BIOS – Jupiter Broadcasting

Your hosts are back from EuroBSDcon 2018 held in Bucharest, Romania this year. The first two days of the conference are used for tutorials and devsummits (FreeBSD and NetBSD), while the last two are for talks.
Although Benedict organized the devsummit in large parts, he did not attend it this year. He held his Ansible tutorial in the morning of the first day, followed by Niclas Zeising’s new ports and poudriere tutorial (which had a record attendance). It was intended for beginners that had never used poudriere before and those who wanted to create their first port. The tutorial was well received and Niclas already has ideas for extending it for future conferences.
On the second day, Benedict took Kirk McKusick’s “An Introduction to the FreeBSD Open-Source Operating System” tutorial, held as a one full day class this year. Although it was reduced in content, it went into enough depth of many areas of the kernel and operating system to spark many questions from attendees. Clearly, this is a good start into kernel programming as Kirk provides enough material and backstories to understand why certain things are implemented as they are.
Olivier Robert took [https://www.talegraph.com/tales/l2o9ltrvsE](pictures from the devsummit) and created a nice gallery out of it.
Devsummit evenings saw dinners at two restaurants that allowed developers to spend some time talking over food and drinks.
The conference opened on the next day with the opening session held by Mihai Carabas. He introduced the first keynote speaker, a colleague of his who presented “Lightweight virtualization with LightVM and Unikraft”.
Benedict helped out at the FreeBSD Foundation sponsor table and talked to people. He saw the following talks in between:

Selfhosting as an alternative to the public cloud (by Albert Dengg)
Using Boot Environments at Scale (by Allan Jude)
Livepatching FreeBSD kernel (by Maciej Grochowski)
FreeBSD: What to (Not) Monitor (by Andrew Fengler)
FreeBSD Graphics (by Niclas Zeising)

Allan spent a lot of time talking to people and helping track down issues they were having, in addition to attending many talks:

Hacking together a FreeBSD presentation streaming box – For as little as possible (by Tom Jones)
Introduction of FreeBSD in new environments (by Baptiste Daroussin)
Keynote: Some computing and networking historical perspectives (by Ron Broersma)
Livepatching FreeBSD kernel (by Maciej Grochowski)
FreeBSD: What to (Not) Monitor (by Andrew Fengler)
Being a BSD user (by Roller Angel)
From “Hello World” to the VFS Layer: building a beadm for DragonFly BSD (by Michael Voight)
We also met the winner of our Power Bagel raffle from Episode 2^8. He received the item in the meantime and had it with him at the conference, providing a power outlet to charge other people’s devices.
During the closing session, GroffTheBSDGoat was handed over to Deb Goodkin, who will bring the little guy to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference and then to MeetBSD later this year. It was also revealed that next year’s EuroBSDcon will be held in Lillehammer, Norway.
Thanks to all the speakers, helpers, sponsors, organizers, and attendees for making it a successful conferences. There were no talks recorded this year, but the slides will be uploaded to the EuroBSDcon website in a couple of weeks. The OpenBSD talks are already available, so check them out.

###Software disenchantment

I’ve been programming for 15 years now. Recently our industry’s lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence started really getting to me, to the point of me getting depressed by my own career and the IT in general.
Modern cars work, let’s say for the sake of argument, at 98% of what’s physically possible with the current engine design. Modern buildings use just enough material to fulfill their function and stay safe under the given conditions. All planes converged to the optimal size/form/load and basically look the same.
Only in software, it’s fine if a program runs at 1% or even 0.01% of the possible performance. Everybody just seems to be ok with it. People are often even proud about how much inefficient it is, as in “why should we worry, computers are fast enough”:
@tveastman: I have a Python program I run every day, it takes 1.5 seconds. I spent six hours re-writing it in rust, now it takes 0.06 seconds. That efficiency improvement means I’ll make my time back in 41 years, 24 days 🙂
You’ve probably heard this mantra: “programmer time is more expensive than computer time”. What it means basically is that we’re wasting computers at an unprecedented scale. Would you buy a car if it eats 100 liters per 100 kilometers? How about 1000 liters? With computers, we do that all the time.

