The second 4.7 prepatch is now availablefor testing. Linus says: "There's a late non-fix I took even thoughthe merge window is over, because I've been wanting it for a while. I doubtanybody notices the actual effects of a pty change/cleanup that means thatour old disgusting DEVPTS_MULTIPLE_INSTANCES kernel config option is gone,because the cleanup means that it is no longer needed." For detailson this change, see this article from lastweek's Kernel Page.
At his blog, Gunnar Wolf urges developers to stop using"short" (eight hex-digit) PGP key IDs as soon as possible. Theimpetus for the advice originates with Debian's Enrico Zini, who recentlyfound two keys sharing the same short ID in the wild. Thepossibility of short-ID collisions has been known for a while, but itis still disconcerting to see in the wild. "Those three keysare not (yet?) uploaded to the keyservers, though... But we can expectthem to appear at any point in the future. We don't know who is behindthis, or what his purpose is. We just know this looks veryevil."Wolf goes on to note that short IDs are not merely human-readableconveniences, but are actually used to identify PGP keys in somesoftware programs. To mitigate the risk, he recommends configuringGnuPG to never shows short IDs, to ensure that other programs do notconsume short IDs, and to "only sign somebody else's key if yousee and verify its full fingerprint. [...] And there are surely many other important recommendations. But this is a good set of points to start with."
At OSCON2016 in Austin, a panel of invited experts debated thealways-thorny subject of how open-source software projects deal withpatents. The panel was packed, featuring representatives from thefree-software world, commerce, and the legal community, so there wasscarcely enough time to move through the prepared topics in the timeallotted, much less to take questions from the audience. But thediscussion was able to highlight a number of current issues, includingpatent abolition, implicit patent licenses, and where theopen-source community should focus its efforts to improve matters.
Arch Linux has updated nginx (denial of service) and nginx-mainline (denial of service).Debian has updated nginx (denial of service).Debian-LTS has updated gdk-pixbuf (buffer overflows), graphicsmagick (command execution), and imagemagick (command execution).Fedora has updated compat-nettle27 (F23: improper cryptographiccalculations), dosfstools (F22: twovulnerabilities), gd (F23: twovulnerabilities), kernel (F23; F22: multiple vulnerabilities), libimobiledevice (F22: sockets listening onINADDR_ANY), libusbmuxd (F22: socketslistening on INADDR_ANY), and phpMyAdmin(F23: three vulnerabilities).SUSE has updated java-1_8_0-ibm(SLE12-SP1: multiple vulnerabilities) and ntp (SOSC5, SMP2.1, SM2.1, SLE11-SP2,3: multiple vulnerabilities).Ubuntu has updated imagemagick (multiple vulnerabilities).
PostgreSQL's annual developer conference, PGCon, took place in May, which made it agood place to get a look at the new PostgreSQL features coming in version9.6. The first 9.6beta was released just the week before and severalcontributors demonstrated key changes at the conference in Ottawa. Formany users, this was the first time to see the finished versions offeatures that had been under development for months or years.
For those who have been wondering about the exodus from ownCloud, the announcement of a company called"Nextcloud" should make things clear. "Started by the well knownopen source file sync and share developer Frank Karlitschek and joined bythe most active contributors to his previous project, building on itsmature code base, we offer a more reliable and sustainable solution forusers and customers. We will develop a drop-in replacement for that legacycode base over the coming weeks, providing the bug fixes and securityhardening all users need and the Enterprise Subscription capabilitiesenterprise customers require."See also thisblog post from Jos Poortvliet.
There is no doubt that the addition of containertechnologies to Linux has created a lot of value,allowing workloads to be effectively and efficiently isolated from each other.Implementing these technologies presents a number of challenges,particularly as much of Linux and Unix was designed to use singletons:objects of which there could never ever be more than one, such ashost names, network routing tables, or process-ID namespaces.Containers require this design approach to be revised as they needmultiple instances of these objects. A singleton that has been causing problems recently is the set of pseudoterminals (TTYs).<p>Click below (subscribers only) for the full article from Neil Brown.
