Release Date: 5 February, 2025.

## Components

### Knife

Important Notice: Upcoming Omnitruck API Deprecation

We updated Knife from v18.6.2 to v18.6.13. This release introduces a warning message when running `knife bootstrap` that notifies users about the upcoming Omnitruck API deprecation.

To ensure uninterrupted downloads and remove this warning:

- For connected environments: Activate your Chef license and Knife automatically uses the new download APIs.
- For air-gapped environments: Set up a local Chef licensing service and configure the `CHEF_LICENSE_SERVER` environment variable to point to its URL. For more information, see the [Chef Local License Service documentation](https://docs.chef.io/licensing/local_license_service/install/).

Activating your Chef license ensures a smooth transition to the new download mechanism before the Omnitruck API is deprecated.

### Chef Habitat

- Updated Chef Habitat from v1.6.1041 to v1.6.1243. See the [Habitat release notes](https://docs.chef.io/release_notes_habitat/#1.6.1243) for more information.

## Improvements

- To improve security and mitigate vulnerabilities, we replaced `Kernel.open` with `File.open` and `IO.read` with `File.read`.

## Security

Updated expat from v2.5.0 to v2.6.4 to resolve the following CVEs:

- [CVE-2023-52425](https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2023-52425/)
- [CVE-2023-52426](https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2023-52426/)
- [CVE-2024-45492](https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2024-45492/)