IPFire is a Linux-based distribution for network appliances such as routers and firewalls. The project's latest release is IPFire 2.25 Core Update 149 which focuses on performance improvements. "IPFire is based on glibc 2.32, the standard library for all C programs, and GCC 10.2, the GNU Compiler Collection. Both bring various bug fixes and improvements. The most notable change is that we have decided to remove a mitigation Spectre 2 which caused that user space programs in IPFire were running about 50% slower due to using a microcode feature which is called "retpoline". Those "return trampolines" disable the branch prediction engine in out-of-order processors which was considered to help with mitigating leaking any information from any unaccessible kernel space. This is however not as effective as thought and massively decreases performance in the user land which mainly affects features like our Intrusion Prevention System, Web Proxy and URL filter. We still use this mechanism to avoid leaking any kernel memory into the user space."

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IPFire is a Linux-based distribution for network appliances such as routers and firewalls. The project's latest release is IPFire 2.25 Core Update 149 which focuses on performance improvements. "IPFire is based on glibc 2.32, the standard library for all C programs, and GCC 10.2, the GNU Compiler Collection. Both bring various bug fixes and improvements. The most notable change is that we have decided to remove a mitigation Spectre 2 which caused that user space programs in IPFire were running about 50% slower due to using a microcode feature which is called "retpoline". Those "return trampolines" disable the branch prediction engine in out-of-order processors which was considered to help with mitigating leaking any information from any unaccessible kernel space. This is however not as effective as thought and massively decreases performance in the user land which mainly affects features like our Intrusion Prevention System, Web Proxy and URL filter. We still use this mechanism to avoid leaking any kernel memory into the user space."

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IPFire is an independent Linux distribution designed to help administrators easily manage network security and traffic. The project latest release introduces new monitoring and logging options as well as starting the random number generator earlier in the boot process. "OpenVPN will from now on collect metrics about connected clients. On an extra page, it will be shown which client has connected when and for how long it was connected. The random number generator will be launched earlier in the boot process to see the kernel's pseudo-random number generator as soon as possible. On some systems, this could have blocked the boot process for a couple of minutes. Firewall: Connections that are being NATed will now always be logged in the filter chain, too. vnstat, the tool behind the net traffic graphs on the IPFire web user interface has been updated to use a new database format and refreshes its graphs more often, for more detailed and accurate data. Pakfire correctly uses upstream proxies now."

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"Finally, we are releasing another big release of IPFire. In IPFire 2.23 Core Update 131, we are rolling out our new Intrusion Prevention System (IPS). On top of that, this update also contains a number of other bug fixes and enhancements. We are finally shipping our recently announced IPS - making all of your networks more secure by deeply inspecting packets and trying to identify threats. This new system has many advantages over the old one in terms of performance, security and it simply put - more modern. We have put together some documentation on how to set up the IPS, what rulesets are supported and what hardware resources you will need. Your settings will automatically be converted if you are using the existing Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and replicated with the new IPS."

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"We have dropped some features that no longer make sense in 2019: Those are the web browser check and download throttling by file extension. Since the web is migrating more and more towards HTTPS, those neither work for all the traffic, nor are they very reliable or commonly used. We have also removed authentication against Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 domains. Those authentication protocols used back then are unsafe for years and nobody should be using those any more. Please consider this when updating to this release. We have also mitigated a security issue in the proxy authentication against Microsoft Windows Active Directory domains."

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