This is the official release announcement for IPFire 2.21 - Core Update 128; another maintenance update with a brand new kernel, introducing TLS 1.3 throughout the whole system and of course a whole package of bug fixes and other improvements.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this Core Update with either sending in patches, testing, reporting bugs and many many other things. I am quite happy to see the team grow! Thank you very much as well to all of you who have supported our Donations Challenge so far. We have received a lot of nice words and support from you, but we are not there, yet! Please support our project and donate!

Kernel Update

The Linux kernel, the core of the IPFire operating system, has been updated to the latest release of the 4.14 branch. We have added some extra patches to improve hardware support and fix some security vulnerabilities. LEDs of PCengines' APU boards are now supported on newer versions of the mainboard and on those boards, the serial console is always enabled. On x86-based systems, we now support up to 64 processors.

OpenSSL 1.1.1 & TLS 1.3

We have also updated the main TLS/SSL library to OpenSSL in version 1.1.1. This adds support for TLS 1.3 and of course brings various other improvements with it. On browsers that support it, the IPFire web user interface is now available over TLS 1.3 and any outgoing SSL connection from the firewall supports it, too. We ensure that those connections only use secure and performant ciphers to make connections as fast as they can be.

We have also updated the list of trusted Certificate Authorities (CAs).

We have removed any previous versions of OpenSSL from the system which will soon be end-of-life. If you have anything custom that you have compiled yourself on your system, please be aware of that and note that you might potentially rebuild your custom software.

Add-ons provided by the IPFire Project now support TLS 1.3 as well. If you are running a custom configuration for postfix or haproxy make sure that TLS 1.3 is not excluded from the supported TLS protocols.

Performance Tuning

The system is now configured to be able to route more packets. During some benchmarks and testing we have discovered that IPFire does not always use the full performance of the hardware underneath it. While most system probably won't benefit much from these improvements, some systems with very fast processor cores will see a 5-10% increase in bandwidth from and to the firewall as well as routed through it. That comes at the cost of very slight increase of power consumption, but we figured that that is a price worth paying not only provide you a secure firewall, but also a fast one.

Misc.

• A change of the firewall policy might potentially be backwards-incompatible, but we saw no other way to improve the security of the system: Previously, systems on the ORANGE network were always allowed to connect to the Internet on RED. This was carried over from the very beginning of IPFire when the firewall user interface was way more basic and rules to change this behaviour could not be configured at all. Now, it makes a lot more sense to not have this default which was also not well-known and allow users to create rules to either allow or deny traffic like this.
• The kdig utility is now available on command line which supports DNS lookups via TLS
• Updated packages: apache 2.4.38, apr 1.6.5, curl 7.64.0, dhcpcd 7.1.1, ghostscript 9.26, logrotate 3.15, openssl 7.9p1, postfix 3.3.2, strongswan 5.7.2, tzdata 2018i

Add-ons

• powertop has been updated to version 2.10
• tor has been updated to version 0.3.5.7
• sendEmail has been fixed by Rob. The script had a wrong file ownership.