Lightning Wire Labs

Summer Sale in the Lightning Wire Labs Store

2025-08-04T12:16:30+02:00

Throughout the month of August, we are offering a 10% discount on all IPFire Appliance products in the Lightning Wire Labs Store. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading your firewall hardware or deploying a new IPFire system, now is a great time to take advantage of this limited-time offer.

This sale includes our complete range of IPFire appliances — including our latest and most compact product: the new IPFire Mini Appliance. Designed for maximum performance in a minimal form factor, it is ideal for home offices, remote sites, or any environment that demands powerful, reliable network security in a small footprint.

The offer is valid until August 31st, 2025. No discount code is required — prices are reduced automatically at checkout.

Visit Our Store Now!

IPFire 2.29 - Core Update 192 Now Available on AWS for x86_64 and ARM

2025-03-13T18:50:29+01:00

We are excited to announce that the latest release of IPFire, version 2.29 - Core Update 192, is now available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for both x86_64 and ARM architectures.

With this release, users can deploy IPFire in the cloud with enhanced performance and security, benefiting from the robust feature set that makes IPFire the trusted choice for firewall and network security.

What’s New in Core Update 192?

This update brings numerous improvements and enhancements, including:

Enhanced Network Performance: Optimizations in the networking stack ensure lower latency and higher throughput, allowing IPFire to handle more traffic efficiently.
Improved Intrusion Detection System (IDS): With updated rulesets and better anomaly detection, IPFire provides even more comprehensive protection against threats.
ARM Architecture Support: With the addition of ARM support, IPFire can now run on cost-efficient ARM-based instances on AWS, offering better energy efficiency and performance.

IPFire in the Cloud: Unmatched Performance and Security

Running IPFire on AWS allows organizations to leverage the scalability and flexibility of the cloud while maintaining top-notch security. Whether you’re protecting your cloud-based infrastructure or establishing secure VPN connections, IPFire delivers reliable performance and advanced security features.

With the support for both x86_64 and ARM architectures, users can choose the most suitable instance type for their workload, optimizing both cost and performance. The improved IDS and enhanced cryptographic support make IPFire a powerful defense against evolving cyber threats in cloud environments.

Get Started Today

Deploy IPFire 2.29 - Core Update 192 on AWS and experience the benefits of a high-performance, open-source firewall.

Go to Amazon Web Services Marketplace and launch your new cloud firewall today:

ARM
x86_64

For detailed installation instructions and more information on the new features, visit our official documentation.

Stay secure with IPFire!

Happy Cyber Monday - Launching Our New IPFire Mini Appliance

2024-12-02T12:30:00+01:00

This Cyber Monday, we are officially announcing the long awaited successor to our most popular firewall: the all new IPFire Mini Appliance!

Order now and enjoy an exclusive price of EUR 499 or USD 599 until December 31st (prices excl. VAT)!

Our IPFire Firewall Appliance is designed for small businesses and home users who need blazing-fast performance and top-notch security. With four 2.5 GBit/s network interfaces, it’s built to launch your network into the future.

Despite its compact size, this appliance delivers unmatched capabilities. Whether it’s building ultra-fast VPN tunnels between branch offices or securing your home office connection to a datacenter, the IPFire Mini Appliance does it all. With support for advanced features like the IPFire Intrusion Prevention System and the ability to handle tens of thousands of firewall rules, it’s engineered for any challenge.

Go to our shop now to find out more details and secure yourself our early-bird offer:

Celebrating 10 Years of Lightning Wire Labs (10% Off All Appliances)

2022-08-01T11:00:00+02:00

We are celebrating 10 years of Lightning Wire Labs!

A whole decade where we have been working to make the Internet a safer place. Time that has been moving fast, has been full of challenges, as well as a time that has been a great success for ourselves, and our customers and partners we work with.

To say Thank You to our loyal customers, we are offering a 10% discount on all our appliances on store.lightningwirelabs.com for all of August¹.

