ClamAV 0.104.0 Second Release Candidate is here!

Today we are publishing a second release candidate for 0.104.0. Please help us verify that 0.104.0-rc2 works on your systems and that we have resolved the concerns you reported with the first release candidate. We need your feedback, so let us know what you find and join us on the ClamAV mailing list, or on our Discord.

In particular, we'd love your feedback on the new Debian and RPM packages (see below) and on the install documentation on docs.clamav.net.

For details about what is new in the 0.104 feature release, please refer to the announcement for the first release candidate.

What changed since the first release candidate

First and foremost, we are listening to your concerns about the build system change from Autotools to CMake, and about changes coming in a future feature release when we add the Rust programming language toolchain into our build requirements. We can't bring back Autotools, but we hope that the following will help.

1. We are introducing a Long Term Support (LTS) program that will begin with the 0.103 feature release. Users will be required to stay up to date with the latest patch versions (e.g., 0.103.3) within the 0.103 feature series, but will have the peace-of-mind that the 0.103 feature release will receive critical patch versions with a stable ABI up until End-of-Life in September 2023. Stay tuned for a separate blog post introducing the full details of our LTS program. We will also add a version-support-matrix to our online documentation in tandem with the LTS blog post for easy reference.

2. We plan to increase our feature release cadence to make it easier to plan and to get new features and efficacy improvements into your hands faster. So, to make it easier for you to stay up-to-date with the latest stable release, we are introducing new package installers for macOS and for RPM-based and Debian-based Linux distributions. These new packages will be available for download on the clamav.net Downloads page. You can find installation instructions for these packages in our online documentation. Please note that the Linux packages unfortunately do not include clamav-milter at this time, and that we are still working on the signing & notarization process for the macOS installer, so it may not work for users on the latest macOS version.

In addition to the above, we've resolved the following issues identified during the first release candidate:

• Increased the functionality level (FLEVEL) for the 0.104 release to make space for additional 0.103 (LTS) patch versions. See the Version & FLEVEL reference.
• Improvements installation instructions in INSTALL.md and in the online documentation.
• Fixed iconv / libiconv detection in the CMake configuration process when -Werror=return-type is enabled, such as in the openSUSE packaging environment. See PR-233.
• Fixed broken CMake build when RAR support is intentionally disabled and test-support is enabled. See PR-237.
• Fixed broken CMake build on systems that do not provide format string macros for standard integer types. See PR-231.
• Improved long file path support on Windows. (Disclaimer: presently requires user to opt-in with a registry key change). See PR-229.
• Fixed a segfault and socket file descriptor leak in ClamOnAcc. See PR-227.
• Fixed an error reported by ClamD when scanning directories on Windows. See PR-230.
• Fixed issue with Freshclam support for Universal Naming Convention (UNC) paths on Windows. See PR-226.
• Added missing environment variable feature documentation to the manpages. See PR-254.
• Fixed an assortment of issues identified by Coverity static analysis. See PR-221.
• Tuned the Valgrind suppression rules for the public test suite to resolve a false positive that caused intermittent ClamD test failures. See PR-238.
• Fixed the mspack library name to deconflict with system installed mspack packages. See PR-234.
• Fixed a false positive in the ClamD tests, reported by Valgrind when compiling with Clang. See PR-236.

Special thanks to Arjen de Korte and Mark Fortescue for contributing patches to fix some of the above issues. And thank you to so many of you who chimed in on the mailing lists, on Discord, and on GitHub Issues to identify issues and share your experiences with the first release candidate.

ClamAV 0.104.0 Release Candidate is here!

We are pleased to announce the ClamAV 0.104.0 release candidate.

Please help us validate this release. We need your feedback, so let us know what you find and join us on the ClamAV mailing list, or on our Discord.

This release candidate phase is only expected to last about two to four weeks before the 0.104.0 Stable version will be published. Take this opportunity to verify that you 0.104.0 can build and run in your environment. 

PSA: FreshClam database download issue

We've received several reports of users experiencing issues with FreshClam triggered by last week's update to the main and daily CVD databases. 

FreshClam's primary advantage over tools like wget and curl, in addition to automatic testing of new databases, is the ability to perform an incremental update using database patch files. But when a database change is so large that a patch file is not efficient, we issue an empty patch file. This empty file will cause FreshClam to download the entire database instead. Unfortunately, our recent update using the empty patch file method has revealed a couple of issues. 

