or another host. Found and fixed issues during tests in the multi-threaded
1082 use of the OpenSSL plugin.
1084 - Added profiling code to synchronization primitives to find bottlenecks if
1085 running on multiple cores. Found and fixed an issue where parts of the
1086 Diffie-Hellman calculation acquired an exclusive lock. This greatly improves
1087 parallelization to multiple cores.
1089 - updown script invocation has been separated into a plugin of its own to
1090 further slim down the daemon core.
1092 - Separated IKE_SA/CHILD_SA key derivation process into a closed system,
1093 allowing future implementations to use a secured environment in e.g. kernel
1096 - The kernel interface of charon has been modularized. XFRM NETLINK (default)
1097 and PFKEY (--enable-kernel-pfkey) interface plugins for the native IPsec
1098 stack of the Linux 2.6 kernel as well as a PFKEY interface for the KLIPS
1099 IPsec stack (--enable-kernel-klips) are provided.
1101 - Basic Mobile IPv6 support has been introduced, securing Binding Update
1102 messages as well as tunneled traffic between Mobile Node and Home Agent.
1103 The installpolicy=no option allows peaceful cooperation with a dominant
1104 mip6d daemon and the new type=transport_proxy implements the special MIPv6
1105 IPsec transport proxy mode where the IKEv2 daemon uses the Care-of-Address
1106 but the IPsec SA is set up for the Home Address.
1108 - Implemented migration of Mobile IPv6 connections using the KMADDRESS
1109 field contained in XFRM_MSG_MIGRATE messages sent by the mip6d daemon
1110 via the Linux 2.6.28 (or appropriately patched) kernel.
1116 - IKEv2 charon daemon supports authentication based on raw public keys
1117 stored in the SQL database backend. The ipsec listpubkeys command
1118 lists the available raw public keys via the stroke interface.
1120 - Several MOBIKE improvements: Detect changes in NAT mappings in DPD exchanges,
1121 handle events if kernel detects NAT mapping changes in UDP-encapsulated
1122 ESP packets (requires kernel patch), reuse old addesses in MOBIKE updates as
1123 long as possible and other fixes.
1125 - Fixed a bug in addr_in_subnet() which caused insertion of wrong source
1126 routes for destination subnets having netwmasks not being a multiple of 8 bits.
1127 Thanks go to Wolfgang Steudel, TU Ilmenau for reporting this bug.
1133 - Fixed a Denial-of-Service vulnerability where an IKE_SA_INIT message with
1134 a KE payload containing zeroes only can cause a crash of the IKEv2 charon
1135 daemon due to a NULL pointer returned by the mpz_export() function of the
1136 GNU Multiprecision Library (GMP). Thanks go to Mu Dynamics Research Labs
1137 for making us aware of this problem.
1139 - The new agent plugin provides a private key implementation on top of an
1142 - The NetworkManager plugin has been extended to support certificate client
1143 authentication using RSA keys loaded from a file or using ssh-agent.
1145 - Daemon capability dropping has been ported to libcap and must be enabled
1146 explicitly --with-capabilities=libcap. Future version will support the
1147 newer libcap2 library.
1149 - ipsec listalgs lists the IKEv2 cryptografic algorithms registered with the
1150 charon keying daemon.
1156 - A NetworkManager plugin allows GUI-based configuration of road-warrior
1157 clients in a simple way. It features X509 based gateway authentication
1158 and EAP client authentication, tunnel setup/teardown and storing passwords
1159 in the Gnome Keyring.
1161 - A new EAP-GTC plugin implements draft-sheffer-ikev2-gtc-00.txt and allows
1162 username/password authentication against any PAM service on the gateway.
1163 The new EAP method interacts nicely with the NetworkManager plugin and allows
1164 client authentication against e.g. LDAP.
1166 - Improved support for the EAP-Identity method. The new ipsec.conf eap_identity
1167 parameter defines an additional identity to pass to the server in EAP
1170 - The "ipsec statusall" command now lists CA restrictions, EAP
1171 authentication types and EAP identities.
1173 - Fixed two multithreading deadlocks occurring when starting up
1174 several hundred tunnels concurrently.
1176 - Fixed the --enable-integrity-test configure option which
1177 computes a SHA-1 checksum over the libstrongswan library.
1183 - Consistent logging of IKE and CHILD SAs at the audit (AUD) level.
1185 - Improved the performance of the SQL-based virtual IP address pool
1186 by introducing an additional addresses table. The leases table
1187 storing only history information has become optional and can be
1188 disabled by setting charon.plugins.sql.lease_history = no in
1191 - The XFRM_STATE_AF_UNSPEC flag added to xfrm.h allows IPv4-over-IPv6
1192 and IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnels with the 2.6.26 and later Linux kernels.
1194 - management of different virtual IP pools for different
1195 network interfaces have become possible.
1197 - fixed a bug which prevented the assignment of more than 256
1198 virtual IP addresses from a pool managed by an sql database.
1200 - fixed a bug which did not delete own IPCOMP SAs in the kernel.
1206 - Added statistics functions to ipsec pool --status and ipsec pool --leases
1207 and input validation checks to various ipsec pool commands.
1209 - ipsec statusall now lists all loaded charon plugins and displays
1210 the negotiated IKEv2 cipher suite proposals.
1212 - The openssl plugin supports the elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman groups
1213 19, 20, 21, 25, and 26.
1215 - The openssl plugin supports ECDSA authentication using elliptic curve
1218 - Fixed a bug in stroke which caused multiple charon threads to close
1219 the file descriptors during packet transfers over the stroke socket.
1221 - ESP sequence numbers are now migrated in IPsec SA updates handled by
1222 MOBIKE. Works only with Linux kernels >= 2.6.17.
1228 - Fixed the strongswan.conf path configuration problem that occurred when
1229 --sysconfig was not set explicitly in ./configure.
1231 - Fixed a number of minor bugs that where discovered during the 4th
1232 IKEv2 interoperability workshop in San Antonio, TX.
1238 - Plugins for libstrongswan and charon can optionally be loaded according
1239 to a configuration in strongswan.conf. Most components provide a
1240 "load = " option followed by a space separated list of plugins to load.
1241 This allows e.g. the fallback from a hardware crypto accelerator to
1242 to software-based crypto plugins.
1244 - Charons SQL plugin has been extended by a virtual IP address pool.
1245 Configurations with a rightsourceip=%poolname setting query a SQLite or
1246 MySQL database for leases. The "ipsec pool" command helps in administrating
1247 the pool database. See ipsec pool --help for the available options
1249 - The Authenticated Encryption Algorithms AES-CCM-8/12/16 and AES-GCM-8/12/16
1250 for ESP are now supported starting with the Linux 2.6.25 kernel. The
1251 syntax is e.g. esp=aes128ccm12 or esp=aes256gcm16.
