Netgate is Named Gold Level Member of the Intel Winners' Circle

Netgate has recently been recognized as a Gold Level member of the Intel Winners' Circle. This award is part of the Intel® Network Builders program, which recognizes ecosystem partners for their technical innovation in the transformation of the network from core to edge. The Intel Winners' Circle is divided into three categories: Titanium, Gold, and Member. Each level is designed to highlight the achievements of ecosystem partners and offers support to awarded solutions. As a Gold Level member, we are excited to continue driving innovation and growth in the secure networking industry through our affordable, high-performance firewall, VPN, and routing solutions.

We are also grateful for the recognition of our commitment to advancing the industry and community through technical and financial contributions to open-source driven projects like the Fast Data Project (FD.io) and its flagship technology Vector Packet Processing (VPP), Data Plane Developer Kit (DPDK), Clixon, FreeBSD, Free Range Routing (FRR), strongSwan, and the pfSense Project.

In 2022, we advanced our flagship products - pfSense Plus and TNSR software. Many of these improvements, coded and funded by Netgate, were released to the community through the pfSense project and upstreamed to other projects mentioned above. This progress includes:

TNSR Software

• Moved the underlying OS base from CentOS to Ubuntu
• Support for WireGuard site-to-site and Remote Access/Roaming VPN
• IPIP tunnel support
• IPFIX flow reporting
• Improved route display
• Ability to selectively enable and disable IPsec tunnels
• Certificate-based authentication for IPsec and support for IPv6 IPsec tunnel endpoints 
• Support for ChaCha20-Poly1305 encryption with IKEv2 IPsec tunnels
• Option to enable interrupt mode for network interfaces and for dispatching asynchronous cryptographic operations
• BGP Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) cache validation support
• Policy Based Routing (ACL-based Forwarding), which can forward traffic based on matching policies in ACLs rather than by destination
• Numerous bug fixes and other improvements

pfSense Plus Software

• Improvements to IPsec for stability and performance
• OpenVPN DCO (Data Channel Offload)
• ZFS Boot Environments and made ZFS the default filesystem
• Added Layer 2 filtering support and support for dummynet (limiters) to pf
• Migrated Captive Portal from ipfw to pf
• New ZFS status dashboard widget
• Improvements to the Captive Portal logout page and process
• Support for ChaCha20-Poly1305 encryption with IKEv2 IPsec tunnels
• New Disks widget to replace the disk usage list in the System Information widget
• AutoConfigBackup no longer makes pages wait to load during the backup process
• The default password hash format in the User Manager has been changed from bcrypt to SHA-512
• RAM disks have been converted to tmpfs
• Numerous bug fixes and other improvements

Please see our detailed release notes for more information on the software improvements:

TNSR Software Release Notes

pfSense Plus Software Release Notes

In addition to the progress we made on pfSense Plus and TNSR software, we also partnered with Intel Network Builders to release a case study on how Netgate's affordable, yet high-performance, TNSR software router was able to help Arkansas State University Three Rivers with their robust networking needs.

Thank you to Intel for the recognition and partnership, and we look forward to making more progress in the coming year.