Release: OpenVPN version 2.6.9

[Pippin]

The OpenVPN community project team is proud to release OpenVPN 2.6.9. This is a bugfix release containing one security fix for the Windows installer.

• For details see Changes.rst

Security fixes:

• Windows Installer: fix CVE-2023-7235 where installing to a non-default
  directory could lead to a local privilege escalation. Reported by Will Dormann.

New features:

• Add support for building with mbedTLS 3.x.x
• New option --force-tls-key-material-export to only accept clients
  that can do TLS keying material export to generate session keys
  (mostly an internal option to better deal with TLS 1.0 PRF failures).
• Windows: bump vcpkg-ports/pkcs11-helper to 1.30
• Log incoming SSL alerts in easier to understand form and move logging
  from --verb 8 to --verb 3.
• protocol_dump(): add support for printing --tls-crypt packets

User visible changes:

• License change is now complete, and all code has been re-licensed
  under the new license (still GPLv2, but with new linking exception
  for Apache2 licensed code). See COPYING for details.
  
  Code that could not be re-licensed has been removed or rewritten.
• The original code for the --tls-export-cert feature has been removed
  (due to the re-licensing effort) and rewritten without looking at the
  original code. Feature-compatibility has been tested by other developers,
  looking at both old and new code and documentation, so there *should*
  not be a user-visible change here.
• IPv6 route addition/deletion are now logged on the same level (3) as
  for IPv4. Previously IPv6 was always logged at --verb 1.
• Better handling of TLS 1.0 PRF failures in the underlying SSL library
  (e.g. on some FIPS builds) - this is now reported on startup, and
  clients before 2.6.0 that can not use TLS EKM to generate key material
  are rejected by the server. Also, error messages are improved to see
  what exactly failed.

Notable bug fixes:

• FreeBSD: for servers with multiple clients, reporting of peer traffic
  statistics would fail due to insufficient buffer space (Github: #487)

Windows MSI changes since 2.6.8:

• Security fix, see above
• Built against OpenSSL 3.2.0
• Included openvpn-gui updated to 11.47.0.0
  • Windows GUI: always update tray icon on state change (Github: #669)
    (for persistent connection profiles, "connecting" state would not show)

Downloads

• Windows installers
• Official OpenVPN Linux package repositories
• Source archive file

Useful resources

• Documentation
• Community wiki
• Report issues
• User mailing list
• Easy RSA 3 HOWTO
• User IRC channel: #openvpn at irc.libera.chat