1257 - Support for "Hash and URL" encoded certificate payloads has been implemented
1258 in the IKEv2 daemon charon. Using the "certuribase" option of a CA section
1259 allows to assign a base URL to all certificates issued by the specified CA.
1260 The final URL is then built by concatenating that base and the hex encoded
1261 SHA1 hash of the DER encoded certificate. Note that this feature is disabled
1262 by default and must be enabled using the option "charon.hash_and_url".
1264 - The IKEv2 daemon charon now supports the "uniqueids" option to close multiple
1265 IKE_SAs with the same peer. The option value "keep" prefers existing
1266 connection setups over new ones, where the value "replace" replaces existing
1269 - The crypto factory in libstrongswan additionally supports random number
1270 generators, plugins may provide other sources of randomness. The default
1271 plugin reads raw random data from /dev/(u)random.
1273 - Extended the credential framework by a caching option to allow plugins
1274 persistent caching of fetched credentials. The "cachecrl" option has been
1277 - The new trustchain verification introduced in 4.2.0 has been parallelized.
1278 Threads fetching CRL or OCSP information no longer block other threads.
1280 - A new IKEv2 configuration attribute framework has been introduced allowing
1281 plugins to provide virtual IP addresses, and in the future, other
1282 configuration attribute services (e.g. DNS/WINS servers).
1284 - The stroke plugin has been extended to provide virtual IP addresses from
1285 a pool defined in ipsec.conf. The "rightsourceip" parameter now accepts
1286 address pools in CIDR notation (e.g. 10.1.1.0/24). The parameter also accepts
1287 the value "%poolname", where "poolname" identifies a pool provided by a
1290 - Fixed compilation on uClibc and a couple of other minor bugs.
1292 - Set DPD defaults in ipsec starter to dpd_delay=30s and dpd_timeout=150s.
1294 - The IKEv1 pluto daemon now supports the ESP encryption algorithm CAMELLIA
1295 with key lengths of 128, 192, and 256 bits, as well as the authentication
1296 algorithm AES_XCBC_MAC. Configuration example: esp=camellia192-aesxcbc.
1302 - libstrongswan has been modularized to attach crypto algorithms,
1303 credential implementations (keys, certificates) and fetchers dynamically
1304 through plugins. Existing code has been ported to plugins:
1305 - RSA/Diffie-Hellman implementation using the GNU Multi Precision library
1306 - X509 certificate system supporting CRLs, OCSP and attribute certificates
1307 - Multiple plugins providing crypto algorithms in software
1308 - CURL and OpenLDAP fetcher
1310 - libstrongswan gained a relational database API which uses pluggable database
1311 providers. Plugins for MySQL and SQLite are available.
1313 - The IKEv2 keying daemon charon is more extensible. Generic plugins may provide
1314 connection configuration, credentials and EAP methods or control the daemon.
1315 Existing code has been ported to plugins:
1316 - EAP-AKA, EAP-SIM, EAP-MD5 and EAP-Identity
1317 - stroke configuration, credential and control (compatible to pluto)
1318 - XML bases management protocol to control and query the daemon
1319 The following new plugins are available:
1320 - An experimental SQL configuration, credential and logging plugin on
1321 top of either MySQL or SQLite
1322 - A unit testing plugin to run tests at daemon startup
1324 - The authentication and credential framework in charon has been heavily
1325 refactored to support modular credential providers, proper
1326 CERTREQ/CERT payload exchanges and extensible authorization rules.
1328 - The framework of strongSwan Manager has envolved to the web application
1329 framework libfast (FastCGI Application Server w/ Templates) and is usable
1330 by other applications.
1336 - IKE rekeying in NAT situations did not inherit the NAT conditions
1337 to the rekeyed IKE_SA so that the UDP encapsulation was lost with
1338 the next CHILD_SA rekeying.
1340 - Wrong type definition of the next_payload variable in id_payload.c
1341 caused an INVALID_SYNTAX error on PowerPC platforms.
1343 - Implemented IKEv2 EAP-SIM server and client test modules that use
1344 triplets stored in a file. For details on the configuration see
1345 the scenario 'ikev2/rw-eap-sim-rsa'.
1351 - Fixed error in the ordering of the certinfo_t records in the ocsp cache that
1352 caused multiple entries of the same serial number to be created.
1354 - Implementation of a simple EAP-MD5 module which provides CHAP
1355 authentication. This may be interesting in conjunction with certificate
1356 based server authentication, as weak passwords can't be brute forced
1357 (in contradiction to traditional IKEv2 PSK).
1359 - A complete software based implementation of EAP-AKA, using algorithms
1360 specified in 3GPP2 (S.S0055). This implementation does not use an USIM,
1361 but reads the secrets from ipsec.secrets. Make sure to read eap_aka.h
1364 - Support for vendor specific EAP methods using Expanded EAP types. The
1365 interface to EAP modules has been slightly changed, so make sure to
1366 check the changes if you're already rolling your own modules.
1372 - The default _updown script now dynamically inserts and removes ip6tables
1373 firewall rules if leftfirewall=yes is set in IPv6 connections. New IPv6
1374 net-net and roadwarrior (PSK/RSA) scenarios for both IKEv1 and IKEV2 were
1377 - Implemented RFC4478 repeated authentication to force EAP/Virtual-IP clients
1378 to reestablish an IKE_SA within a given timeframe.
1380 - strongSwan Manager supports configuration listing, initiation and termination
1381 of IKE and CHILD_SAs.
1383 - Fixes and improvements to multithreading code.
1385 - IKEv2 plugins have been renamed to libcharon-* to avoid naming conflicts.
1386 Make sure to remove the old plugins in $libexecdir/ipsec, otherwise they get
1393 - Removed recursive pthread mutexes since uClibc doesn't support them.
1399 - In NAT traversal situations and multiple queued Quick Modes,
1400 those pending connections inserted by auto=start after the
1401 port floating from 500 to 4500 were erronously deleted.
1403 - Added a "forceencaps" connection parameter to enforce UDP encapsulation
1404 to surmount restrictive firewalls. NAT detection payloads are faked to
1405 simulate a NAT situation and trick the other peer into NAT mode (IKEv2 only).
1407 - Preview of strongSwan Manager, a web based configuration and monitoring
1408 application. It uses a new XML control interface to query the IKEv2 daemon
1409 (see http://wiki.strongswan.org/wiki/Manager).
1411 - Experimental SQLite configuration backend which will provide the configuration
1412 interface for strongSwan Manager in future releases.
