Release Notes for BIND Version 9.14.4

Introduction

BIND 9.14 is a stable branch of BIND. This document summarizes significant
changes since the last production release on that branch.

Please see the file CHANGES for a more detailed list of changes and bug
fixes.

Note on Version Numbering

As of BIND 9.13/9.14, BIND has adopted the "odd-unstable/even-stable"
release numbering convention. BIND 9.14 contains new features added during
the BIND 9.13 development process. Henceforth, the 9.14 branch will be
limited to bug fixes and new feature development will proceed in the
unstable 9.15 branch, and so forth.

Supported Platforms

Since 9.12, BIND has undergone substantial code refactoring and cleanup,
and some very old code has been removed that supported obsolete operating
systems and operating systems for which ISC is no longer able to perform
quality assurance testing. Specifically, workarounds for UnixWare, BSD/OS,
AIX, Tru64, SunOS, TruCluster and IRIX have been removed.

On UNIX-like systems, BIND now 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.

More information can be found in the PLATFORM.md file that is included in
the source distribution of BIND 9. If your platform 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.

As of BIND 9.14, the BIND development team has also made cryptography
(i.e., TSIG and DNSSEC) an integral part of the DNS server. 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.

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

  * A race condition could trigger an assertion failure when a large
    number of incoming packets were being rejected. This flaw is disclosed
    in CVE-2019-6471. [GL #942]

New Features

  * The new GeoIP2 API from MaxMind is now supported when BIND is compiled
    using configure --with-geoip2. The legacy GeoIP API can be used by
    compiling with configure --with-geoip instead. (Note that the
    databases for the legacy API are no longer maintained by MaxMind.)

    The default path to the GeoIP2 databases will be set based on the
    location of the libmaxminddb library; for example, if it is in /usr/
    local/lib, then the default path will be /usr/local/share/GeoIP. This
    value can be overridden in named.conf using the geoip-directory
    option.

    Some geoip ACL settings that were available with legacy GeoIP,
    including searches for netspeed, org, and three-letter ISO country
    codes, will no longer work when using GeoIP2. Supported GeoIP2
    database types are country, city, domain, isp, and as. All of the
    databases support both IPv4 and IPv6 lookups. [GL #182]

  * Two new metrics have been added to the statistics-channel to report
    DNSSEC signing operations. For each key in each zone, the dnssec-sign
    counter indicates the total number of signatures named has generated
    using that key since server startup, and the dnssec-refresh counter
    indicates how many of those signatures were refreshed during zone
    maintenance, as opposed to having been generated as a result of a zone
    update. [GL #513]

Bug Fixes

  * When qname-minimization was set to relaxed, some improperly configured
    domains would fail to resolve, but would have succeeded if
    minimization were disabled. named will now fall back to normal
    resolution in such cases, and also uses type A rather than NS for
    minimal queries in order to reduce the likelihood of encountering the
    problem. [GL #1055]

  * Glue address records were not being returned in responses to root
    priming queries; this has been corrected. [GL #1092]

License

BIND is open source software licensed 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

The end of life date for BIND 9.14 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/.
