Fedora 21 to come out with crucial security, crypto upgrades

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has approved a slew of new features in the latest iteration of Red Hat’s Fedora distro—Fedora 21. As the deadline for specifying the final changes in Fedora 21 draws nearer (April 8), it is now clear that the release will come with crucial security and crypto upgrades.

Thanks to a new systemwide policy, all applications running on a given Fedora system can have a consistent level of cryptography set between them. This will unify the crypto policies used by different applications and libraries in Fedora 21. In terms of security, Fedora 21 would have a set of predefined levels that will individually define various cryptography related behaviours. The changes in crypto and security levels would eventually require changes in the likes of GnuTLS, recently marred by a longundetected bug that could have allowed potential data theft via a specially crafted encryption certificate. Keeping all this in mind, the final set of changes in Fedora 21 is still under wraps.