Vagrant box cache persistence during vagrant up

Vagrant manages downloaded environment boxes through a local cache directory to facilitate reuse across multiple projects. While the provider may host a newer version of a specific box, Vagrant defaults to using the locally cached version when the vagrant up command is executed.

The current behavior requires a manual execution of vagrant box update to synchronize the local cache with the remote provider. This creates a scenario where environments may remain on stale OS versions or outdated dependencies even if the versioning metadata in the Vagrantfile has been incremented on the provider side.

Is there a configuration setting to force a check for newer box versions during the vagrant up process? How does Vagrant handle cases where a provider returns an identical checksum for a modified box image?