1414 - Further improvements to MOBIKE support.
1420 - Since some third party IKEv2 implementations run into
1421 problems with strongSwan announcing MOBIKE capability per
1422 default, MOBIKE can be disabled on a per-connection-basis
1423 using the mobike=no option. Whereas mobike=no disables the
1424 sending of the MOBIKE_SUPPORTED notification and the floating
1425 to UDP port 4500 with the IKE_AUTH request even if no NAT
1426 situation has been detected, strongSwan will still support
1427 MOBIKE acting as a responder.
1429 - the default ipsec routing table plus its corresponding priority
1430 used for inserting source routes has been changed from 100 to 220.
1431 It can be configured using the --with-ipsec-routing-table and
1432 --with-ipsec-routing-table-prio options.
1434 - the --enable-integrity-test configure option tests the
1435 integrity of the libstrongswan crypto code during the charon
1438 - the --disable-xauth-vid configure option disables the sending
1439 of the XAUTH vendor ID. This can be used as a workaround when
1440 interoperating with some Windows VPN clients that get into
1441 trouble upon reception of an XAUTH VID without eXtended
1442 AUTHentication having been configured.
1444 - ipsec stroke now supports the rereadsecrets, rereadaacerts,
1445 rereadacerts, and listacerts options.
1451 - If a DNS lookup failure occurs when resolving right=%<FQDN>
1452 or right=<FQDN> combined with rightallowany=yes then the
1453 connection is not updated by ipsec starter thus preventing
1454 the disruption of an active IPsec connection. Only if the DNS
1455 lookup successfully returns with a changed IP address the
1456 corresponding connection definition is updated.
1458 - Routes installed by the keying daemons are now in a separate
1459 routing table with the ID 100 to avoid conflicts with the main
1460 table. Route lookup for IKEv2 traffic is done in userspace to ignore
1461 routes installed for IPsec, as IKE traffic shouldn't get encapsulated.
1467 - The pluto IKEv1 daemon now exhibits the same behaviour as its
1468 IKEv2 companion charon by inserting an explicit route via the
1469 _updown script only if a sourceip exists. This is admissible
1470 since routing through the IPsec tunnel is handled automatically
1471 by NETKEY's IPsec policies. As a consequence the left|rightnexthop
1472 parameter is not required any more.
1474 - The new IKEv1 parameter right|leftallowany parameters helps to handle
1475 the case where both peers possess dynamic IP addresses that are
1476 usually resolved using DynDNS or a similar service. The configuration
1481 can be used by the initiator to start up a connection to a peer
1482 by resolving peer.foo.bar into the currently allocated IP address.
1483 Thanks to the rightallowany flag the connection behaves later on
1488 so that the peer can rekey the connection as an initiator when his
1489 IP address changes. An alternative notation is
1493 which will implicitly set rightallowany=yes.
1495 - ipsec starter now fails more gracefully in the presence of parsing
1496 errors. Flawed ca and conn section are discarded and pluto is started
1497 if non-fatal errors only were encountered. If right=%peer.foo.bar
1498 cannot be resolved by DNS then right=%any will be used so that passive
1499 connections as a responder are still possible.
1501 - The new pkcs11initargs parameter that can be placed in the
1502 setup config section of /etc/ipsec.conf allows the definition
1503 of an argument string that is used with the PKCS#11 C_Initialize()
1504 function. This non-standard feature is required by the NSS softoken
1505 library. This patch was contributed by Robert Varga.
1507 - Fixed a bug in ipsec starter introduced by strongswan-2.8.5
1508 which caused a segmentation fault in the presence of unknown
1509 or misspelt keywords in ipsec.conf. This bug fix was contributed
1512 - Partial support for MOBIKE in IKEv2. The initiator acts on interface/
1513 address configuration changes and updates IKE and IPsec SAs dynamically.
1519 - IKEv2 peer configuration selection now can be based on a given
1520 certification authority using the rightca= statement.
1522 - IKEv2 authentication based on RSA signatures now can handle multiple
1523 certificates issued for a given peer ID. This allows a smooth transition
1524 in the case of a peer certificate renewal.
1526 - IKEv2: Support for requesting a specific virtual IP using leftsourceip on the
1527 client and returning requested virtual IPs using rightsourceip=%config
1528 on the server. If the server does not support configuration payloads, the
1529 client enforces its leftsourceip parameter.
1531 - The ./configure options --with-uid/--with-gid allow pluto and charon
1532 to drop their privileges to a minimum and change to an other UID/GID. This
1533 improves the systems security, as a possible intruder may only get the
1534 CAP_NET_ADMIN capability.
1536 - Further modularization of charon: Pluggable control interface and
1537 configuration backend modules provide extensibility. The control interface
1538 for stroke is included, and further interfaces using DBUS (NetworkManager)
1539 or XML are on the way. A backend for storing configurations in the daemon
1540 is provided and more advanced backends (using e.g. a database) are trivial
1543 - Fixed a compilation failure in libfreeswan occurring with Linux kernel
1550 - Support for an additional Diffie-Hellman exchange when creating/rekeying
1551 a CHILD_SA in IKEv2 (PFS). PFS is enabled when the proposal contains a
1552 DH group (e.g. "esp=aes128-sha1-modp1536"). Further, DH group negotiation
1553 is implemented properly for rekeying.
1555 - Support for the AES-XCBC-96 MAC algorithm for IPsec SAs when using IKEv2
1556 (requires linux >= 2.6.20). It is enabled using e.g. "esp=aes256-aesxcbc".
1558 - Working IPv4-in-IPv6 and IPv6-in-IPv4 tunnels for linux >= 2.6.21.
1560 - Added support for EAP modules which do not establish an MSK.
1562 - Removed the dependencies from the /usr/include/linux/ headers by
1563 including xfrm.h, ipsec.h, and pfkeyv2.h in the distribution.
1565 - crlNumber is now listed by ipsec listcrls
1567 - The xauth_modules.verify_secret() function now passes the
1574 - Server side cookie support. If to may IKE_SAs are in CONNECTING state,
1575 cookies are enabled and protect against DoS attacks with faked source
1576 addresses. Number of IKE_SAs in CONNECTING state is also limited per
1577 peer address to avoid resource exhaustion. IKE_SA_INIT messages are
1578 compared to properly detect retransmissions and incoming retransmits are
1579 detected even if the IKE_SA is blocked (e.g. doing OCSP fetches).
1581 - The IKEv2 daemon charon now supports dynamic http- and ldap-based CRL
1582 fetching enabled by crlcheckinterval > 0 and caching fetched CRLs
1583 enabled by cachecrls=yes.
