The release of VeraCrypt 1.26.18 has been published, continuing the development of the disk encryption system fork TrueCrypt, which has ceased to exist. VeraCrypt is notable for replacing the RIPEMD-160 algorithm used in TrueCrypt with SHA-512 and SHA-256, increasing the number of hashing iterations, simplifying the build process for Linux and macOS, and resolving issues identified during the audit of TrueCrypt's source code. The code developed by VeraCrypt is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, while borrowings from TrueCrypt continue to be supplied under the TrueCrypt License 3.0. Ready builds are available for Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, and macOS.
Among the changes in the new version:
- On x86 systems, specialized CPU instructions are used to accelerate the PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 algorithm for calculating SHA-256 hashes.
- Support for extended instructions for hardware acceleration of AES encryption has been added for ARM64 platforms.
- The logic for determining sessions created using the sudo utility has been simplified.
- Issues when building with the wxWidgets library supplied in Ubuntu have been resolved.
- A check for the existence of partitions before mounting has been added.
- In macOS builds, screen capturing is disabled by default (an option ââallow-screencaptureâ has been added to enable it).
- Support for 32-bit Windows systems has been discontinued. The minimum supported version is now Windows 10 update 1809 (October 2018). On Windows systems, the pseudo-random number generator BCryptGenRandom is used (instead of the outdated CryptGenRandom) along with a modern API for entropy accumulation.
- The CVE-2024-54187 vulnerability, caused by the use of relative paths when launching system executables, has been fixed. To protect against the manipulation of executable files by placing them in user-accessible directories, only absolute paths are now used during execution.
- The CVE-2025-23021 vulnerability, which allowed mounting partitions in system directories, such as those mentioned in the PATH environment variable, has been resolved.
Source: opennet.ru
