XG Firewall V17.5 MR15 and XG Firewall V18 MR4 are live!

Products•Sophos XG Firewall•Technical News

This month we bring you exciting news of firmware upgrades. Whether your XG is running on version 18 or version 17.5, this applies to you, so read on!

Feb 18 2021 By

We are pleased to announce the availability of new firmware for your XG installations. XG 17.5 gets a new maintenance release – XG17.5 MR15. As well as several bug fixes, this also brings enhanced security to the administrative and sensitive data store areas of the appliance. The biggest change is the introduction of a secure storage master key or SSMK. This key provides extra protection for the account details stored on the XG Firewall and encrypts sensitive information, such as passwords, secrets, and keys, preventing unauthorized access. The accounts have access to services, such as directory services, email servers, FTP servers, and proxies. They also include user accounts stored on the XG Firewall. As part of this change, we are introducing secure encryption for storing admin password hash. The admin (default administration account) will be asked to change their password, and whilst this is optional, it is highly recommended. Also, password complexity rules have been enabled for all passwords. 

XG V18 benefits from all these enhancements but also receives extra attention with X18 MR4. This release brings enhancements to performance, security, reliability and the management experience. XG Firewall MR4 also enables great new Sophos Central Management capabilities, which is where we’ll begin: 

New Sophos Central Enhancements: 

  • New Partner Dashboard facilitating group policy management across the customer base – make a change once and have it automatically replicated across multiple firewalls 
  • New Group Policy Import enables one firewall to define the group policy during group set up making it easy to migrate from legacy CFM or SFM platforms
  • Scheduled Firmware Updates enables MR4 to be the first firmware you schedule using this new option  
  • Full HA Support enabling easier management and improved fail-over support 

General Enhancements in XG Firewall v18 MR4:  

High Availability 

  • Improved FastPath performance for Active-Passive pairs 
  • Full HA support in Amazon Web Services using the AWS Transit Gateway  
  • Improved high availability setup wizard and streamlined upgrade process 

VPN Enhancements 

  • New advanced options for IPSec remote access (replaces scadmin) 
  • Sophos Connect VPN client downloads now available from the user portal (ideal for home workers to self-serve a VPN client) 
  • Enforcement of TLS 1.2 for SSL VPN on site-to-site and remote-access connections 

Other Enhancements 

  • Web Filtering – Websites that are identified as containing child sexual abuse content by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) will be automatically blocked when any web filtering is enabled. See https://www.iwf.org.uk/ for more information on the IWF. 
  • Cloud Optix integration – Cloud Optix is now XG Firewall aware enabling the two solutions to work better together (full details). 
  • Synchronized Application Control – a new option will automatically clean up discovered apps that are over a month old. 

These upgrades are available at no charge for all licensed XG customers and we encourage you to upgrade to the latest firmware as soon as practicable, especially in light of the included security enhancements. 

Please refer to the upgrade matrix for more information.  

 

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