1585 - Added the configuration options --enable-nat-transport which enables
1586 the potentially insecure NAT traversal for IPsec transport mode and
1587 --disable-vendor-id which disables the sending of the strongSwan
1590 - Fixed a long-standing bug in the pluto IKEv1 daemon which caused
1591 a segmentation fault if a malformed payload was detected in the
1592 IKE MR2 message and pluto tried to send an encrypted notification
1595 - Added the NATT_IETF_02_N Vendor ID in order to support IKEv1 connections
1596 with Windows 2003 Server which uses a wrong VID hash.
1602 - Support of SHA2_384 hash function for protecting IKEv1
1603 negotiations and support of SHA2 signatures in X.509 certificates.
1605 - Fixed a serious bug in the computation of the SHA2-512 HMAC
1606 function. Introduced automatic self-test of all IKEv1 hash
1607 and hmac functions during pluto startup. Failure of a self-test
1608 currently issues a warning only but does not exit pluto [yet].
1610 - Support for SHA2-256/384/512 PRF and HMAC functions in IKEv2.
1612 - Full support of CA information sections. ipsec listcainfos
1613 now shows all collected crlDistributionPoints and OCSP
1616 - Support of the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) for IKEv2.
1617 This feature requires the HTTP fetching capabilities of the libcurl
1618 library which must be enabled by setting the --enable-http configure
1621 - Refactored core of the IKEv2 message processing code, allowing better
1622 code reuse and separation.
1624 - Virtual IP support in IKEv2 using INTERNAL_IP4/6_ADDRESS configuration
1625 payload. Additionally, the INTERNAL_IP4/6_DNS attribute is interpreted
1626 by the requestor and installed in a resolv.conf file.
1628 - The IKEv2 daemon charon installs a route for each IPsec policy to use
1629 the correct source address even if an application does not explicitly
1632 - Integrated the EAP framework into charon which loads pluggable EAP library
1633 modules. The ipsec.conf parameter authby=eap initiates EAP authentication
1634 on the client side, while the "eap" parameter on the server side defines
1635 the EAP method to use for client authentication.
1636 A generic client side EAP-Identity module and an EAP-SIM authentication
1637 module using a third party card reader implementation are included.
1639 - Added client side support for cookies.
1641 - Integrated the fixes done at the IKEv2 interoperability bakeoff, including
1642 strict payload order, correct INVALID_KE_PAYLOAD rejection and other minor
1643 fixes to enhance interoperability with other implementations.
1649 - strongSwan now interoperates with the NCP Secure Entry Client,
1650 the Shrew Soft VPN Client, and the Cisco VPN client, doing both
1651 XAUTH and Mode Config.
1653 - UNITY attributes are now recognized and UNITY_BANNER is set
1654 to a default string.
1660 - IKEv1: Support for extended authentication (XAUTH) in combination
1661 with ISAKMP Main Mode RSA or PSK authentication. Both client and
1662 server side were implemented. Handling of user credentials can
1663 be done by a run-time loadable XAUTH module. By default user
1664 credentials are stored in ipsec.secrets.
1666 - IKEv2: Support for reauthentication when rekeying
1668 - IKEv2: Support for transport mode
1670 - fixed a lot of bugs related to byte order
1672 - various other bugfixes
1678 - IKEv1: Implementation of ModeConfig push mode via the new connection
1679 keyword modeconfig=push allows interoperability with Cisco VPN gateways.
1681 - IKEv1: The command ipsec statusall now shows "DPD active" for all
1682 ISAKMP SAs that are under active Dead Peer Detection control.
1684 - IKEv2: Charon's logging and debugging framework has been completely rewritten.
1685 Instead of logger, special printf() functions are used to directly
1686 print objects like hosts (%H) identifications (%D), certificates (%Q),
1687 etc. The number of debugging levels have been reduced to:
1689 0 (audit), 1 (control), 2 (controlmore), 3 (raw), 4 (private)
1691 The debugging levels can either be specified statically in ipsec.conf as
1694 charondebug="lib 1, cfg 3, net 2"
1696 or changed at runtime via stroke as
1698 ipsec stroke loglevel cfg 2
1704 - Implemented full support for IPv6-in-IPv6 tunnels.
1706 - Added configuration options for dead peer detection in IKEv2. dpd_action
1707 types "clear", "hold" and "restart" are supported. The dpd_timeout
1708 value is not used, as the normal retransmission policy applies to
1709 detect dead peers. The dpd_delay parameter enables sending of empty
1710 informational message to detect dead peers in case of inactivity.
1712 - Added support for preshared keys in IKEv2. PSK keys configured in
1713 ipsec.secrets are loaded. The authby parameter specifies the authentication
1714 method to authentificate ourself, the other peer may use PSK or RSA.
1716 - Changed retransmission policy to respect the keyingtries parameter.
1718 - Added private key decryption. PEM keys encrypted with AES-128/192/256
1719 or 3DES are supported.
1721 - Implemented DES/3DES algorithms in libstrongswan. 3DES can be used to
1722 encrypt IKE traffic.
1724 - Implemented SHA-256/384/512 in libstrongswan, allows usage of certificates
1725 signed with such a hash algorithm.
1727 - Added initial support for updown scripts. The actions up-host/client and
1728 down-host/client are executed. The leftfirewall=yes parameter
1729 uses the default updown script to insert dynamic firewall rules, a custom
1730 updown script may be specified with the leftupdown parameter.
1736 - Added support for the auto=route ipsec.conf parameter and the
1737 ipsec route/unroute commands for IKEv2. This allows to set up IKE_SAs and
1738 CHILD_SAs dynamically on demand when traffic is detected by the
1741 - Added support for rekeying IKE_SAs in IKEv2 using the ikelifetime parameter.
1742 As specified in IKEv2, no reauthentication is done (unlike in IKEv1), only
1743 new keys are generated using perfect forward secrecy. An optional flag
1744 which enforces reauthentication will be implemented later.
1746 - "sha" and "sha1" are now treated as synonyms in the ike= and esp=
1747 algorithm configuration statements.
1753 - Full X.509 certificate trust chain verification has been implemented.
1754 End entity certificates can be exchanged via CERT payloads. The current
1755 default is leftsendcert=always, since CERTREQ payloads are not supported
1756 yet. Optional CRLs must be imported locally into /etc/ipsec.d/crls.
1758 - Added support for leftprotoport/rightprotoport parameters in IKEv2. IKEv2
1759 would offer more possibilities for traffic selection, but the Linux kernel
1760 currently does not support it. That's why we stick with these simple
1761 ipsec.conf rules for now.
