When we talk about Linux we usually refer mainly to servers and desktops, but it is more than known that the Open Source system has gone much further. Therefore, we are going to take this opportunity to publish about IPFire, a hardened distribution in terms of security that can function as a router and a firewall.
IPFire version 2.27 Core Update 161 has introduced some new features along with some changes and improvements. The first thing that stands out about this release are the improvements at the support level, which include the Open Source FriendlyARM NanoPI R2S mini router, Fast Flux Detection in the web proxy to detect Fast Flux settings and for the exFAT filesystem, which has long been an official Linux feature courtesy of Microsoft.
Another important point is the removal of support for Python 2, a version of the language (and its official interpreter) that has been discontinued for two years, but in which many programs are still supported and have not migrated to the third version.
Following with more news from IPFire 2.27 Core Update 161, we have the ability of the web proxy to always hide the version number and thus prevent information leaks, support for the Pakfire page to correctly display the locked status after starting an update, support for the status of Logwatch software RAID configurations, backups improved, support for RAID configurations in Logwatch, Backups of Avahi and Minidlna Configurations Enhanced and better disk utilization statistics.
Regarding the performance improvements, those included in the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), which allows you to decide whether traffic from a particular IP address should be seen or if the kernel is told to ignore it. This improvement should be noticeable in “Systems like the Lightning Wire Labs Mini Appliance, which comes with four CPU cores, each clocked at 1GHz. Performance increases from 120 MBit / s with full CPU load to 1 GBit / s with approximately 20% load on a CPU core for this type of connection. This frees up more CPU time to scan other traffic and allows this device to be used correctly on connections with more than 100 MBit / s throughput. “.
At the kernel level we find a Linux modified version 5.10.76, to which the variable stack has been hardened so that all of them are initialized to zero in order to avoid information leaks within the kernel memory space. It has also been configured to make use of TPM hardware as an entropy source if available, it has been made to work at a higher frequency to keep packet forwarding latency low and thus obtain a better response, in addition to having disabled some functions. debugging and extra cost to improve performance somewhat.
All the details of IPFire 2.27 Core Update 161 are available in your official announcement, while the system can be obtained from corresponding section on the project website.
