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IPFire project’s Peter Müller announced today the release and general availability of IPFire 2.27 Core Update 173 as the first update to this open-source hardened Linux firewall distribution for routers and firewalls in 2023.
Powered by the long-term supported Linux 6.1 LTS kernel series, IPFire 2.27 Core Update 173 is here to introduce support for the QMI (Qualcomm MSM Interface) a proprietary interface and the ability to interact with 4G and 5G modems that use the QMI interface.
The new Linux 6.1 LTS kernel brings improved hardware support and security improvements for IPFire users, such as Landlock support, protection against direct memory access via malicious PCI devices on AArch64 (ARM64) systems, protection against cold boot attacks by allowing the firmware to wipe all memory when rebooting, and much more.
IPFire 2.27 Core Update 173 also brings various improvements to its OpenVPN implementation like a fix for an issue where the OpenVPN 2FA authenticator would enter an infinite loop when the socket connection to OpenVPN is lost, as well as minor improvements and cleanups to the OpenVPN GUI.
On top of that, the new IPFire release implements a new mechanism to properly create a user group required for the interaction between D-Bus and Avahi while installing the latter add-on, as well as support for properly treating *.example.com as a wildcard domain by the web interface.
Also fixed was a bug in the firewall engine that allowed the creation of rules with invalid sources. Of course, numerous packages and add-ons have been updated to their latest versions at the moment of writing. For more details, check out the release announcement page.
Meanwhile, if you want to deploy IPFire on your router or firewall hardware, you can download the IPFire 2.27 Core Update 173 release right now from the official website either as an ISO or USB image.
The developers also noted the fact that support for 32-bit ARM hardware will end on February 28th, 2023. Users are urged to migrate to a supported hardware architecture.
Last updated 1 year ago