Everything is unbearably slow

Look around: our portable computers are thousands of times more powerful than the ones that brought man to the moon. Yet every other webpage struggles to maintain a smooth 60fps scroll on the latest top-of-the-line MacBook Pro. I can comfortably play games, watch 4K videos but not scroll web pages? How is it ok?
Google Inbox, a web app written by Google, running in Chrome browser also by Google, takes 13 seconds to open moderately-sized emails:
It also animates empty white boxes instead of showing their content because it’s the only way anything can be animated on a webpage with decent performance. No, decent doesn’t mean 60fps, it’s rather “as fast as this web page could possibly go”. I’m dying to see web community answer when 120Hz displays become mainstream. Shit barely hits 60Hz already.
Windows 10 takes 30 minutes to update. What could it possibly be doing for that long? That much time is enough to fully format my SSD drive, download a fresh build and install it like 5 times in a row.
Pavel Fatin: Typing in editor is a relatively simple process, so even 286 PCs were able to provide a rather fluid typing experience.
Modern text editors have higher latency than 42-year-old Emacs. Text editors! What can be simpler? On each keystroke, all you have to do is update tiny rectangular region and modern text editors can’t do that in 16ms. It’s a lot of time. A LOT. A 3D game can fill the whole screen with hundreds of thousands (!!!) of polygons in the same 16ms and also process input, recalculate the world and dynamically load/unload resources. How come?
As a general trend, we’re not getting faster software with more features. We’re getting faster hardware that runs slower software with the same features. Everything works way below the possible speed. Ever wonder why your phone needs 30 to 60 seconds to boot? Why can’t it boot, say, in one second? There are no physical limitations to that. I would love to see that. I would love to see limits reached and explored, utilizing every last bit of performance we can get for something meaningful in a meaningful way.

Everything is HUUUUGE

And then there’s bloat. Web apps could open up to 10× faster if you just simply block all ads. Google begs everyone to stop shooting themselves in their feet with AMP initiative—a technology solution to a problem that doesn’t need any technology, just a little bit of common sense. If you remove bloat, the web becomes crazy fast. How smart do you have to be to understand that?
Android system with no apps takes almost 6 Gb. Just think for a second how obscenely HUGE that number is. What’s in there, HD movies? I guess it’s basically code: kernel, drivers. Some string and resources too, sure, but those can’t be big. So, how many drivers do you need for a phone?
Windows 95 was 30Mb. Today we have web pages heavier than that! Windows 10 is 4Gb, which is 133 times as big. But is it 133 times as superior? I mean, functionally they are basically the same. Yes, we have Cortana, but I doubt it takes 3970 Mb. But whatever Windows 10 is, is Android really 150% of that?
Google keyboard app routinely eats 150 Mb. Is an app that draws 30 keys on a screen really five times more complex than the whole Windows 95? Google app, which is basically just a package for Google Web Search, is 350 Mb! Google Play Services, which I do not use (I don’t buy books, music or videos there)—300 Mb that just sit there and which I’m unable to delete.
All that leaves me around 1 Gb for my photos after I install all the essential (social, chats, maps, taxi, banks etc) apps. And that’s with no games and no music at all! Remember times when an OS, apps and all your data fit on a floppy?
Your desktop todo app is probably written in Electron and thus has userland driver for Xbox 360 controller in it, can render 3d graphics and play audio and take photos with your web camera.
A simple text chat is notorious for its load speed and memory consumption. Yes, you really have to count Slack in as a resource-heavy application. I mean, chatroom and barebones text editor, those are supposed to be two of the less demanding apps in the whole world. Welcome to 2018.
At least it works, you might say. Well, bigger doesn’t imply better. Bigger means someone has lost control. Bigger means we don’t know what’s going on. Bigger means complexity tax, performance tax, reliability tax. This is not the norm and should not become the norm. Overweight apps should mean a red flag. They should mean run away scared.

Better world manifesto

I want to see progress. I want change. I want state-of-the-art in software engineering to improve, not just stand still. I don’t want to reinvent the same stuff over and over, less performant and more bloated each time. I want something to believe in, a worthy end goal, a future better than what we have today, and I want a community of engineers who share that vision.
What we have today is not progress. We barely meet business goals with poor tools applied over the top. We’re stuck in local optima and nobody wants to move out. It’s not even a good place, it’s bloated and inefficient. We just somehow got used to it.
So I want to call it out: where we are today is bullshit. As engineers, we can, and should, and will do better. We can have better tools, we can build better apps, faster, more predictable, more reliable, using fewer resources (orders of magnitude fewer!). We need to understand deeply what are we doing and why. We need to deliver: reliably, predictably, with topmost quality. We can—and should–take pride in our work. Not just “given what we had…”—no buts!
I hope I’m not alone at this. I hope there are people out there who want to do the same. I’d appreciate if we at least start talking about how absurdly bad our current situation in the software industry is. And then we maybe figure out how to get out.