1763 - Added Dead Peer Detection (DPD) which checks liveliness of remote peer if no
1764 IKE or ESP traffic is received. DPD is currently hardcoded (dpdaction=clear,
1767 - Initial NAT traversal support in IKEv2. Charon includes NAT detection
1768 notify payloads to detect NAT routers between the peers. It switches
1769 to port 4500, uses UDP encapsulated ESP packets, handles peer address
1770 changes gracefully and sends keep alive message periodically.
1772 - Reimplemented IKE_SA state machine for charon, which allows simultaneous
1773 rekeying, more shared code, cleaner design, proper retransmission
1774 and a more extensible code base.
1776 - The mixed PSK/RSA roadwarrior detection capability introduced by the
1777 strongswan-2.7.0 release necessitated the pre-parsing of the IKE proposal
1778 payloads by the responder right before any defined IKE Main Mode state had
1779 been established. Although any form of bad proposal syntax was being correctly
1780 detected by the payload parser, the subsequent error handler didn't check
1781 the state pointer before logging current state information, causing an
1782 immediate crash of the pluto keying daemon due to a NULL pointer.
1788 - Added algorithm selection to charon: New default algorithms for
1789 ike=aes128-sha-modp2048, as both daemons support it. The default
1790 for IPsec SAs is now esp=aes128-sha,3des-md5. charon handles
1791 the ike/esp parameter the same way as pluto. As this syntax does
1792 not allow specification of a pseudo random function, the same
1793 algorithm as for integrity is used (currently sha/md5). Supported
1795 Encryption: aes128, aes192, aes256
1796 Integrity/PRF: md5, sha (using hmac)
1797 DH-Groups: modp768, 1024, 1536, 2048, 4096, 8192
1799 Encryption: aes128, aes192, aes256, 3des, blowfish128,
1800 blowfish192, blowfish256
1801 Integrity: md5, sha1
1802 More IKE encryption algorithms will come after porting libcrypto into
1805 - initial support for rekeying CHILD_SAs using IKEv2. Currently no
1806 perfect forward secrecy is used. The rekeying parameters rekey,
1807 rekeymargin, rekeyfuzz and keylife from ipsec.conf are now supported
1808 when using IKEv2. WARNING: charon currently is unable to handle
1809 simultaneous rekeying. To avoid such a situation, use a large
1810 rekeyfuzz, or even better, set rekey=no on one peer.
1812 - support for host2host, net2net, host2net (roadwarrior) tunnels
1813 using predefined RSA certificates (see uml scenarios for
1814 configuration examples).
1816 - new build environment featuring autotools. Features such
1817 as HTTP, LDAP and smartcard support may be enabled using
1818 the ./configure script. Changing install directories
1819 is possible, too. See ./configure --help for more details.
1821 - better integration of charon with ipsec starter, which allows
1822 (almost) transparent operation with both daemons. charon
1823 handles ipsec commands up, down, status, statusall, listall,
1824 listcerts and allows proper load, reload and delete of connections
1831 - initial support of the IKEv2 protocol. Connections in
1832 ipsec.conf designated by keyexchange=ikev2 are negotiated
1833 by the new IKEv2 charon keying daemon whereas those marked
1834 by keyexchange=ikev1 or the default keyexchange=ike are
1835 handled thy the IKEv1 pluto keying daemon. Currently only
1836 a limited subset of functions are available with IKEv2
1837 (Default AES encryption, authentication based on locally
1838 imported X.509 certificates, unencrypted private RSA keys
1839 in PKCS#1 file format, limited functionality of the ipsec
1846 - the dynamic iptables rules from the _updown_x509 template
1847 for KLIPS and the _updown_policy template for NETKEY have
1848 been merged into the default _updown script. The existing
1849 left|rightfirewall keyword causes the automatic insertion
1850 and deletion of ACCEPT rules for tunneled traffic upon
1851 the successful setup and teardown of an IPsec SA, respectively.
1852 left|rightfirwall can be used with KLIPS under any Linux 2.4
1853 kernel or with NETKEY under a Linux kernel version >= 2.6.16
1854 in conjunction with iptables >= 1.3.5. For NETKEY under a Linux
1855 kernel version < 2.6.16 which does not support IPsec policy
1856 matching yet, please continue to use a copy of the _updown_espmark
1857 template loaded via the left|rightupdown keyword.
1859 - a new left|righthostaccess keyword has been introduced which
1860 can be used in conjunction with left|rightfirewall and the
1861 default _updown script. By default leftfirewall=yes inserts
1862 a bi-directional iptables FORWARD rule for a local client network
1863 with a netmask different from 255.255.255.255 (single host).
1864 This does not allow to access the VPN gateway host via its
1865 internal network interface which is part of the client subnet
1866 because an iptables INPUT and OUTPUT rule would be required.
1867 lefthostaccess=yes will cause this additional ACCEPT rules to
1870 - mixed PSK|RSA roadwarriors are now supported. The ISAKMP proposal
1871 payload is preparsed in order to find out whether the roadwarrior
1872 requests PSK or RSA so that a matching connection candidate can
1879 - the new _updown_policy template allows ipsec policy based
1880 iptables firewall rules. Required are iptables version
1881 >= 1.3.5 and linux kernel >= 2.6.16. This script obsoletes
1882 the _updown_espmark template, so that no INPUT mangle rules
1883 are required any more.
1885 - added support of DPD restart mode
1887 - ipsec starter now allows the use of wildcards in include
1888 statements as e.g. in "include /etc/my_ipsec/*.conf".
1889 Patch courtesy of Matthias Haas.
1891 - the Netscape OID 'employeeNumber' is now recognized and can be
1892 used as a Relative Distinguished Name in certificates.
1898 - /etc/init.d/ipsec or /etc/rc.d/ipsec is now a copy of the ipsec
1899 command and not of ipsec setup any more.
1901 - ipsec starter now supports AH authentication in conjunction with
1902 ESP encryption. AH authentication is configured in ipsec.conf
1903 via the auth=ah parameter.
1905 - The command ipsec scencrypt|scdecrypt <args> is now an alias for
1906 ipsec whack --scencrypt|scdecrypt <args>.
1908 - get_sa_info() now determines for the native netkey IPsec stack
1909 the exact time of the last use of an active eroute. This information
1910 is used by the Dead Peer Detection algorithm and is also displayed by
1911 the ipsec status command.
1917 - running under the native Linux 2.6 IPsec stack, the function
1918 get_sa_info() is called by ipsec auto --status to display the current
1919 number of transmitted bytes per IPsec SA.
1921 - get_sa_info() is also used by the Dead Peer Detection process to detect
1922 recent ESP activity. If ESP traffic was received from the peer within
1923 the last dpd_delay interval then no R_Y_THERE notification must be sent.
