Security updates have been issued by Debian (curl, dnsmasq, and golang-go.crypto), Mageia (docker, firefox, flash-player-plugin, ghostscript, links, squid, sympa, tcpflow, thunderbird, and znc), openSUSE (srt), Oracle (.NET Core, kernel, libwmf, and poppler), Scientific Linux (firefox), SUSE (cri-o, curl, java-1_8_0-ibm, python-SQLAlchemy, and python-urllib3), and Ubuntu (curl and expat).
Hardening must be performed at all levels of a system, including in thecompiler that is used to build that system. There are two viable compilersin the free-software community now, each of which offers a different set ofsecurity features. Kees Cook ran a session during the Toolchainsmicroconference at the 2019 LinuxPlumbers Conference that examined the security-feature support providedby both GCC and LLVM Clang, noting the places where each one could stand toimprove.
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (exim, firefox, and webkit2gtk), Debian (libonig and opensc), Fedora (cobbler), Oracle (firefox and kernel), Red Hat (flash-plugin, kernel, kernel-rt, rh-maven35-jackson-databind, rh-nginx110-nginx, and rh-nginx112-nginx), Scientific Linux (kernel), Slackware (curl, mozilla, and openssl), SUSE (ceph, libvirt, and python-Werkzeug), and Ubuntu (vlc and webkit2gtk).
On day two of the 2019Linux Plumbers Conference, two of the principals behind the Open Printingproject led the very first Open Printingmicroconference. Project leader Till Kamppeter and program managerAveek Basu described the current state of printing on Linux and some of theplans for the future, including supporting scanning for multi-functiondevices. The picture they painted was rosy, at least for printing, whichmay not quite match the experience of many Linux users. As with manyprojects, though, Open Printing is starved for contributors—something thatwas reflected in the sparse attendance at the microconference.
At the 2019EmbeddedLinux Conference North America, which was held in San Diego in August,Krzysztof Opasiak gave a presentation on demystifying the ways to monitor—andeven change—USB traffic on a Linux system. He started with the basics ofthe USB protocol and worked up into software and hardware tools toobserve, modify, and fuzz the messages that get sent. Those tools are part of thearsenal that is available to those interested in looking deeply into USB.
Software Guard Extensions (SGX) is a set of security-relatedinstructions for Intel processors; it allows the creation of privateregions of memory, called "enclaves". The aim of this feature is to worklike an inverted sandbox: instead of protecting the system from maliciouscode, it protects an application from a compromised kernel hypervisor,or other application. Linux support for SGX has existed out-of-treefor years, and the effort of upstreaming it has reached animpressive version22 of the patch set. During the upstreaming discussion, the kerneldevelopers discoveredthat the proposed SGX API did not play nicely with existing securitymechanisms, including Linux security modules(LSMs).
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (python38), openSUSE (nginx, nodejs10, nodejs8, python-Twisted, python-Werkzeug, SDL2_image, SDL_image, and util-linux and shadow), Oracle (firefox and nghttp2), Red Hat (.NET Core, firefox, kernel, libwmf, pki-deps:10.6, and poppler), Scientific Linux (firefox), SUSE (ghostscript, libgcrypt, podman, python-SQLAlchemy, qemu, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (curl, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-raspi2, systemd, and tomcat8).
The CodeWeavers blog carries the sadnews that Józef Kucia died last month. "Józef first contributed to Wine in March of 2012, showing remarkable skill with Wine’s D3D technology. He became a key contributor to Wine, submitting over 2,500 patches. He also contributed to other open source projects including Mesa and Debian. Józef founded and led the vkd3d project and provided insight and guidance to the Vulkan working group.Józef joined CodeWeavers in 2015, and quickly became one of our most valued employees."
Security updates have been issued by Debian (docker.io, icedtea-web, and trafficserver), openSUSE (opera), Red Hat (bind, firefox, go-toolset:rhel8, kernel, nghttp2, and polkit), SUSE (buildah, curl, java-1_7_1-ibm, and skopeo), and Ubuntu (freetype, memcached, python2.7, python3.4, and python2.7, python3.5, python3.6, python3.7).
It's that time of the development cycle again: work on the 5.3 kernel iswinding down with an expected final release date of September 15. Read onfor LWN's traditional look at where the code in 5.3 came from in thisrelatively busy development cycle.
The eighth and presumably final 5.3prepatch is out for testing. "So we probably didn't strictly need an rc8 this release, but with LPCand the KS conference travel this upcoming week it just makeseverything easier."
Anybody running the Exim mail system will want to apply the updates thatare being released today; there is a remote code-execution vulnerability inits TLS-handling code with a known proof-of-concept exploit. As the advisorysays: "If your Exim server accepts TLS connections, it isvulnerable".