Thiswhite paper by Jesse Hertz [PDF] examines various ways to compromise andescape from containers on Linux systems. "A common configuration forcompanies offering PaaS solutions built on containers is to have multiplecustomers’ containers running on the same physical host. By default, bothLXC and Docker setup container networking so that all containers share thesame Linux virtual bridge. These containers will be able to communicatewith each other. Even if this direct network access is disabled (using the–icc=false flag for Docker, or using iptables rules for LXC), containersaren’t restricted for link-layer traffic. In particular, it is possible(and in fact quite easy) to conduct an ARP spoofing attack on anothercontainer within the same host system, allowing full middle-person attacksof the targeted container’s traffic."
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has announced the Open Source License API,to "allow third parties to becomelicense-aware, and give organizations the ability to clearly determine if alicense is, in fact, an Open Source license, from the authoritative sourceregarding Open Source licenses, the OSI."
CoreOS has announceda new project called Torus which is creating a distributed storage systemfor containers. "At its core, Torus is a library with an interfacethat appears as a traditional file, allowing for storage manipulationthrough well-understood basic file operations. Coordinated and checkpointedthrough etcd’s consensus process, this distributed file can be exposed touser applications in multiple ways. Today, Torus supports exposing thisfile as block-oriented storage via a Network Block Device (NBD). We alsoexpect that in the future other storage systems, such as object storage,will be built on top of Torus as collections of these distributed files,coordinated by etcd." The project is quite young, and the currentrelease is a "prototype version."
The Tor Browser Team has announcedthe release of Tor browser 6.0. This release brings the browserup-to-date with Firefox 45-ESR, which provides better support for HTML5video on Youtube, as well as a host of other improvements. DuckDuckGo isnow the default search engine. "Lately, we got a couple of comments on our blog and via email wondering why we are now using DuckDuckGo as the default search engine and not Disconnect anymore. Well, we still use Disconnect. But for a while now Disconnect has no access to Google search results anymore which we used in Tor Browser. Disconnect being more a meta search engine which allows users to choose between different search providers fell back to delivering Bing search results which were basically unacceptable quality-wise. While Disconnect is still trying to fix the situation we asked them to change the fallback to DuckDuckGo as their search results are strictly better than the ones Bing delivers."
Qubes founder Joanna Rutkowska writes about how Qubesworks to avoid building compromised software into its distribution."Ultimately, we would like to introduce a multiple-signature scheme,in which several developers (from different countries, social circles,etc.) can sign Qubes-produced binaries and ISOs. Then, an adversary wouldhave to compromise all the build locations in order to get backdooredversions signed. For this to happen, we need to make the build processdeterministic (i.e. reproducible). Yet, this task still seems to be yearsahead of us."
Version3.0 of the Krita painting application has been released."Wrapping up a year of work, this is a really big release: animationsupport integrated into Krita’s core, Instant Preview for betterperformance painting and drawing with big brushes on big canvases, portedto the latest version of the Qt platform and too many bigger and smallernew features and improvements to mention!".
Linus has released 4.7-rc1 and closed themerge window for this release, saying "this time around we havea fairly big change to the vfs layer that allows filesystems (if theybuy into it) to do readdir() and path component lookup in parallelwithin the same directory.That's probably the biggest conceptual vfs change we've had since westarted doing cached pathname lookups using RCU." The code name hasbeen changed to "Psychotic Stoned Sheep."
Ars technica is carrying aneditorial from Oracle's attorney in its fight with Google; it wouldseem that this ruling is the end of the world."It is hard to see how GPL can survive such a result. In fact, it ishard to see how ownership of a copy of any software protected by copyrightcan survive this result. Software businesses now must accelerate their moveto the cloud where everything can be controlled as a service rather thansoftware. Consumers can expect to find decreasing options to own anythingfor themselves, decreasing options to control their data, decreasingoptions to protect their privacy."
At its blog, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) announces the deployment of "a machine readable publication of OSI approved licenses" accessible via api.opensource.org. The service is designed to "store a central list of crosswalks and common identifiers to other services, allowing third parties who are already license-aware to provide their mappings, and pull OSI approval status programatically." Programs can query a license by its Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) ID and determine whether or not it is OSI-approved. API wrappers are available for Python, Ruby, and Go.