1925 - strongSwan now supports the Relative Distinguished Name "unstructuredName"
1926 in ID_DER_ASN1_DN identities. The following notations are possible:
1928 rightid="unstructuredName=John Doe"
1929 rightid="UN=John Doe"
1931 - fixed a long-standing bug which caused PSK-based roadwarrior connections
1932 to segfault in the function id.c:same_id() called by keys.c:get_secret()
1933 if an FQDN, USER_FQDN, or Key ID was defined, as in the following example.
1940 - the ipsec command now supports most ipsec auto commands (e.g. ipsec listall).
1942 - ipsec starter didn't set host_addr and client.addr ports in whack msg.
1944 - in order to guarantee backwards-compatibility with the script-based
1945 auto function (e.g. auto --replace), the ipsec starter scripts stores
1946 the defaultroute information in the temporary file /var/run/ipsec.info.
1948 - The compile-time option USE_XAUTH_VID enables the sending of the XAUTH
1949 Vendor ID which is expected by Cisco PIX 7 boxes that act as IKE Mode Config
1952 - the ipsec starter now also recognizes the parameters authby=never and
1953 type=passthrough|pass|drop|reject.
1959 - ipsec starter now supports the also parameter which allows
1960 a modular structure of the connection definitions. Thus
1961 "ipsec start" is now ready to replace "ipsec setup".
1967 - Mathieu Lafon's popular ipsec starter tool has been added to the
1968 strongSwan distribution. Many thanks go to Stephan Scholz from astaro
1969 for his integration work. ipsec starter is a C program which is going
1970 to replace the various shell and awk starter scripts (setup, _plutoload,
1971 _plutostart, _realsetup, _startklips, _confread, and auto). Since
1972 ipsec.conf is now parsed only once, the starting of multiple tunnels is
1973 accelerated tremedously.
1975 - Added support of %defaultroute to the ipsec starter. If the IP address
1976 changes, a HUP signal to the ipsec starter will automatically
1977 reload pluto's connections.
1979 - moved most compile time configurations from pluto/Makefile to
1980 Makefile.inc by defining the options USE_LIBCURL, USE_LDAP,
1981 USE_SMARTCARD, and USE_NAT_TRAVERSAL_TRANSPORT_MODE.
1983 - removed the ipsec verify and ipsec newhostkey commands
1985 - fixed some 64-bit issues in formatted print statements
1987 - The scepclient functionality implementing the Simple Certificate
1988 Enrollment Protocol (SCEP) is nearly complete but hasn't been
1995 - CA certicates are now automatically loaded from a smartcard
1996 or USB crypto token and appear in the ipsec auto --listcacerts
2003 - when using "ipsec whack --scencrypt <data>" with a PKCS#11
2004 library that does not support the C_Encrypt() Cryptoki
2005 function (e.g. OpenSC), the RSA encryption is done in
2006 software using the public key fetched from the smartcard.
2008 - The scepclient function now allows to define the
2009 validity of a self-signed certificate using the --days,
2010 --startdate, and --enddate options. The default validity
2011 has been changed from one year to five years.
2017 - the config setup parameter pkcs11proxy=yes opens pluto's PKCS#11
2018 interface to other applications for RSA encryption and decryption
2019 via the whack interface. Notation:
2021 ipsec whack --scencrypt <data>
2022 [--inbase 16|hex|64|base64|256|text|ascii]
2023 [--outbase 16|hex|64|base64|256|text|ascii]
2026 ipsec whack --scdecrypt <data>
2027 [--inbase 16|hex|64|base64|256|text|ascii]
2028 [--outbase 16|hex|64|base64|256|text|ascii]
2031 The default setting for inbase and outbase is hex.
2033 The new proxy interface can be used for securing symmetric
2034 encryption keys required by the cryptoloop or dm-crypt
2035 disk encryption schemes, especially in the case when
2036 pkcs11keepstate=yes causes pluto to lock the pkcs11 slot
2039 - if the file /etc/ipsec.secrets is lacking during the startup of
2040 pluto then the root-readable file /etc/ipsec.d/private/myKey.der
2041 containing a 2048 bit RSA private key and a matching self-signed
2042 certificate stored in the file /etc/ipsec.d/certs/selfCert.der
2043 is automatically generated by calling the function
2045 ipsec scepclient --out pkcs1 --out cert-self
2047 scepclient was written by Jan Hutter and Martin Willi, students
2048 at the University of Applied Sciences in Rapperswil, Switzerland.
2054 - the current extension of the PKCS#7 framework introduced
2055 a parsing error in PKCS#7 wrapped X.509 certificates that are
2056 e.g. transmitted by Windows XP when multi-level CAs are used.
2057 the parsing syntax has been fixed.
2059 - added a patch by Gerald Richter which tolerates multiple occurrences
2060 of the ipsec0 interface when using KLIPS.
2066 - with gawk-3.1.4 the word "default2 has become a protected
2067 keyword for use in switch statements and cannot be used any
2068 more in the strongSwan scripts. This problem has been
2069 solved by renaming "default" to "defaults" and "setdefault"
2070 in the scripts _confread and auto, respectively.
2072 - introduced the parameter leftsendcert with the values
2074 always|yes (the default, always send a cert)
2075 ifasked (send the cert only upon a cert request)
2076 never|no (never send a cert, used for raw RSA keys and
2079 - fixed the initialization of the ESP key length to a default of
2080 128 bits in the case that the peer does not send a key length
2081 attribute for AES encryption.
2083 - applied Herbert Xu's uniqueIDs patch
2085 - applied Herbert Xu's CLOEXEC patches
2091 - CRLs can now be cached also in the case when the issuer's
2092 certificate does not contain a subjectKeyIdentifier field.
2093 In that case the subjectKeyIdentifier is computed by pluto as the
2094 160 bit SHA-1 hash of the issuer's public key in compliance
2095 with section 4.2.1.2 of RFC 3280.
2097 - Fixed a bug introduced by strongswan-2.5.1 which eliminated
2098 not only multiple Quick Modes of a given connection but also
2099 multiple connections between two security gateways.
2105 - Under the native IPsec of the Linux 2.6 kernel, a %trap eroute
2106 installed either by setting auto=route in ipsec.conf or by
2107 a connection put into hold, generates an XFRM_AQUIRE event
2108 for each packet that wants to use the not-yet exisiting
2109 tunnel. Up to now each XFRM_AQUIRE event led to an entry in
2110 the Quick Mode queue, causing multiple IPsec SA to be
2111 established in rapid succession. Starting with strongswan-2.5.1
2112 only a single IPsec SA is established per host-pair connection.
