It's coming soon to an operating system near you

Mar 21, 2017 01:10 GMT  ·  By

OpenSSH, the cross-platform and open-source 100% complete SSH 2.0 protocol implementation offering both SFTP server and client support, was updated today to version 7.5.

OpenSSH 7.5 comes three months after the release of OpenSSH 7.4 in late December 2016 and promises to be a maintenance update that addresses two important security issues, implements support for the "=-" syntax to make removing of methods from algorithm lists a lot easier, and fixes numerous reported bugs.

"This release deprecates the sshd_config UsePrivilegeSeparation option, thereby making privilege separation mandatory. Privilege separation has been on by default for almost 15 years and sandboxing has been on by default for almost the last five," reads today's announcement.

Portable OpenSSH no longer compiles against OpenSSL versions before 1.0.1

Another interesting change implemented in today's OpenSSH 7.5 release is that the Portable OpenSSH variant of the SSH (Secure Shell) implementation will no longer compile against versions of the OpenSSL before 1.0.1, which are no longer receiving security fixes since more than a year ago.

Among other changes, OpenSSH 7.5 updates the format of various log messages emitted by the packet code to include details about the user's authentication state, etc. Attached below you can find the entire changelog if you're curious to know what exactly was improved or fixed in this version.

We recommend all users to update their systems to OpenSSH 7.5 as soon as possible, or as soon as it lands in the stable software repositories of their favorite GNU/Linux distributions. OS vendors are also urged to download the OpenSSH 7.5 and Portable OpenSSH 7.5p1 source tarballs right now from our website and compile them for their supported architectures. Please update your systems immediately for the best security experience possible.

OpenSSH 7.5 Changelog