In those 10 Years, we are proud:

That we have been working together with our great community, creating IPFire which is trusted by millions of users every day.
That we support customers ranging from Businesses of all shapes and sizes, Schools & Universities, Governments & Non-Governmental Organisations all over the world and help them to overcome their challenges.
We build tools to help people restoring their privacy from overreaching surveillance and data-collecting corporations.
We develop market-leading software so that anyone can make their business, organisation or home a secure place.

Thank you to everyone who has been on this journey together with us.

Cheers to the next 10 Years!

While stocks last. Offer ends on August 31st, 2022. Our terms & conditions apply. ↩

Can You Get Better Value For Money From AWS?

2021-08-30T19:41:00+02:00

Today, we are launching IPFire on AWS ARM-based instances, making IPFire cheaper, more versatile and more secure for all your cloud-based projects.

Having been around for a little while, Lightning Wire Labs ported IPFire to the new ARM-based processors from AWS with IPFire 2.25 - Core Update 159.

The cloud is here to stay. Lightning Wire Labs proudly has a large customer base with large cloud envirtonments secured by IPFire.

One common question, we are getting often is How to reduce cost? Although running your setup in the cloud gives you a lot of flexibility, this does not come for free. As companies grow, more resources are required driving up costs, and with more financial pressure on most businesses due to the pandemic, reducing cloud spend is more important than ever.

With IPFire already being free of any license cost, the biggest opportunity to save money on the firewall is to use a smaller instance size. However, since IPFire does not use a lot of resources, a certain amount of oomph is required to keep your hosted services fast for your customers and to shift Gigabits of data.

AWS new ARM instances based on their new Graviton 2 processors come with more performance for a smaller price. Who wouldn’t want to take advantage of that?

For application as a firewall, the T4g, M6g and C6g instances have many advantages:

Faster processing power which decreases latency on the network
Cryptographic acceleration for more throughput over VPNs, easily saturating a multi-gigabit link
Using lightweight virtualisation, IOMMU and DMA allows for less virtualisation overhead which decreases processor usage when handling network packets and giving the system time to care about other things
ARM processors are less likely to be vulnerable for any speculation attacks such as Spectre and Meltdown, giving you a little bit of extra security in the cloud
Giving an overall 40% better price performance compared to x86-based instances

IPFire in the cloud brings all the features that cost a lot of extra money to AWS without extra charge. Setting up VPNs to connect to your on-premise firewall in the office, or securely connecting your staff to the servers they are working on. Hosting services for your clients and protecting your web applications against attackers using the Intrusion Protection System. There are many opportunities and they have now become more affordable for everyone.

Read more about IPFire in the cloud on our product page.

Launching IPFire on Exoscale

2020-11-09T17:00:00+01:00

Today, we are launching IPFire on Exoscale, the GDPR-compatible European Cloud Provider based in Switzerland.

For the two years that IPFire is available on Amazon EC2, we have often received feedback from various customers about their data privacy concerns. GDPR and the generally higher data protection regulation in Europe is making it difficult for many people to find the right cloud provider that complies with those laws.

We are proud to offer an option for those customers.

With data centers in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Bulgaria, Exoscale is promising that your data won’t “travel halfway around the world”. Privacy has been built into the cloud from the first moment.

With competitive pricing and a user interface that is very easy to use, they are a brilliant alternative to the big, well-known cloud providers.

IPFire in the Cloud, just like you are used to it

IPFire in the cloud enables your business to grow above and beyond. It is the same firewall appliance that you know from your on-premise data center, just in the cloud - and therefore more versatile and flexible.

You can host your infrastructure of web servers, mail servers, and have it protected by a powerful firewall while accessing them easily through a secure VPN connection.

Your cloud infrastructure will grow with you to whatever size you need it to. Whether your website is becoming more popular, or your company is opening more branch offices that need to be securely connected to your central servers. Just upgrade your cloud instance and you have added more CPU power and memory to handle whatever challenges you face.

From a small prototype environment to a 10 Gigabit router. IPFire grows with you.

See some more examples on the detailed product page.

Try out IPFire on Exoscale for free today.