The5.2.12,4.19.70,4.14.142,4.9.191, and4.4.191stable kernels have been released with another set of important fixes.Milliseconds thereafter,5.2.13 and4.19.71were released to fix a regression with the elantech mouse driver.
Google has a long and interesting history contributing to the upstreamLinux kernel. With Chrome OS, Google has tried to learn from some ofthe mistakes of its past and is now working with the upstream Linux kernel asmuch as it can. In a session at the 2019Open Source Summit North America, Google software engineer DougAnderson detailed how and why Chrome OS developers work upstream. Itis an effort intended to help the Linux community as well as Google.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (exim4 and firefox-esr), Fedora (lxc, lxcfs, pdfresurrect, python3-lxc, rdesktop, and seamonkey), Oracle (kernel), and SUSE (nginx, python-Werkzeug, SUSE Manager Client Tools, and util-linux and shadow).
The staging tree was added to the kernel in 2008for the 2.6.28 development cycle as a way to ease the process ofgetting substandard device drivers into shape and merged into themainline. It has been followed by controversy for just about as long. Therecent disagreements over the EROFS and exFAT filesystems have reignited many of thearguments over whether the staging tree is beneficial to the kernelcommunity or not. LWN cannot answer that question, but we can look into what has transpired in thestaging tree in its first eleven years to see if there are any conclusionsto be drawn there.A lot of code has gone into the staging tree over the years; what happenedto it thereafter?
Security updates have been issued by Debian (webkit2gtk), Fedora (systemd), openSUSE (go1.11, python-Twisted, SDL2_image, SDL_image, and wavpack), Oracle (kdelibs and kde-settings, kernel, and qemu-kvm), Red Hat (chromium-browser and firefox), Slackware (seamonkey), SUSE (java-1_8_0-ibm, kernel, and python-urllib3), and Ubuntu (firefox and npm/fstream).
Google has announcedthe release of a new library for applications using differential privacytechniques. "Differentially-private data analysis is a principledapproach that enables organizations to learn from the majority of theirdata while simultaneously ensuring that those results do not allow anyindividual's data to be distinguished or re-identified. This type ofanalysis can be implemented in a wide variety of ways and for manydifferent purposes. For example, if you are a health researcher, you maywant to compare the average amount of time patients remain admitted acrossvarious hospitals in order to determine if there are differences incare. Differential privacy is a high-assurance, analytic means of ensuringthat use cases like this are addressed in a privacy-preservingmanner."
The Linux Plumbers Conference has filled up and has closed its waiting list. "All of the spots available have been allocated, so anyone whois not registered at this point will have to wait for next year. Therewill be no on-site registration. We regret that we could notaccommodate everyone. The good news is that all of themicroconferences, refereed talks, Kernel summit track, and Networkingtrack will be recorded on video and made available as soon as possibleafter the conference. Anyone who could not make it to Lisbon this yearwill at least be able to catch up with what went on. Hopefully thosewho wanted to come will make it to a future LPC." LPC will be held in Lisbon, Portugal, September 9-11.
Finding ways to make it easier and faster to mitigate an ongoing attackagainst a Linux system at runtime is part of the motivation behind thekernel runtime security instrumentation (KRSI) project. Its developer, KPSingh, gave a presentation about the project at the 2019LinuxSecurity Summit North America (LSS-NA), which was held in late Augustin San Diego. A prototype of KRSI is implemented as a Linux securitymodule (LSM) that allows eBPF programs to be attached to the kernel'ssecurity hooks.
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (grafana, irssi, and jenkins), Debian (freetype, samba, and varnish), Fedora (community-mysql, kernel, kernel-headers, kernel-tools, and python-mitogen), openSUSE (postgresql10 and python-SQLAlchemy), Oracle (kdelibs and kde-settings and squid:4), Red Hat (kdelibs and kde-settings, kernel, kernel-rt, openstack-nova, qemu-kvm, and redis), Scientific Linux (kdelibs and kde-settings, kernel, and qemu-kvm), SUSE (ansible, java-1_7_1-ibm, libosinfo, php53, and qemu), and Ubuntu (irssi, samba, and systemd).
A typical kernel development cycle involves pulling patches from over 100repositories into the mainline. Any of those pulls could conceivablybring with it malicious code, leaving the kernel (and its users) open tocompromise. The kernel's web of trust helps maintainers to ensure thatpull requests are legitimate, but that web has become difficult to maintainin the wake of the recent attacks on keyservers and other problems. So now the kernel community istaking management of its web of trust into its own hands.