Worth a read: thispaper [PDF] From Kaiyuan Yang et al. on how an analog back door can beplaced into a hardware platform like a CPU. "In this paper, we showhow a fabrication-time attacker can leverage analog circuits to create ahardware attack that is small (i.e., requires as little as one gate) andstealthy (i.e., requires an unlikely trigger sequence before effecting[sic] achip’s functionality). In the open spaces of an already placed and routeddesign, we construct a circuit that uses capacitors to siphon charge fromnearby wires as they transition between digital values. When the capacitorsfully charge, they deploy an attack that forces a victim flip-flop to adesired value. We weaponize this attack into a remotely-controllableprivilege escalation by attaching the capacitor to a wire controllable andby selecting a victim flip-flop that holds the privilege bit for ourprocessor."
Ars technica reportsthat Google has prevailed against Oracle in its court battle over the useof the Java APIs in Android. "There was only one question on thespecial verdict form, asking if Google's use of the Java APIs was a 'fairuse' under copyright law. The jury unanimously answered 'yes,' in Google'sfavor. The verdict ends the trial, which began earlier this month."
Debian-LTS has updated bozohttpd(two vulnerabilities, one from 2014), ruby-mail (SMTP injection), and xymon (multiple vulnerabilities). Also, the Debian-LTS team has announced that some packages will not besupported (libv8, mediawiki, sogo, and vlc) for Debian 7 ("wheezy"),so users of those should upgrade to Debian 8 ("jessie").Red Hat has updated rh-mariadb100-mariadb (RHSC: many vulnerabilities).Ubuntu has updated eglibc, glibc(15.10, 14.04, 12.04: multiple vulnerabilities, some from 2013 and 2014)and samba (16.04, 15.10, 14.04: regressionin previous security fix).
Arch Linux has updated libndp (man-in-the-middle attacks).Fedora has updated kernel (F22:multiple vulnerabilities).Red Hat has updated jq (RHOSP8:code execution).Slackware has updated libarchive (code execution).Ubuntu has updated php5, php7.0 (multiple vulnerabilities).
By all accounts, the Internet's transition to IPv6 has been a slow affair.In recent years, though, perhaps inspired by the exhaustion of the IPv4address space, IPv6 usage has been on therise. There is a corresponding interest in ensuring that applicationswork with both IPv4 and IPv6. But, as a recent discussion on the OpenBSDmailing list has highlighted, a mechanism designed to ease the transition to anIPv6 network may also make the net less secure — and Linux distributionsmay be configured insecurely by default.
On the Tor blog, Nick Mathewson reports on an informal survey he did for "severe" bugs in Tor over the last few years. It breaks down the 70 bugs he found into different categories that are correlated with some recommendations for ways to try to avoid them in the future. For example: "Recommendation 5.1: all backward compatibility code should have a timeout date.On several occasions we added backward compatibility code to keep an old version of Tor working, but left it enabled for longer than we needed to. This code has tended not to get the same regular attention it deserves, and has also tended to hold surprising deviations from the specification. We should audit the code that's there today and see what we can remove, and we should never add new code of this kind without adding a ticket and a comment planning to remove it." Many of the recommendations are likely applicable to other projects.
GitLab 8.8 has been releasedwith pipeline visualization, .gitignore templates, the GitLabContainer Registry, and more. "In this release, we are supercharging GitLab CI. First with Pipelines and now with GitLab Container Registry. GitLab Container Registry is a secure and private registry for Docker images. It isn't just a standalone registry; it's completely integrated with GitLab. In fact, our container registry is actually the first Docker registry that is fully-integrated with git repository management and comes out of the box with GitLab 8.8. So if you've upgraded, you already have it! Our integrated Container Registry requires no additional installation. It allows for easy upload and download of images from GitLab CI. And it's free."