IPFire on AWS: Update to IPFire 2.25 - Core Update 146

2020-07-15T05:40:28+02:00

Today, we have updated IPFire on AWS to IPFire 2.25 - Core Update 146 - the latest official release of IPFire.

Since IPFire is available on AWS, we are gaining more and more users who are securing their cloud infrastructure behind an easy to configure, yet fast and secure firewall.

This update brings a new kernel as well as many other exciting changes.

The most important change for the cloud is that on AWS, IPFire will now default to a MTU of 9001 bytes for all internal interfaces. The RED interface will remain on 1500 bytes, since this is the Internet defaults to that size and we prefer IPFire performing any fragmentation and reassembly of packets over Amazon’s network stack.

This allows more network throughput with less overhead.

Try it out today for free!

There is a detailed installation guide available which helps you setting up your cloud correctly for IPFire.

How to update?

For all customers that are already running on the latest image, there is nothing to do here but to make sure that you have all updates installed on your instance.

Click here to go to IPFire on AWS

Follow Us on LinkedIn

2020-04-14T14:22:27+02:00

We are now on LinkedIn!

In a bid to improve our online presence we have created a LinkedIn page where we will be sharing news, product updates and vacancies within Lightning Wire Labs.

Check out our page and start following us today!

IPFire on AWS: Update to IPFire 2.25 - Core Update 141

2020-02-27T10:41:27+01:00

Today, we have updated IPFire on AWS to IPFire 2.25 - Core Update 141 - the latest official release of IPFire.

Since IPFire is available on AWS, we are gaining more and more users who are securing their cloud infrastructure behind an easy to configure, yet fast and secure firewall.

This update adds the rewritten DNS stack and brings many bug fixes to the cloud.

Managing DNS servers in IPFire has been re-imagined in this release of IPFire. Before, there were many places where DNS was configured which varied for each system depending on how it connected to the Internet.

For the cloud, we have added some changes that might be relevant for you:

For new installations, we won’t use Amazon’s DNS servers any more since they do not support DNSSEC. By default, the system runs in recursor mode which means that IPFire will contact authoritative DNS servers directly.

For that, Security Groups need to allow IPFire connecting UDP/53 and TCP/53 for any IP address on the Internet.

Systems that are upgraded will automatically carry the previous configuration over. We recommend reviewing those settings and ask you to consider to configure DNS-over-TLS.

Try it out today for free!

There is a detailed installation guide available which helps you setting up your cloud correctly for IPFire.

How to update?

For all customers that are already running on the latest image, there is nothing to do here but to make sure that you have all updates installed on your instance.

Click here to go to IPFire on AWS

Enhancements to our DNS Resolver

2020-02-12T17:05:46+01:00

Today, we have taken some important changes on our DNS Resolver into production. Having released support for DNS-over-TLS in 2018, we have now added TCP Fast Open and TLSv1.3.

Lightning Wire Labs is managing a DNS Resolver to provide an alternative to the large corporation who are trying to get the global DNS system under their control and use it for marketing purposes.

To not fall behind the technical development, we have now enabled some new features on our resolver to make it ready for the new DNS changes that are going to land with IPFire 2.25 - Core Update 141 very soon.

DNS-over-TLS

We are supporting DNS-over-TLS, for almost two years now, but with only few users. This is not surprising since IPFire did not DNS-over-TLS in the past, but this will now change.

We support TLSv1.3 and require at least TLSv1.2. ChaCha20-Poly1305, AES-GCM, Curve25519, and smaller ECSDA certificates are of course not missing either.

TCP Fast Open

For users who have an ISP that is filtering UDP queries or breaks DNSSEC in one way or the other, we are supporting TCP of course.

Since TCP requires a full 3-way handshake before any data can be sent, there is a small performance impact. To combat that, we now support TCP Fast Open which allows to send the DNS query with the first packet, even before the TCP connection is fully open.

This way, queries over TCP are just as fast as those over UDP.

How to use it?

The server is available at 2001:678:b28::54 and 81.3.27.54.

If you are using TLS, enter recursor01.dns.lightningwirelabs.com or recursor01.dns.ipfire.org as TLS hostname.