2114 - Right after loading the PKCS#11 module, all smartcard slots are
2115 searched for certificates. The result can be viewed using
2118 ipsec auto --listcards
2120 The certificate objects found in the slots are numbered
2121 starting with #1, #2, etc. This position number can be used to address
2122 certificates (leftcert=%smartcard) and keys (: PIN %smartcard)
2123 in ipsec.conf and ipsec.secrets, respectively:
2125 %smartcard (selects object #1)
2126 %smartcard#1 (selects object #1)
2127 %smartcard#3 (selects object #3)
2129 As an alternative the existing retrieval scheme can be used:
2131 %smartcard:45 (selects object with id=45)
2132 %smartcard0 (selects first object in slot 0)
2133 %smartcard4:45 (selects object in slot 4 with id=45)
2135 - Depending on the settings of CKA_SIGN and CKA_DECRYPT
2136 private key flags either C_Sign() or C_Decrypt() is used
2137 to generate a signature.
2139 - The output buffer length parameter siglen in C_Sign()
2140 is now initialized to the actual size of the output
2141 buffer prior to the function call. This fixes the
2142 CKR_BUFFER_TOO_SMALL error that could occur when using
2143 the OpenSC PKCS#11 module.
2145 - Changed the initialization of the PKCS#11 CK_MECHANISM in
2146 C_SignInit() to mech = { CKM_RSA_PKCS, NULL_PTR, 0 }.
2148 - Refactored the RSA public/private key code and transferred it
2149 from keys.c to the new pkcs1.c file as a preparatory step
2150 towards the release of the SCEP client.
2156 - The loading of a PKCS#11 smartcard library module during
2157 runtime does not require OpenSC library functions any more
2158 because the corresponding code has been integrated into
2159 smartcard.c. Also the RSAREF pkcs11 header files have been
2160 included in a newly created pluto/rsaref directory so that
2161 no external include path has to be defined any longer.
2163 - A long-awaited feature has been implemented at last:
2164 The local caching of CRLs fetched via HTTP or LDAP, activated
2165 by the parameter cachecrls=yes in the config setup section
2166 of ipsec.conf. The dynamically fetched CRLs are stored under
2167 a unique file name containing the issuer's subjectKeyID
2168 in /etc/ipsec.d/crls.
2170 - Applied a one-line patch courtesy of Michael Richardson
2171 from the Openswan project which fixes the kernel-oops
2172 in KLIPS when an snmp daemon is running on the same box.
2178 - Eliminated null length CRL distribution point strings.
2180 - Fixed a trust path evaluation bug introduced with 2.4.3
2186 - Improved the joint OCSP / CRL revocation policy.
2187 OCSP responses have precedence over CRL entries.
2189 - Introduced support of CRLv2 reason codes.
2191 - Fixed a bug with key-pad equipped readers which caused
2192 pluto to prompt for the pin via the console when the first
2193 occasion to enter the pin via the key-pad was missed.
2195 - When pluto is built with LDAP_V3 enabled, the library
2196 liblber required by newer versions of openldap is now
2203 - Added the _updown_espmark template which requires all
2204 incoming ESP traffic to be marked with a default mark
2207 - Introduced the pkcs11keepstate parameter in the config setup
2208 section of ipsec.conf. With pkcs11keepstate=yes the PKCS#11
2209 session and login states are kept as long as possible during
2210 the lifetime of pluto. This means that a PIN entry via a key
2211 pad has to be done only once.
2213 - Introduced the pkcs11module parameter in the config setup
2214 section of ipsec.conf which specifies the PKCS#11 module
2215 to be used with smart cards. Example:
2217 pkcs11module=/usr/lib/pkcs11/opensc-pkcs11.lo
2219 - Added support of smartcard readers equipped with a PIN pad.
2221 - Added patch by Jay Pfeifer which detects when netkey
2222 modules have been statically built into the Linux 2.6 kernel.
2224 - Added two patches by Herbert Xu. The first uses ip xfrm
2225 instead of setkey to flush the IPsec policy database. The
2226 second sets the optional flag in inbound IPComp SAs only.
2228 - Applied Ulrich Weber's patch which fixes an interoperability
2229 problem between native IPsec and KLIPS systems caused by
2230 setting the replay window to 32 instead of 0 for ipcomp.
2236 - Fixed a bug which caused an unwanted Mode Config request
2237 to be initiated in the case where "right" was used to denote
2238 the local side in ipsec.conf and "left" the remote side,
2239 contrary to the recommendation that "right" be remote and
2246 - updated Vendor ID to strongSwan-2.4.0
2248 - updated copyright statement to include David Buechi and
2255 - strongSwan now communicates with attached smartcards and
2256 USB crypto tokens via the standardized PKCS #11 interface.
2257 By default the OpenSC library from www.opensc.org is used
2258 but any other PKCS#11 library could be dynamically linked.
2259 strongSwan's PKCS#11 API was implemented by David Buechi
2260 and Michael Meier, both graduates of the Zurich University
2261 of Applied Sciences in Winterthur, Switzerland.
2263 - When a %trap eroute is triggered by an outgoing IP packet
2264 then the native IPsec stack of the Linux 2.6 kernel [often/
2265 always?] returns an XFRM_ACQUIRE message with an undefined
2266 protocol family field and the connection setup fails.
2267 As a workaround IPv4 (AF_INET) is now assumed.
2269 - the results of the UML test scenarios are now enhanced
2270 with block diagrams of the virtual network topology used
2271 in a particular test.
2277 - fixed IV used to decrypt informational messages.
2278 This bug was introduced with Mode Config functionality.
2280 - fixed NCP Vendor ID.
2282 - undid one of Ulrich Weber's maximum udp size patches
2283 because it caused a segmentation fault with NAT-ed
2286 - added UML scenarios wildcards and attr-cert which
2287 demonstrate the implementation of IPsec policies based
2288 on wildcard parameters contained in Distinguished Names and
2289 on X.509 attribute certificates, respectively.
2295 - Added basic Mode Config functionality
2297 - Added Mathieu Lafon's patch which upgrades the status of
2298 the NAT-Traversal implementation to RFC 3947.
2300 - The _startklips script now also loads the xfrm4_tunnel
2303 - Added Ulrich Weber's netlink replay window size and
2304 maximum udp size patches.
2306 - UML testing now uses the Linux 2.6.10 UML kernel by default.
2312 - Eric Marchionni and Patrik Rayo, both recent graduates from
2313 the Zuercher Hochschule Winterthur in Switzerland, created a
2314 User-Mode-Linux test setup for strongSwan. For more details
2315 please read the INSTALL and README documents in the testing
2318 - Full support of group attributes based on X.509 attribute
2319 certificates. Attribute certificates can be generated
2320 using the openac facility. For more details see
2324 The group attributes can be used in connection definitions
2325 in order to give IPsec access to specific user groups.
