# Sidekick RELEASE.2025-10-16T15-12-49Z

Released: 2025-10-16

This release delivers critical security updates and stability improvements. The update addresses deprecated cryptographic functions, resolves potential runtime panics in metrics collection, and fixes latency measurement initialization issues that could affect backend selection accuracy.

## Security Updates

- **Replaced deprecated x509 PEM encryption functions (#16)** - Updated TLS certificate handling to use current cryptographic standards, replacing deprecated `x509.EncryptPEMBlock` and `x509.DecryptPEMBlock` functions. This ensures continued security compliance and compatibility with modern Go toolchains. Deployments using encrypted PEM certificates should verify compatibility after upgrading.

## Bug Fixes

- **Fixed potential nil pointer dereference in metrics collection (#12)** - Eliminated race condition that could cause panics when accessing backend statistics during concurrent updates. The fix ensures thread-safe access to connection statistics and metrics data structures, improving overall stability in high-traffic environments.

- **Fixed latency measurement initialization (#13)** - Corrected initialization of `minLatency` metric to use `math.MaxInt64` instead of incorrect duration value. This ensures accurate minimum latency tracking from startup and prevents backend selection anomalies caused by incorrect initial latency values.