Three software releases - psad, fwknop, gpgdir
08 June, 2008
The following releases of the Cipherdyne security projects are now available:
psad-2.1.3, fwknop-1.9.5,
and gpgdir-1.9.1. The motivation for a group release
stems from the need to make similar changes to the fwknop and gpgdir projects to
update to version 2.11 of the
Class::MethodMaker
perl module from CPAN - a dependency of GnuPG::Interface. This version fixes a
build error under recent versions of perl (such as perl-5.10.0) which are distributed
on systems like Fedora 9.
Also, for both fwknop and gpgdir, thanks to a suggestion made by
Jean-Denis Girard on the fwknop mailing list, the
default locale has been set to "C" via the LC_ALL environmental variable so that
GnuPG output can be properly interpreted even on systems where a different locale is
used. The locale can be manually set or not used at all with two new command line
arguments --locale <str> and --no-locale respectively. On another note,
Kevin Hilton has written
an excellent how-to for fwknop on Ubuntu systems.
For psad, it was time to make a new release after it became necessary to update the whois client so that IP addresses such as 116.125.35.98 (which was scanning a psad user) could be properly identified with whois records. In addition, psad was updated to parse syslog files directly for iptables log messages instead of requiring reconfiguration of the syslog daemon to write kern.info messages to the /var/lib/psad/psadfifo named pipe. This simplifies the proper installation of psad, and is now a default setting. Although there is a slight performance penalty since psad now parses all messages that are written to the /var/log/messages file (this is the default path), it should not be noticeable on most systems. Further, the old behavior of using the named pipe can be restored via the ENABLE_SYSLOG_FILE variable in the /etc/psad/psad.conf file.
Finally, Franck Joncourt has made excellent progress in developing Debian packages for the IPTables::ChainMgr and IPTables::Parse modules, and he is also close to a Debian package for the fwknop project.
The complete change logs for these new releases can be found as follows: psad-2.1.3, fwknop-1.9.5, and gpgdir-1.9.1