2326 This is done with the new parameter left|rightgroups as in
2328 rightgroups="Research, Sales"
2330 giving access to users possessing the group attributes
2331 Research or Sales, only.
2333 - In Quick Mode clients with subnet mask /32 are now
2334 coded as IP_V4_ADDRESS or IP_V6_ADDRESS. This should
2335 fix rekeying problems with the SafeNet/SoftRemote and NCP
2336 Secure Entry Clients.
2338 - Changed the defaults of the ikelifetime and keylife parameters
2339 to 3h and 1h, respectively. The maximum allowable values are
2340 now both set to 24 h.
2342 - Suppressed notification wars between two IPsec peers that
2343 could e.g. be triggered by incorrect ISAKMP encryption.
2345 - Public RSA keys can now have identical IDs if either the
2346 issuing CA or the serial number is different. The serial
2347 number of a certificate is now shown by the command
2349 ipsec auto --listpubkeys
2355 - Added Tuomo Soini's sourceip feature which allows a strongSwan
2356 roadwarrior to use a fixed Virtual IP (see README section 2.6)
2357 and reduces the well-known four tunnel case on VPN gateways to
2358 a single tunnel definition (see README section 2.4).
2360 - Fixed a bug occurring with NAT-Traversal enabled when the responder
2361 suddenly turns initiator and the initiator cannot find a matching
2362 connection because of the floated IKE port 4500.
2364 - Removed misleading ipsec verify command from barf.
2366 - Running under the native IP stack, ipsec --version now shows
2367 the Linux kernel version (courtesy to the Openswan project).
2373 - Introduced the ipsec auto --listalgs monitoring command which lists
2374 all currently registered IKE and ESP algorithms.
2376 - Fixed a bug in the ESP algorithm selection occurring when the strict flag
2377 is set and the first proposed transform does not match.
2379 - Fixed another deadlock in the use of the lock_certs_and_keys() mutex,
2380 occurring when a smartcard is present.
2382 - Prevented that a superseded Phase1 state can trigger a DPD_TIMEOUT event.
2384 - Fixed the printing of the notification names (null)
2386 - Applied another of Herbert Xu's Netlink patches.
2392 - Support of Dead Peer Detection. The connection parameter
2394 dpdaction=clear|hold
2396 activates DPD for the given connection.
2398 - The default Opportunistic Encryption (OE) policy groups are not
2399 automatically included anymore. Those wishing to activate OE can include
2400 the policy group with the following statement in ipsec.conf:
2402 include /etc/ipsec.d/examples/oe.conf
2404 The default for [right|left]rsasigkey is now set to %cert.
2406 - strongSwan now has a Vendor ID of its own which can be activated
2407 using the compile option VENDORID
2409 - Applied Herbert Xu's patch which sets the compression algorithm correctly.
2411 - Applied Herbert Xu's patch fixing an ESPINUDP problem
2413 - Applied Herbert Xu's patch setting source/destination port numbers.
2415 - Reapplied one of Herbert Xu's NAT-Traversal patches which got
2416 lost during the migration from SuperFreeS/WAN.
2418 - Fixed a deadlock in the use of the lock_certs_and_keys() mutex.
2420 - Fixed the unsharing of alg parameters when instantiating group
2427 - Thomas Walpuski made me aware of a potential DoS attack via
2428 a PKCS#7-wrapped certificate bundle which could overwrite valid CA
2429 certificates in Pluto's authority certificate store. This vulnerability
2430 was fixed by establishing trust in CA candidate certificates up to a
2431 trusted root CA prior to insertion into Pluto's chained list.
2433 - replaced the --assign option by the -v option in the auto awk script
2434 in order to make it run with mawk under debian/woody.
2440 - Split of the status information between ipsec auto --status (concise)
2441 and ipsec auto --statusall (verbose). Both commands can be used with
2442 an optional connection selector:
2444 ipsec auto --status[all] <connection_name>
2446 - Added the description of X.509 related features to the ipsec_auto(8)
2449 - Hardened the ASN.1 parser in debug mode, especially the printing
2450 of malformed distinguished names.
2452 - The size of an RSA public key received in a certificate is now restricted to
2454 512 bits <= modulus length <= 8192 bits.
2456 - Fixed the debug mode enumeration.
2462 - Fixed another PKCS#7 vulnerability which could lead to an
2463 endless loop while following the X.509 trust chain.
2469 - Fixed the PKCS#7 vulnerability discovered by Thomas Walpuski
2470 that accepted end certificates having identical issuer and subject
2471 distinguished names in a multi-tier X.509 trust chain.
2477 - Removed all remaining references to ipsec_netlink.h in KLIPS.
2483 - The new "ca" section allows to define the following parameters:
2486 cacert=koolCA.pem # cacert of kool CA
2487 ocspuri=http://ocsp.kool.net:8001 # ocsp server
2488 ldapserver=ldap.kool.net # default ldap server
2489 crluri=http://www.kool.net/kool.crl # crl distribution point
2490 crluri2="ldap:///O=Kool, C= .." # crl distribution point #2
2491 auto=add # add, ignore
2493 The ca definitions can be monitored via the command
2495 ipsec auto --listcainfos
2497 - Fixed cosmetic corruption of /proc filesystem by integrating
2498 D. Hugh Redelmeier's freeswan-2.06 kernel fixes.
2504 - Added support for the 818043 NAT-Traversal update of Microsoft's
2505 Windows 2000/XP IPsec client which sends an ID_FQDN during Quick Mode.
2507 - A symbolic link to libcrypto is now added in the kernel sources
2508 during kernel compilation
2510 - Fixed a couple of 64 bit issues (mostly casts to int).
2511 Thanks to Ken Bantoft who checked my sources on a 64 bit platform.
2513 - Replaced s[n]printf() statements in the kernel by ipsec_snprintf().
2514 Credits go to D. Hugh Redelmeier, Michael Richardson, and Sam Sgro
2515 of the FreeS/WAN team who solved this problem with the 2.4.25 kernel.
2521 - an empty ASN.1 SEQUENCE OF or SET OF object (e.g. a subjectAltName
2522 certificate extension which contains no generalName item) can cause
2523 a pluto crash. This bug has been fixed. Additionally the ASN.1 parser has
2524 been hardened to make it more robust against malformed ASN.1 objects.
2526 - applied Herbert Xu's NAT-T patches which fixes NAT-T under the native
2527 Linux 2.6 IPsec stack.
2533 - based on freeswan-2.04, x509-1.5.3, nat-0.6c, alg-0.8.1rc12