diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS
index 313242be3..0a9b566b0 100644
--- a/NEWS
+++ b/NEWS
@@ -1,3 +1,20 @@
+strongswan-4.6.1
+----------------
+
+- Because of changing checksums before and after installation which caused
+  the integrity tests to fail we avoided directly linking libsimaka, libtls and
+  libtnccs to those libcharon plugins which make use of these dynamic libraries.
+  Instead we linked the libraries to the charon daemon. Unfortunately the most
+  recent libtool versions do no keep links to dynamic libraries that are not
+  actually used by the charon daemon itself, thus causing failures during the
+  loading of the plugins which depend on these libraries for resolving external
+  symbols.
+
+-  Therefore our approach of computing  integrity checksums for plugins had to be
+   changed radically by moving the hash generation from the compilation to the
+   post-installation phase.
+ 
+
 strongswan-4.6.0
 ----------------
 
diff --git a/configure.in b/configure.in
index a0b1f40fd..66daeb6b8 100644
--- a/configure.in
+++ b/configure.in
@@ -16,7 +16,7 @@ dnl ===========================
 dnl  initialize & set some vars
 dnl ===========================
 
-AC_INIT(strongSwan,4.6.0)
+AC_INIT(strongSwan,4.6.1)
 AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE(tar-ustar)
 AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR([m4/config])
 PKG_PROG_PKG_CONFIG