Debian has updated atheme-services (denial of service).Fedora has updated gsi-openssh(F23: privilege escalation), imlib2 (F23; F22: multiple vulnerabilities), and websvn (F23; F22: cross-site scripting).Mageia has updated glibc (multiple vulnerabilities), golang (denial of service), pcre (two vulnerabilities), and xerces-j2 (denial of service).Red Hat has updated jq (RHELOSP7 for RHEL7; RHELOSP6 for RHEL7: code execution)and kernel (RHEL6.6: two remote denial of service vulnerabilities).SUSE has updated IBM Java 1.6.0(SLES10-SP4: multiple vulnerabilities).
Linux.com has an interviewwith Dietrich Ayala about using old smartphones for home automation."Ayala spent a lot of time studying the readouts from sensors, as well as from the phone’s microphone, camera, and, radios, that would enable a remote user to draw conclusions about what was happening at home. This contextual information could then be codified into more useful notifications.With ambient light, for example, if it suddenly goes dark in the daytime, maybe someone is standing over a device, explained Ayala. Feedback from the accelerometer can be analyzed to determine the difference between footsteps, an earthquake, or someone picking up the device. Scripts can use radio APIs to determine if a person moving around is carrying a phone with a potentially revealing Bluetooth signature."
Version1.2.0 of the Roundcube web-based email system has been released. Theheadline feature this time around would appear to be support for encryptedmail with PGP; the encryption can be handled either centrally in theserver, or in the browser via the "Mailvelope" browser plugin. Acomplete list of changes can be found in thechangelog.
For those who are curious about how the CoreOS remote SSH vulnerabilitycame to be, the company has posted adetailed report. "This misconfiguration was abetted byconfirmation bias. The expected outcome of the change to the CoreOS PAMconfiguration was for users who presented a password present in anauthentication database to be successfully authenticated. Because of thepam_permit failure case explained above, this was the observed behavior intesting, so the change was assumed to be correct. No attempt was made todetermine whether the observed behavior could be explained in some otherway, such as the system allowing any presented password."
Arch Linux has updated bugzilla(cross-site scripting).Debian has updated librsvg (threevulnerabilities).Debian-LTS has updated expat(code execution) and libgd2 (denial of service).Mageia has updated dhcpcd (codeexecution from 2014), expat (codeexecution), gdk-pixbuf2.0 (code execution),icu (code execution), imagemagick/ruby-rmagic (multiplevulnerabilities), libxml2 (two denial ofservice flaws), perl (denial of service),and xerces-c (code execution).openSUSE has updated libksba(13.2: two vulnerabilities) and php5 (42.1:multiple vulnerabilities).Red Hat has updated Red Hat OpenShiftEnterprise 3.1 (unauthorized access) and Red Hat OpenShift Enterprise 3.2 (three vulnerabilities).SUSE has updated openssl (SLE10:multiple vulnerabilities).
Over at InfoWorld, Jim Reno compares the security of virtual machines (VMs) and containers. "Which is more secure?" is a question that is often asked, but the answer, of course, is "it depends". Reno analyzes the attack surface of each to help in the choosing between VMs and containers."Many legacy VM applications treat VMs like bare metal. In other words, they have not adapted their architectures specifically for VMs or for security models not based on perimeter security. They might install many services on the same VM, run the services with root privileges, and have few or no security controls between services. Rearchitecting these applications (or more likely replacing them with newer ones) might use VMs to provide security separation between functional units, rather than simply as a means of managing larger numbers of machines.Containers are well suited for microservices architectures that “string together†large numbers of (typically) small services using standardized APIs. Such services often have a very short lifetime, where a containerized service is started on demand, responds to a request, and is destroyed, or where services are rapidly ramped up and down based on demand. That usage pattern is dependent on the fast instantiation that containers support. From a security perspective it has both benefits and drawbacks."
On his blog, Josh Berkus asks about the effects of changing how PostgreSQL numbers its releases. There is talk of moving from an x.y.z scheme to an x.y scheme, where x would increase every year to try to reduce "the need to explain to users that 9.5 to 9.6 is really a major version upgrade requiring downtime". He is wondering what impacts that will have on users, tools, scripts, packaging, and so on."The problem is the first number, in that we have no clear criteria when to advance it. Historically, we've advanced it because of major milestones in feature development: crash-proofing for 7.0, Windows port for 8.0, and in-core replication for 9.0. However, as PostgreSQL's feature set matures, it has become less and less clear on what milestones would be considered "first digit" releases. The result is arguments about version numbering on the mailing lists every year which waste time and irritate developers."
Docker Engine 1.11 has been released,built on runC and containerd. "runC is the first implementation of the Open Containers Runtime specification and the default executor bundled with Docker Engine. Thanks to the open specification, future versions of Engine will allow you to specify different executors, thus enabling the ecosystem of alternative execution backends without any changes to Docker itself. By separating out this piece, an ecosystem partner can build their own compliant executor to the specification, and make it available to the user community at any time – without being dependent on the Engine release schedule or wait to be reviewed and merged into the codebase."
Yubico has posted ablog entry defending the company's decision to switch to closed-sourcecode in the Yubikey 4 product. "If you have to pick only one,is it more important to have the source code available for review or tohave a product that includes serious countermeasures for attacks againstthe integrity of your keys?"See also: KonstantinRyabitsev's response to this posting. "When it comes to anyhardware, we must at some point trust the manufacturer -- unless we havevery large budgets that would allow us to fully monitor every step of themanufacturing process. In the absence of such large budgets, we must baseour trust on the company's prior record and their willingness to work withthe community to show that their hands are clean and their intentions arepure. Putting out a blackbox proprietary device after all the good will youhave built up with NEOs sends the exact opposite message."
Jeffrey Pomerantz and Robin Peek seek todisambiguate the word "open", as it is used or misused today. Examplesinclude open source, open access, open society, open knowledge, opengovernment, and so on."From the common ancestor Free Software, the term “open†diversified, filling a wide range of niches. The Open Source Definition gave rise to a number of other definitions, articulating openness for everything from hardware to knowledge. Inspired by the political philosophy of openness, the Open Society Institute funded the meeting at which the Budapest Open Access Initiative declaration was created. Open Access then gave rise to a wide range of other opens concerned with scholarship, publication, and cultural heritage generally. This spread of openness can be seen as the diversification of a powerful idea into a wide range of resources and services. It can also be seen more importantly as the arrival, society-wide, of an idea whose time has come ... an idea with political, legal, and cultural impacts."(Thanks to Paul Wise)
Should you happen to be running a CoreOS alpha release in an exposedsetting, you'll want to have a look at thisadvisory and do a quick upgrade. "A misconfiguration in the PAMsubsystem in CoreOS Linux Alpha 1045.0.0 and 1047.0.0 allowed unauthorizedusers to gain access to accounts without a password or any otherauthentication token being required. This vulnerability affects a subset ofmachines running CoreOS Linux Alpha. Machines running CoreOS Linux Beta orStable releases are unaffected."
Linus has released the 4.6 kernel, saying:"It's just as well I didn't cut the rc cycle short, since the lastweek ended up getting a few more fixes than expected, but nothing in therefeels all that odd or out of line."Some of the more significant changes in this release are:post-init read-only memory as a barebeginning of the effort to harden the kernel,support for memory protection keys,the preadv2() and pwritev2()system calls,the kernel connection multiplexer,the OrangeFS distributed filesystem,compile-time stack validation,the OOM reaper, and many more.See the KernelNewbies 4.6page for an amazing amount of detail.
At his blog, Christian Schaller discusses the details of the OpenH264 media codec from Cisco, which is now available in Fedora. In particular, he notes that the codec only handle the H.264 "Baseline" profile. "So as you might guess from the name Baseline, the Baseline profile is pretty much at the bottom of the H264 profile list and thus any file encoded with another profile of H264 will not work with it. The profile you need for most online videos is the High profile. If you encode a file using OpenH264 though it will work with any decoder that can do Baseline or higher, which is basically every one of them." Wim Taymans of GStreamer is looking at improving the codec with Cisco's OpenH264 team.
LWN.net