Kerberos 5 Release 1.15.1

• Announcement
• README file
• Known Bugs
• Documentation
• Retrieving

Kerberos 5 Release 1.15.1 is now available

The MIT Kerberos Team announces the availability of the krb5-1.15.1 release. The detached PGP signature is available without going through the download page, if you wish to verify the authenticity of a distribution you have obtained elsewhere.

Please see the README file for a more complete list of changes.

You may also see the current full list of fixed bugs tracked in our RT bugtracking system.

DES transition

The Data Encryption Standard (DES) is widely recognized as weak. The krb5-1.7 release contains measures to encourage sites to migrate away from using single-DES cryptosystems. Among these is a configuration variable that enables "weak" enctypes, which now defaults to "false" beginning with krb5-1.8.

Major changes in 1.15.1 (2017-03-01)

This is a bug fix release.

• Allow KDB modules to determine how the e_data field of principal fields is freed
• Fix udp_preference_limit when the KDC location is configured with SRV records
• Fix KDC and kadmind startup on some IPv4-only systems
• Fix the processing of PKINIT certificate matching rules which have two components and no explicit relation
• Improve documentation

Major changes in 1.15 (2016-12-01)

Administrator experience

• Improve support for multihomed Kerberos servers by adding options for specifying restricted listening addresses for the KDC and kadmind.
• Add support to kadmin for remote extraction of current keys without changing them (requires a special kadmin permission that is excluded from the wildcard permission), with the exception of highly protected keys.
• Add a lockdown_keys principal attribute to prevent retrieval of the principal's keys (old or new) via the kadmin protocol. In newly created databases, this attribute is set on the krbtgt and kadmin principals.
• Restore recursive dump capability for DB2 back end, so sites can more easily recover from database corruption resulting from power failure events.
• Add DNS auto-discovery of KDC and kpasswd servers from URI records, in addition to SRV records. URI records can convey TCP and UDP servers and master KDC status in a single DNS lookup, and can also point to HTTPS proxy servers.
• Add support for password history to the LDAP back end.
• Add support for principal renaming to the LDAP back end.
• Use the getrandom system call on supported Linux kernels to avoid blocking problems when getting entropy from the operating system.
• In the PKINIT client, use the correct DigestInfo encoding for PKCS #1 signatures, so that some especially strict smart cards will work.

Code quality

• Clean up numerous compilation warnings.
• Remove various infrequently built modules, including some preauth modules that were not built by default.

Developer experience:

• Add support for building with OpenSSL 1.1.
• Use SHA-256 instead of MD5 for (non-cryptographic) hashing of authenticators in the replay cache. This helps sites that must build with FIPS 140 conformant libraries that lack MD5.
• Eliminate util/reconf and allow the use of autoreconf alone to regenerate the configure script.

Protocol evolution

• Add support for the AES-SHA2 enctypes, which allows sites to conform to Suite B crypto requirements.

Retrieving Kerberos 5 Release 1.15.1

You may retrieve the Kerberos 5 Release 1.15.1 source from here. If you need to acquire the sources from some other distribution site, you may verify them against the detached PGP signature for krb5-1.15.1.