Ahead of FreeBSD 14.5-RELEASE hopefully debuting on 8 September, FreeBSD 14.5-RC1 is out today as the final scheduled development release.

FreeBSD 14.5-RC1 now points the FreeBSD kernel modules "kmods" repository to packages built on FreeBSD 14.5. And then the rest of the changes in FreeBSD 14.5 are security fixes.

FreeBSD 14.5-RC1 takes care of a race condition in the POSIX shared memory large page configuration. This race condition in the POSIX shared memory code could lead to local users escalating privileges on the system. This vulnerability was uncovered by GMO Cybersecurity by Ierae.

FreeBSD 14.5-RC1 also picks up a fix for a kernel use-after-free vulnerability via the TTY ioctls that could allow unprivileged local users to escalate privileges. Again uncovered by GMO Cybersecurity by Iera.

GovTech CSG meanwhile uncovered a kernel use-after-free in the FreeBSD sound SNDCTL_DSP_SYNCSTART ioctl that could be used for escalating privileges of local users.

Alexander Leidinger uncovered an issue where the HWPMC driver for hardware performance mounting counters will fail to detach during exec credential transitions. In turn an unprivileged local user who has attached PMCs to a process can keep monitoring it after the process executes a setuid or setgid binary.

FreeBSD also pulled in the latest upstream OpenSSL code to obtain fixes for multiple security vulnerabilities affecting that key project.

Those security fixes are the main set of changes with FreeBSD 14.5-RC1 as your last chance to help test this BSD operating system update before its stable debut in early September.