This is primarily a maintenance release with bugfixes and improvements. This release also fixes a security issue (CVE-2020-11810, trac #1272) which allows disrupting service of a freshly connected client that has not yet not negotiated session keys. The vulnerability cannot be used to inject or steal VPN traffic.

A summary of the changes is available in Changes.rst, and a full list of changes is available here.

Please note that LibreSSL is not a supported crypto backend. We accept patches and we do test on OpenBSD 6.0 which comes with LibreSSL, but if newer versions of LibreSSL break API compatibility we do not take responsibility to fix that.

Also note that Windows installers have been built with NSIS version that has been patched against several NSIS installer code execution and privilege escalation problems. Based on our testing, though, older Windows versions such as Windows 7 might not benefit from these fixes. We thus strongly encourage you to always move NSIS installers to a non-user-writeable location before running them. We are moving to MSI installers in OpenVPN 2.5, but OpenVPN 2.4.x will remain NSIS-only.

Compared to OpenVPN 2.3 this is a major update with a large number of new features, improvements and fixes. Some of the major features are AEAD (GCM) cipher and Elliptic Curve DH key exchange support, improved IPv4/IPv6 dual stack support and more seamless connection migration when client's IP address changes (Peer-ID). Also, the new --tls-crypt feature can be used to increase users' connection privacy.

OpenVPN GUI bundled with the Windows installer has a large number of new features compared to the one bundled with OpenVPN 2.3. One of major features is the ability to run OpenVPN GUI without administrator privileges. For full details, see the changelog. The new OpenVPN GUI features are documented here.

Please note that OpenVPN 2.4 installers will not work on Windows XP. The last OpenVPN version that supports Windows XP is 2.3.18, which is downloadable as 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

If you find a bug in this release, please file a bug report to our Trac bug tracker. In uncertain cases please contact our developers first, either using the openvpn-devel mailinglist or the developer IRC channel (#openvpn-devel at irc.freenode.net). For generic help take a look at our official documentation, wiki, forums, openvpn-users mailing list and user IRC channel (#openvpn at irc.freenode.net).

Important: you will need to use the correct installer for your operating system. The Windows 10 installer works on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016/2019. The Windows 7 installer will work on Windows 7/8/8.1/Server 2012r2. This is because of Microsoft's driver signing requirements are different for kernel-mode devices drivers, which in our case affects OpenVPN's tap driver (tap-windows6).

NOTE: the GPG key used to sign the release files has been changed since OpenVPN 2.4.0. Instructions for verifying the signatures, as well as the new GPG public key are available here.

We also provide static URLs pointing to latest releases to ease automation. For a list of files look here.

This release is also available in our own software repositories for Debian and Ubuntu, Supported architectures are i386 and amd64. For details. look here.

You can use EasyRSA 2 or EasyRSA 3 for generating your own certificate authority. The former is bundled with Windows installers. The latter is a more modern alternative for UNIX-like operating systems.

The Windows installers are bundled with OpenVPN-GUI – its source code is available on its project page and as tarballs on our alternative download server.