Release Notes for BIND Version 9.15.0

Introduction

BIND 9.15 is an unstable development release of BIND. This document
summarizes new features and functional changes that have been introduced
on this branch. With each development release leading up to the stable
BIND 9.16 release, this document will be updated with additional features
added and bugs fixed.

Note on Version Numbering

Until BIND 9.12, new feature development releases were tagged as "alpha"
and "beta", leading up to the first stable release for a given development
branch, which always ended in ".0". More recently, BIND adopted the
"odd-unstable/even-stable" release numbering convention. There will be no
"alpha" or "beta" releases in the 9.15 branch, only increasing version
numbers. So, for example, what would previously have been called 9.15.0a1,
9.15.0a2, 9.15.0b1, and so on, will instead be called 9.15.0, 9.15.1,
9.15.2, etc.

The first stable release from this development branch will be renamed as
9.16.0. Thereafter, maintenance releases will continue on the 9.16 branch,
while unstable feature development proceeds in 9.17.

Supported Platforms

To build on UNIX-like systems, BIND requires support for POSIX.1c threads
(IEEE Std 1003.1c-1995), the Advanced Sockets API for IPv6 (RFC 3542), and
standard atomic operations provided by the C compiler.

The OpenSSL cryptography library must be available for the target
platform. A PKCS#11 provider can be used instead for Public Key
cryptography (i.e., DNSSEC signing and validation), but OpenSSL is still
required for general cryptography operations such as hashing and random
number generation.

More information can be found in the PLATFORMS.md file that is included in
the source distribution of BIND 9. If your compiler and system libraries
provide the above features, BIND 9 should compile and run. If that isn't
the case, the BIND development team will generally accept patches that add
support for systems that are still supported by their respective vendors.

Download

The latest versions of BIND 9 software can always be found at http://
www.isc.org/downloads/. There you will find additional information about
each release, source code, and pre-compiled versions for Microsoft Windows
operating systems.

Security Fixes

  * In certain configurations, named could crash with an assertion failure
    if nxdomain-redirect was in use and a redirected query resulted in an
    NXDOMAIN from the cache. This flaw is disclosed in CVE-2019-6467. [GL
    #880]

  * The TCP client quota set using the tcp-clients option could be
    exceeded in some cases. This could lead to exhaustion of file
    descriptors. (CVE-2018-5743) [GL #615]

New Features

  * The new add-soa option specifies whether or not the response-policy
    zone's SOA record should be included in the additional section of RPZ
    responses. [GL #865]

Removed Features

  * The dnssec-enable option has been deprecated and no longer has any
    effect. DNSSEC responses are always enabled if signatures and other
    DNSSEC data are present. [GL #866]

Feature Changes

  * When trusted-keys and managed-keys were both configured for the same
    name, or when trusted-keys was used to configure a trust anchor for
    the root zone and dnssec-validation was set to the default value of
    auto, automatic RFC 5011 key rollovers would be disabled. This
    combination of settings was never intended to work, but there was no
    check for it in the parser. This has been corrected, and it is now a
    fatal configuration error. [GL #868]

  * DS and CDS records are now generated with SHA-256 digests only,
    instead of both SHA-1 and SHA-256. This affects the default output of
    dnssec-dsfromkey, the dsset files generated by dnssec-signzone, the DS
    records added to a zone by dnssec-signzone based on keyset files, the
    CDS records added to a zone by named and dnssec-signzone based on
    "sync" timing parameters in key files, and the checks performed by
    dnssec-checkds.

Bug Fixes

  * The allow-update and allow-update-forwarding options were
    inadvertently treated as configuration errors when used at the options
    or view level. This has now been corrected. [GL #913]

License

BIND is open source software licenced under the terms of the Mozilla
Public License, version 2.0 (see the LICENSE file for the full text).

The license requires that if you make changes to BIND and distribute them
outside your organization, those changes must be published under the same
license. It does not require that you publish or disclose anything other
than the changes you have made to our software. This requirement does not
affect anyone who is using BIND, with or without modifications, without
redistributing it, nor anyone redistributing BIND without changes.

Those wishing to discuss license compliance may contact ISC at https://
www.isc.org/mission/contact/.

End of Life

BIND 9.15 is an unstable development branch. When its development is
complete, it will be renamed to BIND 9.16, which will be a stable branch.

The end of life date for BIND 9.16 has not yet been determined. For those
needing long term support, the current Extended Support Version (ESV) is
BIND 9.11, which will be supported until at least December 2021. See
https://www.isc.org/downloads/software-support-policy/ for details of
ISC's software support policy.

Thank You

Thank you to everyone who assisted us in making this release possible. If
you would like to contribute to ISC to assist us in continuing to make
quality open source software, please visit our donations page at http://
www.isc.org/donate/.
