31 March 2008, 17:09

OpenSSH 4.9 released

The development team behind the OpenSSH encryption suite have released version 4.9. It contains only non-critical changes.

The only security related change modifies the default value for one option, so that the ~/.ssh/rc file is no longer executed automatically where a command is called by the ForceCommand directive in sshd_config. However, according to the developers this behaviour was already documented. The change is merely intended to make configuration easier for administrators.

As far as new features go, there are merely a few ease-of-use additions. For example, OpenSSH now supports chroot, although the development team warn that this feature should be used with caution. The sftp server is now directly linked into sshd, so that when used, for example, in combination with the chroot option, no additional configuration is required. Further changes are listed in the OpenSSH 4.9 changelog.