Thisgrsecurity blog entry looks at how an ineffective Spectre fix found itsway into the stable kernel releases. If one looks past the advertising,it's a good summary of how the kernel processes can produce the wrongresult. "Despite this warning, this code was merged into ThomasGleixner's x86/tip tree verbatim, as can be seen here.Prior to merging the fix for 5.3-rc1, Linus Torvalds noticed the warning asseen on the LKML mailing list here and fixed it correctly.However, when the actual mergeof the tree was performed, no mention was made of the correction to thefix, and with no specific commit mentioning the correction and fixing italone, everyone else's processes that depended on cherry-picking specificcommits ended up grabbing the bad warning-inducing change.As a further failure, instead of looking at Linus' correct fix (observableby checking out the master tree at the time), the approach seems to havebeen to naively silence the warning by simply swapping the order of the twolines."
Providing meaningful metrics for open-source projects has long been achallenge, as simply measuring downloads, commits, or GitHub stars typicallydoesn't say much about the health or diversity of a project. It's achallenge the Linux Foundation's Community Health Analytics Open Source Software (CHAOSS) project islooking to help solve. At the 2019Open Source Summit North America (OSSNA), Matt Germonprez, one of the foundingmembers of CHAOSS, outlined what the group is currently doing and why itsinitial efforts didn't work out as expected.
Google has announcedthe release of Android 10, the free parts of which are available fromthe Android Open Source Project now. "Privacy is a central focus inAndroid 10, from stronger protections in the platform to new featuresdesigned with privacy in mind. Building on previous releases, Android 10includes extensive changes to protect privacy and give users control, withimproved system UI, stricter permissions, and restrictions on what dataapps can use."
Firefox 69.0 has been released. This release enables on-by-default EnhancedTracking Protection for all users and gives more control over blockingplayback of videos which start playing automatically. See the release notesfor details.
The success stories that have gathered around data analyticsdrive broader adoption of the newest artificial-intelligence-basedtechniques—but risks come along with these techniques. The large numbers of freshlyanointed data scientists piling into industry and the sensitivity of theareas given over to machine-learning models—hiring, loans, evensentencing for crime—means there is a danger of misapplied models,which is earning the attention of the public. Two sessions at the recent MinneBOS 2019 conference focused on maintaining ethics andaddressingbias in machine-learning applications.
The 5.3-rc7 kernel prepatch is out fortesting, one day later than usual. The final 5.3 release may also bedelayed a week to accommodate Linus's travel schedule: "So I dosuspect that with my timing (and a number of other developers are probablygoing to be traveling for LPC and KS too) I'll just make an rc8 even if itturns this Labor Day week ends up being very quiet and there might not beany _technical_ reason to delay the release."
Security updates have been issued by Debian (gosa, libav, libextractor, nghttp2, pump, and python2.7), Fedora (dovecot, mod_http2, and pango), Gentoo (dovecot, gnome-desktop, libofx, and nautilus), Mageia (ansible, ghostscript, graphicsmagick, memcached, mpg123, pango, vlc, wavpack, webmin, wireshark, and wpa_supplicant, hostapd), openSUSE (flatpak, libmirage, podman, slirp4netns and libcontainers-common, python-SQLAlchemy, and qemu), Red Hat (ghostscript, java-1.8.0-ibm, and squid:4), and SUSE (kernel, libsolv, libzypp, zypper, NetworkManager, nodejs10, nodejs8, perl, python-Django, and python-SQLAlchemy).
Linux kernel developers like to get support for new features — such asfilesystem types — merged quickly. In the case of the exFATfilesystem, that didn't happen; exFAT was created by Microsoft in 2006 foruse in larger flash-storage cards, but there has never been support in thekernel for this filesystem. Microsoft's recent announcementthat it wanted to get exFAT support into the mainline kernel would appearto have removed the largest obstacle to Linux exFAT support. But, as is sooften the case, it seems that some challenges remain.
It's not Linux but is worth a read: Google's Project Zero blog has ahighly detailed analysis of several iOS exploits and how they were usedto compromise large numbers of devices. "There's something thus far which is conspicuous only by its absence: is any of this encrypted? The short answer is no: they really do POST everything via HTTP (not HTTPS) and there is no asymmetric (or even symmetric) encryption applied to the data which is uploaded. Everything is in the clear. If you're connected to an unencrypted WiFi network this information is being broadcast to everyone around you, to your network operator and any intermediate network hops to the command and control server.This means that not only is the end-point of the end-to-end encryptionoffered by messaging apps compromised; the attackers then send all thecontents of the end-to-end encrypted messages in plain text over thenetwork to their server."
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (dovecot, gettext, go, go-pie, libnghttp2, and pigeonhole), Debian (djvulibre, dovecot, and subversion), Fedora (sleuthkit and wireshark), openSUSE (containerd, docker, docker-runc, and qbittorrent), Oracle (pango), SUSE (kernel, nodejs10, and python-SQLAlchemy), and Ubuntu (apache2).
