A good evening to you all,

while the summer is hot, we push forward to what now is 15.7 — nicknamed ‘Brave Badger’ — right in front of you. A lot of effort went into this project during the past 6 months, and we dare say it has been worth all of it. We would like to thank our followers and friends and feedback givers and forum lurkers and contributors and doubters and supporters that helped to make 15.7 what it is. We wouldn’t be here without any of you. Thank you.

In itself, 15.7 is a simple upgrade from 15.1.12 which we recommend to everyone. What changes is that development will move to a different branch so that from now on regressions are less likely and therefore stability will increase further. The provided images may also be the only ones for the next 6 months as we are confident in their longevity and the online upgrade path. We have also bumped the LibreSSL flavour to a production-ready state and encourage everyone to try it out. The installer’s import configuration tool coupled with a quick and easy installation can help you move from OpenSSL to LibreSSL and back seamlessly.

The biggest addition is the intrusion detection integration (suricata) as well as new local and remote blacklists options for the proxy server (squid).
Security-wise, it has been rather quiet with only a few CVEs in third-party tools. Please see the full patch notes for details and references:

• kernel: borrowed a dummynet / ipnat patch from m0n0wall to enable symmetric traffic shaping when NAT is involved
• kernel: fix recurse lock panic for tmpfs in conjunction with unionfs
• kernel: applied two stable patches that prevent squid from crashing [1]
• kernel: retired ALTQ support
• base: sendmail TLS/DH Interoperability Improvement [2]
• base: improved iconv(3) UTF-7 support [3]
• base: inconsistency between locale and rune locale states [4]
• notable ports updates: phalcon 2.0.3 [5], curl 7.43.0_2 [6], openssh 6.8p1_8, python 2.7.10 [7], perl 5.20.2_5 [8], ntp 4.2.8p3 [9], libxml2 [10] 2.9.2_3, openldap24-server 2.4.41 [11]
• opnsense-update: will no longer try to reinstall the installed version after a fresh installation
• bsdinstaller: bring back cpdup to error out on low memory installation (you need 1 GB of RAM, or work around installation using the nano image)
• traffic shaper: removed legacy queues support in favour of the new traffic shaper functionality
• traffic shaper: allow direct enable/disable toggle
• proxy: fix the initial daemon start on bootup
• proxy: added LAN as the default interface configuration
• proxy: local and remote blacklists with regex support
• intrusion detection: initial release of our IDS GUI based on suricata
• gateways: monitoring mode gained IPv6 support
• captive portal: fix idle timeout bug
• captive portal: d
• not delete the wrong zone when having multiple configurations
• captive portal: removed include files from exposed web directory
• backend: always regenerate users and groups to avoid corruption after an unclean shutdown
• backend: wait for configd socket to come up to address a startup race issue
• backend: clean up configd socket on exit
• backend: fixed regression that prevented user scripts from being started via /etc/rc.conf
• gateways: only show apinger in services when monitoring is enabled for a gateway
• languages: brought Simplified Chinese to 49% completed, German to 30% completed
• universal plug and play: make page invoke static to remove exploitability of the legacy packages framework
• crash reporter: finally enabled the send button and provides human-readable feedback whether the submission was complete
• console: added non-interactive interface assignment for headless deployments
• ssh: disable password authentication on factory reset to align with the standard configuration
• diagnostics: avoid duplicated calls of gethostbyaddr() in NDP table view
• users: prompt for old password on password change to prevent account hijacking
• users: stripped the impossible scponly user privileges since said utility has never been part of our ecosystem

Images can be found on any of our mirrors, but they may take a few hours to sync.

https://opnsense.org/download/

Stay safe,
Your OPNsense team

—
[1] https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=195802
[2] https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-EN-15:08.sendmail.asc
[3] https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-EN-15:10.iconv.asc
[4] https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-EN-15:09.xlocale.asc
[5] https://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon/releases/tag/phalcon-v2.0.3
[6] http://curl.haxx.se/changes.html
[7] https://hg.python.org/cpython/raw-file/15c95b7d81dc/Misc/NEWS
[8] http://perldoc.perl.org/perl5202delta.html
[9] http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~ntp/ntp_spool/ntp4/ChangeLog-stable
[10] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2015-1819
[11] http://www.openldap.org/software/release/readme.html