Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/992030/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium and trafficserver), Fedora (chromium), Mageia (apache-mod_jk, gnome-shell, kernel, kmod-xtables-addons, and kmod-virtualbox, kernel-linus, and python3), Oracle (container-tools:ol8, dovecot, emacs, expat, firefox, git-lfs, gtk3, kernel, nano, net-snmp, osbuild-composer, python3, python3.11, python3.12, ruby:3.3, and virt:ol and virt-devel:rhel), Slackware (boost), SUSE (kernel), and Ubuntu (configobj, cups, cups-browsed, cups-filters, libcupsfilters, and libppd).

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/991929/

Security researcher Simone Margaritelli

has reported a new vulnerability in

CUPS, the software that many Linux systems use to manage printers and print jobs. Margaritelli describes the impact of the attack by saying:

A remote unauthenticated attacker can silently replace existing printers’ (or install new ones) IPP urls with a malicious one, resulting in arbitrary command execution (on the computer) when a print job is started (from that computer).

The vulnerability relies on a few related problems in CUPS libraries and utilities; versions before 2.0.1 or 2.1b1 (depending on the component) may be affected.

Red Hat has released a security bulletin as well.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/990918/

Danilo Krummrich gave a talk at Kangrejos 2024 focusing on the question of how
the Rust-for-Linux project could improve at getting device and driver
abstractions upstream. As a case study, he used some of his recent work that
attempts to make it possible to write a PCI driver entirely in Rust. There
wasn’t time to go into as much detail as he would have liked, but he did
demonstrate that it is possible to interface with the kernel’s module loader in
a way that is much harder to
screw up than the current standard approach in C.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/990736/

In March, Danilo Krummrich announced the new
Nova GPU driver — a successor to Nouveau for controlling NVIDIA GPUs.
At Kangrejos 2024, Krummrich gave a
presentation about what it is, why it’s needed, and where it’s
going next. Hearing about the needs of the driver provoked extended discussion
on related topics, including what level of safety is reasonable to expect from
drivers, given that they must interact with the hardware.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/990619/

Dirk Behme led a second session, back-to-back with
his session on error handling at
Kangrejos 2024, discussing providing better guidance for users of the kernel’s
Rust abstractions. Just after that,
Carlos Bilbao and Miguel Ojeda had their own time slot dedicated to collecting
resources that could be of use to someone trying to come up to speed
on kernel development in
Rust. The attendees provided a lot of guidance in both sessions, and
discussed what they could do to make things easier for people coming
from non-Rust backgrounds.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/991028/

The OpenSSH project has released version 9.9. This version includes support for the
new post-quantum cryptography standard from NIST.
The release also includes
the next step in the deprecation of DSA keys — they are now disabled by default at compile time,
and are expected to be removed entirely in early 2025. The release also contains the normal mixture of bug fixes and small usability improvements.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/991027/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium), Fedora (bluez, chromium, frr, iwd, libell, python3.11, python3.8, python3.9, and ruby), Mageia (kernel, kmod-xtables-addons, and kmod-virtualbox and kernel-linus), Red Hat (kernel), SUSE (kernel, kubernetes1.23, kubernetes1.24, kubernetes1.25, libmfx, and python-azure-identity), and Ubuntu (emacs, emacs24, emacs25, libreoffice, postgresql-9.5, python2.7, python3.5, and tgt).

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/990489/

Dirk Behme led a session discussing the use of Rust’s question-mark operator in
the kernel at Kangrejos 2024. He was particularly concerned with the concept of
“silent” errors that don’t print any messages to the console.
Other attendees were less convinced that this was a problem, but his presentation
sparked a lot of discussion about whether the Rust-for-Linux project could
improve error handling in kernel Rust code.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/990273/

Kangrejos 2024 started off with a talk from Benno Lossin about his
recent work
to establish a standard for safety documentation in Rust kernel code. Lossin
began his talk by giving a brief review of what safety documentation is, and
why it’s needed, before moving on to the current status of his work. Safety
documentation is easier to read and write when there’s a shared vocabulary for
discussing common requirements; Lossin wants to establish that shared vocabulary
for Rust code in the Linux kernel.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/990596/

Four researchers have published a formal proof that Linux’s new deterministic random bit generator (DRBG) is secure in a particular sense — specifically, that the number of queries that would need to be made to it to uncover its internal state depends on the quality of the entropy it can collect from different sources. As long as it can gather enough entropy, it produces secure random numbers.