For all its faults, email has long provedto be an effective communication mechanism for kernel development. Similarly, Git is an effective tool forsource-code management. But there is no real connection between the two,meaning that there is no straightforward way to connect a Git commit withthe email discussions that led to its acceptance. Once a patch enters arepository, it transitions into a new form of existence and leaves its pastlife behind. Doug Anderson recently went to the ksummit-discuss list withaproposal to add Gerrit-style change IDs as a way of connecting the twolives of a kernel patch; the end result may not be quite what he was askingfor.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the latest batch of stable kernels: 5.2.11, 4.19.69, and 4.14.141. As usual, they containimportant fixes all over the kernel tree; users should upgrade.
Blogger Ovid writesabout the push to rebrand Perl 6. "So yeah, there'sbitterness and the Perl community not only needs to heal, but we need tofind a way forward for both languages. The suggestion to change the name ofPerl 6 to 'raku' is effectively designed to make this happen. Perl 5 canfigure out how to get beyond the branding issue that's been plaguing it andPerl 6 can do the same thing."
Security updates have been issued by Debian (apache2 and faad2), openSUSE (schismtracker), Red Hat (ceph and pango), Scientific Linux (pango), SUSE (apache-commons-beanutils, ceph, php7, and qemu), and Ubuntu (ceph, dovecot, and ghostscript).
To open-source fans, the lure of open-source voting systems is surely strong. Soa talk at 2019Open Source Summit North America on a project for open-source voting inSan Francisco sounded promising; it is a city with lots of technicalknow-how among its inhabitants. While progress has definitely beenmade—though at an almost glacially slow speed—there is no likelihood thatthe city will be voting using open-source software in the near future. The talk byTony Wasserman was certainly interesting, however, and provided a look atthe intricacies of elections and voting that make it clear the problem isnot as easy as it might at first appear.
Linux support for the exFAT filesystem has had a long and troubled history; Microsoft haslong asserted patents in this area that have prevented that code from beingmerged into the kernel. Microsoft has just changed its tune, announcingthat upstreaming exFAT is now OK: "It’s important to us that theLinux community can make use of exFAT included in the Linux kernel withconfidence. To this end, we will be making Microsoft’s technicalspecification for exFAT publicly available to facilitate development ofconformant, interoperable implementations. We also support the eventualinclusion of a Linux kernel with exFAT support in a future revision of theOpen Invention Network’s Linux System Definition, where, once accepted, thecode will benefit from the defensive patent commitments of OIN’s 3040+members and licensees."
The GNOME Foundation, with support from Endless, has announcedthe Coding Education Challenge, a competition aimed to attract projectsthat offer educators and students new and innovative ideas to teach codingwith free and open source software. "Anyone is encouraged to submit a proposal. Individuals and teams will be judged through three tiers of competition. Twenty winners will be selected from an open call for ideas and will each receive $6,500 in prize money. Those winners will progress to a proof of concept round and build a working prototype. Five winners from that round will be awarded $25,000 and progress to the final round where they will turn the prototype into an end product. The final winner will receive a prize of $100,000 and the second placed product a prize of $25,000."
The Linux Foundation (LF) TechnicalAdvisory Board (TAB) is meant to give the kernel community somerepresentation within the foundation.In a "birds of a feather" (BoF) session at the 2019Open Source Summit North America, four TAB members participated in an"Ask the TAB" session. Laura Abbott organized the BoF and Tim Bird, GregKroah-Hartman, and Steven Rostedt joined in as well. In the session, thehistory behind the TAB, its role, and some of its activities over the yearswere described.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (dovecot), Fedora (docker and nghttp2), Oracle (pango), SUSE (apache2, fontforge, ghostscript-library, libreoffice, libvirt, podman, slirp4netns and libcontainers-common, postgresql10, and slurm), and Ubuntu (dovecot).
Packt has published alengthy writeup of a talk by Josh Triplett on work being done toadvance the Rust language for system-level programming. "Systemsprogramming often involves low-level manipulations and requires low-leveldetails of the processors such as privileged instructions. For this, Rustsupports using inline Assembly via the 'asm!' macro. However, it is onlypresent in the nightly compiler and not yet stabilized. Triplett in acollaboration with other Rust developers is writing a proposal to introducemore robust syntax for inline Assembly."
The encryption of data at rest is increasingly mandatory in a wide range ofsettings from mobile devices to data centers. Linux has supportedencryption at both the filesystem and block-storage layers for some time,but that support comes with a cost: either the CPU must encrypt and decrypt vastamounts of data moving to and from persistent storage or it mustorchestrate offloading that work to a separate device. It wasthus only a matter of time before ways were found to offload that overhead to thestorage hardware itself. Satya Tangirala's inlineencryption patch set is intended to enable the kernel to take advantageof this hardware in a general manner.
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