Download strongSwan 4.3.0

Various protocols can be used to secure connections over public networks, such as the widely used ipsec. StrongSwan is an ipsec implementation for Linux systems, whose 4.2 and 4.3 wings target the current 2.6 Linux kernel. Support for ikev1, ikev2 and ipv6 is present as on this page can be read. The developers have released strongSwan 4.3.0 and provided the following announcement:

Version 4.3.0

We proudly present the first release of the new strongSwan 4.3 branch which offers the following two major features:

• IKEv2 Multiple Authentication Exchanges (RFC 4739)
  Initiators and responders can use several authentication rounds (eg RSA followed by EAP) to authenticate. The new ipsec.conf leftauth/rightauth and leftauth2/rightauth2 parameters define their own authentication rounds and setup constraints for the remote peer. See the ipsec.conf man page for more details.
  A typical sample scenario using mutual RSA authentication in the first round and EAP-SIM client authentication in the second round can be found under the link.
• Use of libstrongswan in the IKEv1 pluto code
  We refactored the pluto and scepclient code to share basic functions (memory allocation, leak detective, chunk handling, printf_hooks, strongswan.conf attributes, ASN.1 parser, etc.) with the libstrongswan library.
  As a first benefit, up to two DNS and WINS servers to be sent via the IKEv1 ModeConfig protocol can be configured in the pluto section of /etc/strongswan.conf. A configuration example can be found under the link.

And here some more features:

• If glibc printf hooks (register_printf_function) are not available, strongSwan can use the vstr string library to run on non-glibc systems.
• The IKEv2 charon daemon now supports the ESP CAMELLIA-CBC cipher (esp=camellia128|192|256). A sample scenario can be found under the link.

Due to the heavy refactoring of large parts of both the IKEv1 and IKEv2 source code we strongly advise *against* using 4.3.0 in mission critical applications. Please use the stable strongSwan 4.2.14 version on production systems instead, at least until the release of 4.3.1.