Freexian is pleased to announce a partnership with Invisible Things Lab to extend the security support of the Xen type-1 hypervisor version 4.17. Three years after its initial release, Xen 4.17, the version available in Debian 12 “bookworm”, will reach end-of-security-support status upstream on December 2025. The aim of our partnership with Invisible Things is to extend the security support until, at least, July 2027. We may also explore a possibility of extending the support until June 2028, to coincide with the end of Debian 12 LTS support-period.
The security support of Xen in Debian, since Debian 8 “jessie” until Debian 11 “bullseye”, reached its end before the end of the life cycle of the release. We aim then to significantly improve the situation of Xen in Debian 12. As with similar efforts, we would like to mention that this is an experiment and that we will do our best to make it a success. We are aiming to try and to extend the security support for Xen versions included in future Debian releases, including Debian 13 “trixie”.
In the long term, we hope that this effort will ultimately allow the Xen Project to increase the official security support period for Xen releases from the current three years to at least five years, with the extra work being funded by the community of companies benefiting from the longer support period.
If your company relies on Xen and wants to help sustain LTS versions of Xen, please reach out to us. For companies using Debian, the simplest way is to subscribe to Freexian’s Debian LTS offer at a gold level (or above) and let us know that you want to contribute to Xen LTS when you send in your subscription form. For others, please reach out to us at sales@freexian.com and we will figure out a way to help you contribute.
In the mean time, this initiative has been made possible thanks to the current LTS sponsors and ELTS customers. We hope the entire community of Debian and Xen users will benefit from this initiative.
For any queries you might have, please don’t hesitate to contact us at sales@freexian.com.
About Invisible Things Lab
Invisible Things Lab (ITL) offers low-level security consulting auditing services for x86 virtualization technologies; C, C++, and assembly codebases; Intel SGX; binary exploitation and mitigations; and more. ITL also specializes in Qubes OS and Gramine consulting, including deployment, debugging, and feature development.