Since the significant structural changes in Linux 4 and Linux 5.17, there has
been no research on the provable security of Linux-DRBG. For the first time (to
the best of our knowledge), we formally model the Linux-DRBG in Linux 6.4.8
and prove its security in the seedless robustness model

Thanks to Jason Donenfeld for bringing the paper to our attention.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/990588/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (php-twig and pymongo), Fedora (linux-firmware, microcode_ctl, and python3.13), Mageia (clamav, microcode, postgresql13 and postgresql15, python3-webob, suricata, tcpreplay, tgt, and wireshark), Oracle (httpd, kernel, and linux-kernel), Red Hat (firefox, kernel, kernel-rt, pcs, and thunderbird), SUSE (389-ds, chromium, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, htmldoc, kernel, SUSE Manager Client Tools, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (clamav, curl, dcmtk, dovecot, nginx, openssh, and python3.10, python3.12, python3.8).

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/988401/

OpenSnitch is an
“interactive application firewall“. Like other firewalls, it uses a
series of rules to decide what network traffic should be permitted. Unlike
many other firewalls, though, OpenSnitch does not ask the user to create a list of rules
ahead of time. Instead, the list of rules can be built up
incrementally as applications make connections — and the user can peruse both
the rules that have built up over time, and statistics on the connections that
have been attempted.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/973231/

On August 13, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

published the final form of its new post-quantum cryptographic standards. One
key-exchange mechanism and two digital-signature schemes are now officially
sanctioned by the institute. Adopting the new standards should be fairly
painless for most developers, but the overhead added by the schemes could pose
challenges for some applications.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/986998/

The

Forgejo project has announced that, starting from version 9.0, Forgejo will be released under the GPLv3 license (or a later version). Older versions of the software forge remain MIT-licensed.

A copyleft license makes reusing other copyleft software easier. Recently, we discovered that

some of the dependencies we used were incompatible with the license Forgejo was distributed with, and they had to be removed for now. Choosing copyleft licenses enables us to reuse more work, and saves us precious time to focus on improving Forgejo itself.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/986997/

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (community-mysql, iaito, and radare2), Oracle (python3.12-setuptools and tomcat), Red Hat (krb5 and podman), Slackware (ffmpeg), SUSE (apache2, expat, firefox, webkit2gtk3, and xen), and Ubuntu (imagemagick and libxstream-java).

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/985853/

On July 30, Al Viro sent

a patch set to the linux-fsdevel mailing list with a
comprehensive cover letter explaining his
recent work on ensuring that the kernel’s internal representation of
file descriptors are used correctly in the kernel.
File descriptors are ubiquitous; many system calls
need to handle them. Viro’s review
identified a few existing bugs, and may prevent more in the future. He also had
suggestions for ways to keep uses consistent throughout the kernel.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/985346/

Python has had
formatted string literals
(f-strings), a syntactic shorthand for building
strings, since 2015. Recently, Jim Baker, Guido van Rossum, and Paul Everitt have
proposed

PEP 750 (“Tag Strings For Writing Domain-Specific Languages”) which would
generalize and expand that mechanism to provide Python library writers with additional
flexibility. Reactions to the proposed change were somewhat positive, although
there was a good deal of discussion of (and opposition to)
the PEP’s inclusion of lazy evaluation of template parameters.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/985980/

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (389-ds-base, dotnet8.0, python3.13, roundcubemail, thunderbird, and tor), Mageia (roundcubemail), Oracle (.NET 8.0, bind and bind-dyndb-ldap, bind9.16, container-tools:ol8, edk2, firefox, gnome-shell, grafana, httpd:2.4, jose, kernel, krb5, mod_auth_openidc:2.3, orc, poppler, python-urllib3, python3.11-setuptools, thunderbird, and wget), Red Hat (kernel), SUSE (apptainer, curl, kernel, kernel-firmware, libqt5-qtbase, python-aiosmtpd, and ucode-intel), and Ubuntu (bind9, gnome-shell, libreoffice, and orc).

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/982868/

Rust is intended to let programmers write safer code.
But compilers are
not omniscient, and writing Rust code that interfaces with hardware (or that
works with memory outside of Rust’s lifetime paradigm) requires, at
some point, the programmer’s assurance that some operations are permissible. Benno Lossin

suggested adding
some more documentation to

the Rust-for-Linux project clarifying the
standards for commenting uses of unsafe in kernel code. There’s general
agreement that such standards are necessary, but less agreement on exactly when
it is appropriate to use unsafe.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/984599/

The

PostgreSQL project has

released beta
versions of PostgreSQL 17 containing several interesting security and usability
improvements, alongside the usual performance improvements and bug fixes. If the
release proceeds according to the usual timeline, the full release of version 17
is expected in September or October.
The most important changes are in what PostgreSQL does when a database
supervisor has their credentials revoked, and added
support for incremental database backups.