14 DAY TRIAL // The OPNsense project had the great pleasure of announcing the release of the first Beta images of the upcoming OPNsense 17.1 operating system developed for firewalls and routers.
Built upon the foundation of the FreeBSD 11.0 operating system, OPNsense 17.1 promises to be a major release featuring a large number of new technologies and functionalities, among which we can mention a very useful SSH (Secure Shell) remote installer, PHP 7.0 support, native PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module) authentication against 2FA, new Tinc VPN and FTP proxy plugins, as well as support for Czech and Italian languages.
"With the best wishes for the holiday season attached we hereby humbly present our 17.1-BETA images and thank everyone for their early input, valid questions and generally keeping us on our toes throughout the past months. The next major release features FreeBSD 11.0, the SSH remote installer, new languages Italian and Czech, state-of-the-art HardenedBSD security features," reads the release announcement page.
Furthermore, this first Beta release of OPNsense 17.1 updates the Intel em driver to version 7.6.2 as a plugin, introduces IPsec tunnel isolation mode for interoperability, improves the security of passwords, rewrites the Nano images to support growfs, adds system secondary console support with new Mute and EFI options, and makes the firewall rules and authentication methods fully pluggable.
Micro migrations and versioning are now used for config items, along with constraint support. Two new state-of-the-art HardenedBSD features were implemented as well, namely SEGVGUARD for preventing address space layout randomization (ASLR) brute force attacks, and PIE and ASLR compilation for most binaries. OPNsense 17.1 Beta is now available for download if you want to take it for a quick test drive.