Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) provided some history on the insecurity of TIOCSTI [simulate typed input on terminal], with a proposal to disable it on OpenBSD:
You heard it here (or on tech@) first: Trapsleds are in, and it makes OpenBSD even safer. Work done by Todd Mortimer and submitted to tech@ in the Trapsleds thread was later committed by Theo de Raadt.Todd's message to tech says,
OpenBSD developer Adam Wolk (awolk@) talks about a community effort to read at least one C source file from OpenBSD every day at https://blog.tintagel.pl/2017/06/09/openbsd-daily.html.
OpenBSD 6.1 was announced as the first release with no CD available for purchase.Now it turns out that in fact, exactly one CD set was made, and it can be yours if you are the successful bidder in the auction that ends on May 13, 2017.Bob Beck (beck@) writes in to tell us
In a series of commits starting here and ending with this one, Damien Miller completed the removal of all support for the now-historic SSHv1 protocol from OpenSSH. The final commit message, for the commit that removes the SSHv1 related regression tests, reads:
Landry Breuil, OpenBSD's firefox (and other Mozilla ports) maintainer, writes:Maybe i haven't talked about it enough on the lists, but since i'vebeen maintaining the various mozillas in the portstree (cvs log says istarted around firefox 3.6.something... 7 years ago. *sigh*) alot of things changed, so i wanted take the 6.1 release as an occasionto sum up the various ways one could run which version of which firefoxon which version of OpenBSD.Read more...
Every OpenBSD release since 3.0 (back in 2001) has had at least one relase song, and OpenBSD 6.1 is no different. Today, Theo de Raadt released the OpenBSD 6.1. The Songs page has download links, lyrics and a background story, which reads:
Ian Darwin writes in about his work deploying the arm64 platform and the Raspberry Pi 3:So I have this empty white birdhouse-like thing in the yard, open at the front. It was intended to house the wireless remote temperature sensor from alow-cost weather station, which had previously been mounted on a dark-colored wall of the house (reading were really high when the sun reached that side of the house!).But when I put the sensor into the birdhouse, the signal is too weak for the weather station to receive it(the mounting post was put in place by a previous owner of our property, and is set deeply in concrete).So the next plan was to pop in a tiny OpenBSD computer with a uthum(4) temperature sensor and stream the temperature over WiFi.Read more...
While the world largely wasn't looking, there was a nano hackathon last month, Hackathon report - e2k17 Hackathon, Edmonton Alberta. Bob Beck (beck@) writes,
Google's golang, collaboratively developed by Unix and C pioneers like Ken Thompson, Rob Pike et al has been very BSD friendly (the language itself is BSD licensed) and it just got even friendlier for OpenBSD's pledge mechanism.To quote the diff:"unix: add support for OpenBSD pledgePledge, the privilege-restricting syscall and mitigation mechanism,was missing from syscall_openbsd.go. As of the latest release, itis officially supported in 'stable'."Link to the full golang diff here: https://go.googlesource.com/sys/+/8fd966b47dbdd4faa03de0d06e3d733baeb9a1a9%5E%21/
On behalf of the EuroBSDCon 2017 Program Committee, here is the Call for Proposals for the EuroBSDCon 2017 conference which will take place in Paris, France from 21st through 24th of September 2017:
If you follow commits closely, via source-changes@ or otherwise, you may already know that mandoc has grown another useful feature. Ingo Schwarze sent us this very nicely formatted article about the new mandoc to markdown converter:Read more...
Avoid possible side-channel leak of ECDSA private keys when signing.A source code patch exists which remedies this problem:for 6.0.for 5.9This is related to CVE-2016-7056 "ECDSA P-256 timing attack key recovery (OpenSSL, LibreSSL, BoringSSL)"Additional details can be read here: http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2017/q1/52Thanks to M:Tier https://stable.mtier.org for raising awareness on this patch.
OpenBSD as WiFi access points look set to be making a comeback in the near future. With this diff https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=148396652007923&w=2, Stefan Sperling added 802.11n hostap mode, with full support initially for the Atheros chips supported by the athn(4) driver.
Undeadly editor Peter Hansteen (pitrh) recently spoke to the Bergen (BSD and) Linux User Group (BLUG) on the subject "OpenBSD and you", and has shared the slides from the talk.These make a great resource for preaching to the as-yet-unconverted.
Ted Unangst (tedu@) has written a flak entry entitled "openbsd changes of note".It gives an overview (with relevant links) of recent significant changes in -current.Update: there is now a second part.Update: there is now a third part.
Kristaps Dzonsons, of mandoc and acme-client (and more) fame, has written a detailed article entitled "why pledge(2) …or, how I learned to love web application sandboxing".The tl;dr section starts: