If your software deals with untrusted user input, it's a good idea to run a fuzzer against the program. For the Linux kernel, the most effective fuzzer of recent years has been Dave Jones's Trinity system call tester. But there's a new system call fuzzer in town, Dmitry Vyukov's syzkaller, and early results from it look promising — over 150 bugs uncovered in the mainline kernel (plus several dozen in Google's internal kernels) in a few months of operation.Click below (subscribers only) for the full article by David Drysdale.
The Raspberry Pi 3 has beenreleased and is on sale now for $35. "For Raspberry Pi 3,Broadcom have supported us with a new SoC, BCM2837. This retains the samebasic architecture as its predecessors BCM2835 and BCM2836, so all thoseprojects and tutorials which rely on the precise details of the RaspberryPi hardware will continue to work. The 900MHz 32-bit quad-core ARMCortex-A7 CPU complex has been replaced by a custom-hardened 1.2GHz 64-bitquad-core ARM Cortex-A53. Combining a 33% increase in clock speed withvarious architectural enhancements, this provides a 50-60% increase inperformance in 32-bit mode versus Raspberry Pi 2, or roughly a factor often over the original Raspberry Pi." (Thanks to Forrest Cook)
The OpenSSL project has disclosed a newhigh-profile vulnerability. This one, known as CVE-2016-800, or "DROWN", affects servers that stillhave the old SSLv2 protocol enabled. Yes, it has its own domain name andlogo. "DROWN allows attackers to break the encryption and read orsteal sensitive communications, including passwords, credit card numbers,trade secrets, or financial data. Our measurements indicate 33% of allHTTPS servers are vulnerable to the attack." The solution is tojust disable SSLv2 completely. Note that there are several othervulnerabilities (with a lower presumed severity) fixed in the OpenSSL1.0.2g and 1.0.1s releases.
David Malcolm takesa look at a new compiler warning in GCC 6,-Wmisleading-indentation. "At a high level, the underlying implementation looks at control statements (if/else, while, for), and if it sees them guard a single statement without braces, it looks at the followup statement. It complains if both have the same indentation.That’s a simplified description – we spent a fair amount of time working on heuristics in the warning, to try to ensure that it warns for all cases that are reasonable to warn for, whilst not complaining unduly for indentation that’s merely bad (rather than being actively misleading). We’ve also tested it with a variety of coding styles: GNU, K&R, Linux kernel, etc."
Harald Welte attended the court hearing in the GPL violation/infringementcase that Christoph Hellwig brought against VMware. This is his report."There was quite some debate about the question whether or not the plaintiff has shown that he actually holds a sufficient amount of copyrighted materials.The question here is not, whether Christoph has sufficient copyrightable contributions on Linux as a whole, but for the matter of this legal case it is relevant which of his copyrighted works end up in the disputed product VMware ESXi.Due to the nature of the development process where lots of developers make intermittent and incremental changes, it is not as straight-forward to demonstrate this, as one would hope. You cannot simply print an entire C file from the source code and mark large portions as being written by Christoph himself. Rather, lines have been edited again and again, were shifted, re-structured, re-factored. For a non-developer like the judges, it is therefore not obvious to decide on this question."(Thanks to Paul Wise)
The 4.5-rc6 kernel prepatch is out fortesting. "I'd like to say that things are on track for the usual release timing,but let's see how things look next week. If rc7 hasn't started toshrink, I may end up deciding that this is one of the releases when wedo an rc8 too. Too early to tell. There's nothing particularly scarygoing on, but I'd have liked it even calmer this week."
The Software Freedom Law Center weighsin on the ZFS controversy with a long and somewhat academic posting.The TL;DR is that it depends on what the kernel developers want."No existing record conclusively or convincingly demonstrates whetherthe only relevant licensing community, the holders of kernel copyright,intends a literal or equitable interpretation of its license terms underpresent circumstances. As so often in the long history of our law, bothliteral and equitable postures of interpretation are completely tenable,and reasonable people in the relevant roles may justifiably disagree. Thematter is smaller than that which divided the Pharisees from the Saducees,but from a legal theory point of view it is of the same fundamentalkind."
Arch Linux has updated lib32-libssh2 (man-in-the-middle).Debian has updated gajim(message interception) and xerces-c(code execution).Debian-LTS has updated xerces-c (code execution).openSUSE has updated libreoffice (13.2: multiple vulnerabilities).SUSE has updated kernel (SLE12: multiple vulnerabilities).
On his blog, Harald Welte has a report on a hearing in Germany regarding VMware's alleged GPL violations. Welte is a former kernel developer as well as the founder of gpl-violations.org, so he has quite an interest in the case, which was brought by Christoph Hellwig and is being funded by the Software Freedom Conservancy. To Welte's eye, it seems that there are two questions at issue: whether vmklinux and vmkernel are considered to be one or separate works (in a copyright sense) and whether Hellwig has the standing to sue: "This situation is used by the VMware defense in claiming that overall, they could only find very few functions that could be attributed to Christoph, and that this may altogether be only 1% of the Linux code they use in VMware ESXi.The court recognized this as difficult, as in German copyright law there is the concept of fading. If the original work by one author has been edited to an extent that it is barely recognizable, his original work has faded and so have his rights. The court did not state whether it believed that this has happened. To the contrary, the indicated that it may very well be that only very few lines of code can actually make a significant impact on the work as a whole. However, it is problematic for them to decide, as they don't understand source code and software development.So if (after further briefs from both sides and deliberation of the court) this is still an open question, it might very well be the case that the court would request a [technical] expert report to clarify this to the court."
Matthew Garrett digs intoa Linux-running light bulb and is not impressed with what he finds."The OS detection reported Linux, which wasn't hugely surprising -there was no GPL notice or source code included with the box, but I'm waypast the point of shock at that. It also reported that there was a telnetdaemon running. I connected and got a login prompt. And then I typed adminas the username and admin as the password and got a root prompt. So,there's that."
The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has put out an analysis of the recently announced plans of Canonical to provide and support ZFS as part of Ubuntu 16.04. There are some license-compatibility questions within the community, but Canonical believes that it is within its rights to distribute the CDDLv1-licensed zfs.ko kernel module with the GPLv2-licensed kernel. SFC, however, disagrees: "We are sympathetic to Canonical's frustration in this desire to easily support more features for their users. However, as set out below, we have concluded that their distribution of zfs.ko violates the GPL. We have written this statement to answer, from the point of view of many key Linux copyright holders, the community questions that we've seen on this matter.Specifically, we provide our detailed analysis of the incompatibility between CDDLv1 and GPLv2 — and its potential impact on the trajectory of free software development — below. However, our conclusion is simple: Conservancy and the Linux copyright holders in the GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers believe that distribution of ZFS binaries is a GPL violation and infringes Linux's copyright. We are also concerned that it may infringe Oracle's copyrights in ZFS. As such, we again ask Oracle to respect community norms against license proliferation and simply relicense its copyrights in ZFS under a GPLv2-compatible license."
Arch Linux has updated libgcrypt(key leak) and libssh2 (insecure sessions).Debian has updated icedove (multiple vulnerabilities).Debian-LTS has updated libfcgi(denial of service), libfcgi-perl (denial of service), pixman (code execution from 2014), and postgresql-8.4 (denial of service).Fedora has updated hamster-time-tracker (F22: denial of service), postgresql (denial of service), and qemu (three vulnerabilities).Mageia has updated libssh(insecure sessions).openSUSE has updated gummi (42.1,13.2: insecure tmp files), libgcrypt (13.2:key leak),and postgresql94 (42.1: three vulnerabilities, one from 2007).Oracle has updated openssh (OL5:denial of service from 2010).SUSE has updated firefox(SLE11SP4: denial of service).Ubuntu has updated ca-certificates (15.10, 14.04, 12.04: 1024-bitRSA key removal), glib-networking (15.10,14.04, 12.04: update for certificate changes), gnutls (14.04, 12.04: update for certificate changes), and openssl (14.04, 12.04: update for certificate changes).
One of the more entertaining presentations at this year's DevConf.cz was by Dan Walsh, Red Hat's headof container engineering. He presented on one of the core conflicts in the Linuxcontainer world: systemd versus the Docker daemon. This is far from a newissue; it has been brewing since Ubuntu adopted systemd, and CoreOSintroduced Rocket, a container system builtaround systemd.Subscribers can click below for a look at the talk by guest author JoshBerkus.
The Red Hat developer blog looksat what's coming in version 6 of the GNU Compiler Collection."The x86/x86_64 is a segmented memory architecture, yet GCC haslargely ignored this aspect of the Intel architecture and relied onimplicit segment registers. Low level code such as the Linux kernel &glibc often have to be aware of the segmented architecture and havetraditionally resorted to asm statements to use explicit segment registersfor memory accesses. Starting with GCC 6, variables may be declared asbeing relative to a particular segment. Explicit segment registers willthen be used to access those variables in memory." The GCC 6release can be expected sometime around April.
Dan Kaminsky looksat the Glibc DNS bug (CVE-2015-7547). "We’ve investigated the DNS lookup path, which requires the glibc exploit to survive traversing one of the millions of DNS caches dotted across the Internet. We’ve found that it is neither trivial to squeeze the glibc flaw through common name servers, nor is it trivial to prove such a feat is impossible. The vast majority of potentially affected systems require this attack path to function, and we just don’t know yet if it can. Our belief is that we’re likely to end up with attacks that work sometimes, and we’re probably going to end up hardening DNS caches against them with intent rather than accident. We’re likely not going to apply network level DNS length limits because that breaks things in catastrophic and hard to predict ways."
Version 2.23 of the GNU C Library (glibc) has been released. The headlinefeature this time around seems to be Unicode 8.0.0 support; there are anumber of API changes, performance improvements and security fixes aswell.
The Linux Mint blog announces that the project'sweb site was compromised and made to point to a backdoored version of thedistribution. "As far as we know, the only compromised edition was Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon edition.If you downloaded another release or another edition, this does not affect you. If you downloaded via torrents or via a direct HTTP link, this doesn’t affect you either.Finally, the situation happened today, so it should only impact people who downloaded this edition on February 20th."Update: it appearsthat the Linux Mint forums were compromised too; users should assume thattheir passwords have been exposed.
The 4.5-rc5 kernel prepatch is out, one dayahead of the usual schedule. "Things continue to look normal, andthings have been fairly calm. Yes, the VM THP cleanup seems to still beproblematic on s390, but other than that I don't see anything particularlyworrisome."
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of stable kernels 4.3.6 and 3.10.97. Both contain important updatesthroughout the tree. In addition, 4.3.6 is the last release for thenow end-of-life 4.3 kernel branch; users will need to migrate to the4.4 series.
Version 4.7 of the Ardourdigital-audio workstation has been released. Theupdate includes two key new features: a dialog that displays detailedspectral and waveform analysis for exported files, and substantiallyimproved support for Mackie Control brand hardware control consoles.Many other improvements are listed in the announcement, includingpreliminary support for importing work from ProTools 10 and 11.
Dustin Kirkland justifiesUbuntu's plans to ship the ZFS filesystem kernel module. "Andzfs.ko, as a self-contained file system module, is clearly not a derivativework of the Linux kernel but rather quite obviously a derivative work ofOpenZFS and OpenSolaris. Equivalent exceptions have existed for manyyears, for various other stand alone, self-contained, non-GPL and evenproprietary (hi, nvidia.ko) kernel modules."
The Linux Foundation has announcedthe Zephyr Project, which is aimed at building a real-time operatingsystem (RTOS) for the Internet of Things (IoT). "Modularity andsecurity are key considerations when building systems for embedded IoTdevices. The Zephyr Project prioritizes these features by providing thefreedom to use the RTOS as is or to tailor a solution. The project’s focuson security includes plans for a dedicated security working group and adelegated security maintainer. Broad communications and networking supportis also addressed and will initially include Bluetooth, Bluetooth LowEnergy and IEEE 802.15.4, with plans to expand communications andnetworking support over time." The ZephyrKernel v1.0.0 Release Notes provide more details.
Vulkan is a new graphics APIspecification, seemingly meant to supersede OpenGL. Collabora has announcedthe availability of the 1.0 specification — and that the Wayland compositoralready supports it. "To provide the best possible base for fluidmodern user interfaces, Collabora have worked extensively on the Waylandwindow system, the underlying Kernel Mode Setting drivers and atomicmodesetting, and also the EGL specifications and implementations. We areproud to continue this work with Vulkan." Intel has announcedan open-source Vulkan driver for its hardware as well.
Debian has updated eglibc (multiple vulnerabilities), glibc (multiple vulnerabilities), graphite2 (three vulnerabilities), and libgcrypt11 (key leak).Debian-LTS has updated xdelta3 (code execution).Red Hat has updated 389-ds-base(RHEL7: denial of service), firefox(RHEL5,6,7: three vulnerabilities), kernel(RHEL7: two vulnerabilities), kernel-rt(RHEL7: two vulnerabilities), polkit(RHEL7: denial of service), and sos (RHEL7:information disclosure).SUSE has updated qemu (SLE12-SP1:two vulnerabilities).Ubuntu has updated eog (codeexecution), gtk+2.0, gtk+3.0 (codeexecution), libgcrypt11, libgcrypt20 (keyleak), nettle (15.10, 14.04: impropercryptographic calculations), and samba(regression in previous update).
The Google Online Security Blog disclosesa security issue in the GNU C library; a fix, workarounds, and aproof-of-concept exploit are all provided. "The glibc DNS client side resolver is vulnerableto a stack-based buffer overflow when the getaddrinfo() library function isused. Software using this function may be exploited withattacker-controlled domain names, attacker-controlled DNS servers, orthrough a man-in-the-middle attack."See also: the glibcadvisory for this issue.
Opensource.com coversa linux.conf.au talk by Paris Buttfield-Addison and Jon Manning ofSecret Lab. "Secret Lab participates in hackathons to subtly subvert that mission by making interesting games based on data. They don't even care if anyone ever plays the game again. But they've won quite a few national awards along the way.In particular, they've done so through participation in several GovHack events, which are Australia/New Zealand hackathons built around government data sources."
