IPFire 2.19 - Core Update 118

Hello community,

this is the official release announcement for IPFire 2.19 – Core Update 118. It comes with a number of security and bug fixes as well as some new features. Please note the that we are dropping support for some add-ons.

Thanks for the people who contributed to this Core Update by submitting their patches and please help us to support everyone’s work with your donation!

Spring Clean

It is the time of the year where we reviewed large parts of the distribution and decided to drop support for various packages and add-ons that cannot be maintained any more:

Most importantly, this Core Update drops support for PHP and therefore various add-ons that rely on it. We have taken that decision some while ago without any objections and first dropped all add-ons that are not supported and updated by their respective authors and maintainers. That left us with only one package that needed PHP but also be installed anywhere else.

PHP is a huge problem to maintain and does not really have a place on a firewall in 2018. Our web user interface is entirely independent and since we value security more than anything else, we have decided to drop support for PHP with this Core Update.

If you have anything installed manually that requires PHP, please move it to another web server before installing this Core Update.

Add-ons that have also been dropped: cacti, openmailadmin, phpSANE, nagios because icinga is available, nagiosql, mediatomb, owncloud

Meltdown/Spectre

This Core Update originally contained the microcode updates that Intel has now pulled from public release. Since they make the system very unstable and cause random reboots and reportedly can render some systems unbootable, we decided to remove them from the update again.

So far due to the hardening Meltdown exploits do not work on IPFire although this still is a hardware bug and software can only be modified to mitigate this massive problem. Over the coming days and weeks we will continue to work on providing a solution that mitigates all problems, but so far we are not in a position to have patches for Linux that fix them all and are at the same time complete and stable enough to be released.

Security Improvements

• The list of Certificate Authorities has been updated and various CAs have been removed
• Users are now warned that 3DES and 1024 bit long RSA keys are considered “weak” cryptography
• Content Security Policy headers have been added to the web user interface and Captive portal pages so that browsers are prevented to load any resources from external sites

Update Accelerator Improvements

Justin Luth has contributed fixes and improvements for the Update Accelerator which has sometimes re-downloaded files with special characters in the URL (#10504).

He has also improved caching of Microsoft updates which is now based on a checksum of the update file (#11558).

Misc

• squid, the web proxy, has been patched against a security vulnerability in its HTTP parser (SA 2018:2)
• GeoIP information has been added to some pages on the web user interface
• Updated packages: bind 9.11.2-P1, dmidecode 3.1, glib2 2.54.3, gzip 1.9, hdparm 9.53, openssh 7.6p1, sed 4.4, snort 2.9.11.1, unbound 1.6.8, wget 1.9.4
• fireinfo is now submitting all profiles over HTTPS
• The LZ4 compression library is now shipped

Add-Ons

New Add-ons

• mdns-repeater is now being packages which is a tool that relays mDNS messages from one network segment to another one. That helps devices like printers and other IoT devices to be auto-discovered from the GREEN network when they are connected to the BLUE one and vice-versa.

Updates

• tor 0.3.2.9
• nano 2.9.2
• clamav 0.99.3 which fixes various severe security vulnerabilities
• libvirt has been updated to version 4.0
• qemu 2.11
• Smaller packages updated for qemu & libvirt: opus 1.2.1, spice 0.14