## Security Updates

Ruby has been updated to 2.7.2, which includes a fix for [CVE-2020-25613](https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2020-25613).

## Improvements

Install times on Windows systems are now 2.5x faster.

### Chef Workstation Powershell Shortcut

We removed the administrator requirement from the PowerShell shortcut added to the Desktop on install. Users who desire this existing functionality should right-click and `Run as administrator` on this shortcut.

### Chef Infra Client

Chef Infra Client has been updated from 16.5.77 to 16.6.14. This release adds support for Microsoft's `pwsh` (commonly known as PowerShell Core) in addition to its previous support for `PowerShell`. The [powershell_script](https://docs.chef.io/resources/powershell_script/) resource includes a new `interpreter` property that accepts either `powershell` or `pwsh`, the `powershell_out` and `powershell_exec` custom resource helpers have been updated with a new argument that accepts either `:pwsh` or `:powershell`, and the `powershell_exec` helper now supports the 32-bit version of Windows.

This release also improves the Target Mode feature by converting the majority of Ohai plugins to run remotely, adds a new [chef_client_config](https://docs.chef.io/resources/chef_client_config/) resource, and fixes various bugs.

### Cookstyle

Cookstyle has been updated from 6.19.5 to 6.21.1. This release includes an updated RuboCop engine, improves scan times, fixes various bugs, and adds 3 new cops:

#### Lint/RedundantSafeNavigation

The `Lint/RedundantSafeNavigation` cop detects redundant save navigation operators in order to simplify code. For example `attrs&.respond_to?(:[])` can be simplified to just `attrs.respond_to?(:[])` because `respond_to?` will not error even if `attrs` is not defined.

#### ChefCorrectness/OctalModeAsString

The `ChefCorrectness/OctalModeAsString` cop detects mode properties that incorrectly use a string to represent an octal value. We highly recommend using strings that contain a base 10 mode value, but even if you want to use octal values, they can't be passed as strings.

#### ChefDeprecations/UseYamlDump

The `ChefDeprecations/UseYamlDump` cop detects cookbooks that use the .to_yaml method. Chef Infra Client 16.5 introduced performance enhancements to Ruby library loading and due to the underlying implementation of Ruby's `.to_yaml` method, it does not automatically load the YAML library. We recommend using `YAML.dump()` instead, which is functionally equivalent, and also properly loads the YAML library.

### Kitchen EC2

The `kitchen-ec2` gem has been updated from 3.7.2 to 3.8.0. This release allows multiple IP addresses to be specified when creating a security group and fixes a bug when creating spot instances.

### Kitchen Dokken

The `kitchen-dokken` gem has been updated from 2.11.0 to 2.11.1 This release improves how kitchen-dokken determines if containers are available for connections.

### knife-ec2

The `knife-ec2` plugin has been updated from 2.0.4 to 2.0.6. This release fixes an error that would occur when using the `--server-connect-attribute private_ip_address` flag.