New Main & Daily CVD's are incoming

 Tomorrow, Wednesday July 14th, we are planning on publishing a brand new main.cvd and daily.cvd, as we do periodically to move more of the long term signatures into the main.cvd and make the daily.cvd smaller again.  

This will have an impact on your downloads of these files (as every ClamAV instance will have to re-download both files), so you may see a spike in your bandwidth usage.

We will monitor the situation on the mirror side and make any adjustments necessary, but we anticipate no issues.

ClamAV EOL of 0.100.x versions

Effective Oct. 29, 2021, ClamAV 0.100.0 (and all patch versions) will no longer be supported in accordance with ClamAV's EOL policy. 

End of life (EOL) for ClamAV means:

• We will no longer be testing against that version when we write signatures.
• We may break that version with something with a future release.
• Signature updates for that version will be blocked when attempting to download from the mirror update system.

Please upgrade to the newest version of ClamAV, currently at 0.103.3, available for download now!

As always, thank you for using ClamAV.

New online documentation and other improved open-source processes

By Micah Snyder.

I'm excited to announce that we are making several changes that will improve how we work with the open-source community. We've also made several other changes to ClamAV.net over the past year that we are excited to formally unveil today, including a new security policy and new build advisories. 

ClamAV 0.103.3 patch release

ClamAV 0.103.3 is out now. Users can head over to clamav.net/downloads to download the release materials.

Join ClamAV on Discord

As a result of changes to Freenode IRC management, the #clamav channel on the Freenode IRC server is no longer being monitored or maintained by the ClamAV team at Cisco Talos. 

Almost two years ago, the ClamAV team added Discord as an alternative to IRC, with a general channel we bridged to the IRC channel.

"clamav-devel" GitHub repository name change to "clamav"

On Tuesday, May 18th the Cisco-Talos "clamav-devel" repository on GitHub will be renamed to "clamav".

This is just an advisory notice. GitHub automatically redirects requests for renamed repositories so that the old URLs remain functional.

However, those who have clones-of or links-to this git repository may wish to update the URLs after the rename is complete. For example:

http://github.com/Cisco-Talos/clamav-devel

  to http://github.com/Cisco-Talos/clamav

http://github.com/Cisco-Talos/clamav-devel.git

  to http://github.com/Cisco-Talos/clamav.git

git@github.com:Cisco-Talos/clamav-devel.git

  to git@github.com:Cisco-Talos/clamav.git

 

Thank you!

ClamAV 0.103.2 security patch release

ClamAV 0.103.2 is out now. Users can head over to clamav.net/downloads to download the release materials.

This is a security patch release with the following fixes:

• CVE-2021-1386: Fix for UnRAR DLL load privilege escalation. Affects 0.103.1 and prior on Windows only.
  
• CVE-2021-1252: Fix for Excel XLM parser infinite loop. Affects 0.103.0 and 0.103.1 only.
  
• CVE-2021-1404: Fix for PDF parser buffer over-read; possible crash. Affects 0.103.0 and 0.103.1 only.
  
• CVE-2021-1405: Fix for mail parser NULL-dereference crash. Affects 0.103.1 and prior.
  
• Fix possible memory leak in PNG parser.
  
• Fix ClamOnAcc scan on file-creation race condition so files are scanned after their contents are written.
  
• FreshClam: Deprecate the SafeBrowsing config option. The SafeBrowsing option will no longer do anything. For more details, see our blog post from last year about the future of the ClamAV Safe Browsing database. 
  

  Tip: If creating and hosting your own safebrowing.gdb database, you can use the DatabaseCustomURL option in freshclam.conf to download it.

• FreshClam: Improved HTTP 304, 403 and 429 handling.
  
• FreshClam: Added the mirrors.dat file back to the database directory.
  This new mirrors.dat file will store:
• A randomly generated UUID for the FreshClam User-Agent.
• A retry-after timestamp that so FreshClam won't try to update after having received an HTTP 429 response until the Retry-After timeout has expired.
  
• FreshClam will now exit with a failure in daemon mode if an HTTP 403 (Forbidden) was received because the outcome won't change if it tries again later. The FreshClam user will have to take appropriate action to get unblocked.
  
• Fix the FreshClam mirror-sync issue where a downloaded database is "older than the version advertised."

If a new CVD download gets a version that is older than advertised, FreshClam will keep the older version and retry the update so that the incremental update process (CDIFF patch process) will update to the latest version.