Arch Linux has updated firefox (same-origin restriction bypass) and nghttp2 (denial of service).Debian has updated iceweasel (denial of service), postgresql-9.1 (three vulnerabilities), and postgresql-9.4 (two vulnerabilities).Debian-LTS has updated chrony (packet modification) and cpio (out-of-bounds write).Fedora has updated firefox (F23:denial of service), krb5 (F22: threevulnerabilities), mingw-gnutls (F23:improper cryptographic calculations), mingw-nettle (F23: improper cryptographiccalculations), nodejs (F23: two vulnerabilities), php (F23; F22: multiple vulnerabilities), and wordpress (F23; F22: two vulnerabilities).
Mark Wielaard writesabout some of the many new compiler warnings provided by the GCC6release. "My favorite is still -Wmisleading-indentation. But thereare many more that have found various bugs. Not all of them are enabled bydefault, but it makes sense to enable as many as possible when writing newcode."
"It's Valentine's day, so here I am, making a valentine for everybodyin the form of the usual rc release," says Linus; that release is 4.5-rc4."So in between romancing your significant other, go out andtest."
In a lengthy blog series (part 1, part 2, and part 3), Matthew Chapman described the process of getting a non-Lenovo battery to charge in his Thinkpad laptop. He reverse-engineered the authorization that real batteries do and changed the code in the embedded controller (EC) on the laptop to allow other batteries to charge. "I look in BIOS to see where these messages are coming from. Both this message and the original unauthorised battery message are displayed by LenovoVideoInitDxe.efi: don’t ask me why this code is in this module rather than somewhere more relevant (may I suggest LenovoAnnoyingBatteryMessageDxe.efi?), but it might have been convenient to put it in the video initialisation module as the message is displayed when the screen is cleared post-POST [Power-on self-test]."(Thanks to Neil Brown.)
On the Maru blog, developer Preetam D’Souza has announced that the Maru project is now open source. Maru is a desktop system running on a smartphone, so that adding a display, keyboard, and mouse to a phone allows the user to run their desktop on the phone—and still be able to use the device as a phone. "I’ve gotta say, the open source community never ceases to amaze me. I’ve had emails from people asking if they can help test Maru on other devices on a Sunday. How many normal people do you know that willingly want to give up their Sundays to help test software? I’ve experienced this helpfulness time and time again, whether it was the speakers at open source conferences so willing to share their knowledge, or the folks on forums who were so keen to help out beginners like me. Maru would never have been possible without that spirit of openness."
Bradley Kuhn started off his linux.conf.au 2016 talk by stating a goalthat, he hoped, he shared with the audience: a world where more (or most)software is free software. The community has one key strategy toward that goal:copyleft licensing. He was there to talk about whether that strategy isworking, and what can be done to make it more effective; the picture hepainted was not entirely rosy, but there is hope if software developers arewilling to make some changes.
Chris Hermansen looks at an early open music format—vinyl LP records—over at Opensource.com. He goes into some of the details of the format and how it is read, as well as a bit about ripping records using Linux. "Ok, so we just figured out that our stylus puts 136 times as much pressure on our records as our car puts on the pavement? That's crazy!!! Why doesn't the stylus completely destroy the record? Those alternate-Earth physicists and engineers are rolling on the floor now, clutching their bellies and gasping for breath... but here is the final straw. Despite the seemingly ridiculous or even impossible nature of the whole ensemble of components, a well-recorded vinyl LP played back with a decent turntable, tonearm, and cartridge sounds wonderful."
Debian has updated libgcrypt20(key leak) and nginx (three vulnerabilities).Debian-LTS has updated eglibc(regression in previous security update).Fedora has updated nodejs-is-my-json-valid (F22: denial ofservice) and python-pymongo (F23; F22: two vulnerabilities).openSUSE has updated cacti (42.1; 13.2; 13.1: multiple vulnerabilities), cacti-spine (13.1: unspecified), and openssl (13.1: cipher downgrade).Slackware has updated mozilla(14.1: unspecified).Ubuntu has updated firefox(15.10, 14.04, 12.04: same-origin restriction bypass) and postgresql-9.1, postgresql-9.3, postgresql-9.4(15.10, 14.04, 12.04: two vulnerabilities).
Scratching an itch is a recurring theme in presentations at linux.conf.au. As the open-hardware movement gains strength, more and more of these itches relate to the physical world, not just the digital. David Tulloh used his presentation [WebM] on the “Linux Driven Microwave†to discuss how annoying microwave ovens can be and to describe his project to build something less irritating.Click below (subscribers only) for the full report from Neil Brown.
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