We’re pleased to announce that the early access program (EAP) is now underway for the latest Sophos Firewall release. This update brings several Secure by Design enhancements and many of your top requested features.
Secure By Design
Internet facing infrastructure has recently come under increasing attacks to exploit vulnerabilities and other weaknesses to gain a foothold on networks.
As you know, at Sophos, we take security very seriously and over the last several releases we have invested in implementing many Secure By Design principles to harden the product and make it a much more difficult target. This release takes Secure by Design to a whole new level.
Sophos Firewall Health Check
A strong security posture depends on keeping your firmware up to date and ensuring your firewall is optimally configured. Sophos Firewall v22 makes it much easier to evaluate and address the configuration of your firewall with the new Health Check feature.
This new feature evaluates dozens of different configuration settings on your firewall and compares them with CIS benchmarks and other best practices, providing immediate insights to areas that may be at risk. It will identify all high-risk settings and provide recommendations with quick drill-down to the areas of concern so you can easily address them.
The health check status is displayed on a new Control Center widget and a full report is available under the “Firewall health check” main menu item.
Other Secure By Design enhancements:
- Next-gen Xstream Architecture – introduces an all-new control plane re-architected for maximum security and scalability to take us into the future. The new control plane enables modularization, isolation, and containerization of services like IPS for example, to run like “apps” on the firewall platform. It also enables complete separation of privileges for added security. In addition, high-availability deployments now benefit from a self-healing capability that is continuously monitoring system state and fixes deviations between devices automatically.
- Hardened kernel – The next-gen Xstream Architecture in Sophos Firewall OS is built upon a new hardened kernel (v6.6+) that provides enhanced security, performance, and scalability to maximize current and future hardware. This new kernel offers tighter process isolation and better mitigation for side-channel attacks as well as mitigations for CPU vulnerabilities (Spectre, Meltdown, L1TF, MDS, Retbleed, ZenBleed, Downfall). It also offers hardened usercopy, stack canaries, and Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR).
- Remote integrity monitoring – Sophos Firewall OS v22 now integrates our Sophos XDR Linux Sensor that enables real-time monitoring of system integrity, including unauthorized configuration, rule exports, malicious program execution attempts, file tampering, and more. This helps our security teams, who are proactively monitoring our entire Sophos Firewall install base to better identify, investigate, and respond more quickly to any attack. This is an added security capability that no other firewall vendor provides.
- New anti-malware engine – Sophos Firewall OS v22 integrates the latest Sophos anti-malware engine with enhanced zero-day real-time detection of emerging threats using global reputation lookups. It takes full advantage of SophosLabs’ massive cloud database of known malicious files, updated every five minutes or less. It also introduces AI and ML model detections and delivers enhanced telemetry to SophosLabs for accelerating their emerging threat detection analysis.
Other security and scalability enhancements:
- Firmware updates via SSL and certificate pinning ensures authenticity
- Active Threat Response logging improvements enhanced visibility
- NDR Essentials threat score is included in Logs for added insights
- NDR Essentials data center selection for data residency requirements
- Instant web category alerts for education institutions
- XML API access control enhancements with added granularity
- TLS 1.3 support for device access for the WebAdmin console and portals
Streamlined management and quality of life enhancements:
- Enhanced navigation performance
- Hardware monitoring for SNMP with a downloadable MIB
- sFlow Monitoring for real-time visibility
- NTP server settings defaults to “Use pre-defined NTP server”
- UI enhancements for XFRM interfaces with pagination and search/filter options
SG UTM features:
With Sophos UTM heading toward end-of-life soon (July 30, 2026), some migrating customers will appreciate these added features:
- SHA 256 and 512 support for OTP tokens
- MFA support for WAF form-based authentication
- Audit trail logs with before and after tracking to meet the latest NIST standards
Get the full details
Download the full What’s New Guide for a complete overview of all the great new features and enhancements in v22.
Get started today
You can download the upgrade package or installer for v22 from the Sophos Firewall v22 EAP Registration Page. Simply submit your details and the download links will be emailed to you straight away.
All support during the EAP will be through our forums on the Sophos Firewall Community.
Please provide feedback using the option at the top of every screen in your Sophos Firewall as highlighted below in red or via the Community Forums.
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