##News Roundup
###[llvm-announce] LLVM 7.0.0 Release

I am pleased to announce that LLVM 7 is now available.

Get it here: https://llvm.org/releases/download.html#7.0.0

The release contains the work on trunk up to SVN revision 338536 plus
work on the release branch. It is the result of the community's work
over the past six months, including: function multiversioning in Clang
with the 'target' attribute for ELF-based x86/x86_64 targets, improved
PCH support in clang-cl, preliminary DWARF v5 support, basic support
for OpenMP 4.5 offloading to NVPTX, OpenCL C++ support, MSan, X-Ray
and libFuzzer support for FreeBSD, early UBSan, X-Ray and libFuzzer
support for OpenBSD, UBSan checks for implicit conversions, many
long-tail compatibility issues fixed in lld which is now production
ready for ELF, COFF and MinGW, new tools llvm-exegesis, llvm-mca and
diagtool. And as usual, many optimizations, improved diagnostics, and
bug fixes.

For more details, see the release notes:
https://llvm.org/releases/7.0.0/docs/ReleaseNotes.html
https://llvm.org/releases/7.0.0/tools/clang/docs/ReleaseNotes.html
https://llvm.org/releases/7.0.0/tools/clang/tools/extra/docs/ReleaseNotes.html
https://llvm.org/releases/7.0.0/tools/lld/docs/ReleaseNotes.html

Thanks to everyone who helped with filing, fixing, and code reviewing
for the release-blocking bugs!

Special thanks to the release testers and packagers: Bero
Rosenkränzer, Brian Cain, Dimitry Andric, Jonas Hahnfeld, Lei Huang
Michał Górny, Sylvestre Ledru, Takumi Nakamura, and Vedant Kumar.

For questions or comments about the release, please contact the
community on the mailing lists. Onwards to LLVM 8!

Cheers,
Hans

###Update your Thinkpad’s bios with Linux or OpenBSD

Get your new bios

At first, go to the Lenovo website and download your new bios:

Go to lenovo support
Use the search bar to find your product (example for me, x270)
Choose the right product (if necessary) and click search
On the right side, click on Update Your System
Click on BIOS/UEFI
Choose *BIOS Update (Bootable CD) for Windows *
Download

For me the file is called like this : r0iuj25wd.iso

Extract bios update

Now you will need to install geteltorito.

With OpenBSD:

$ doas pkg_add geteltorito
quirks-3.7 signed on 2018-09-09T13:15:19Z
geteltorito-0.6: ok

With Debian:

$ sudo apt-get install genisoimage

Now we will extract the bios update :

$ geteltorito -o bios_update.img r0iuj25wd.iso
Booting catalog starts at sector: 20
Manufacturer of CD: NERO BURNING ROM VER 12
Image architecture: x86
Boot media type is: harddisk
El Torito image starts at sector 27 and has 43008 sector(s) of 512 Bytes

Image has been written to file "bios_update.img".
This will create a file called bios_update.img.

Put the image on an USB key
CAREFULL : on my computer, my USB key is sda1 on Linux and sd1 on OpenBSD.

Please check twice on your computer the name of your USB key.

With OpenBSD :

$ doas dd if=bios_update.img of=/dev/rsd1c

With Linux :

$ sudo dd if=bios_update.img of=/dev/sda

Now all you need is to reboot, to boot on your USB key and follow the instructions. Enjoy

###Announcing The HardenedBSD Foundation

In June of 2018, we announced our intent to become a not-for-profit, tax-exempt 501©(3) organization in the United States. It took a dedicated team months of work behind-the-scenes to make that happen. On 06 September 2018, HardenedBSD Foundation Corp was granted 501©(3) status, from which point all US-based persons making donations can deduct the donation from their taxes.
We are grateful for those who contribute to HardenedBSD in whatever way they can. Thank you for making HardenedBSD possible. We look forward to a bright future, driven by a helpful and positive community.

###How you migrate ZFS filesystems matters

If you want to move a ZFS filesystem around from one host to another, you have two general approaches; you can use ‘zfs send’ and ‘zfs receive’, or you can use a user level copying tool such as rsync (or ‘tar -cf | tar -xf’, or any number of similar options). Until recently, I had considered these two approaches to be more or less equivalent apart from their convenience and speed (which generally tilted in favour of ‘zfs send’). It turns out that this is not necessarily the case and there are situations where you will want one instead of the other.
We have had two generations of ZFS fileservers so far, the Solaris ones and the OmniOS ones. When we moved from the first generation to the second generation, we migrated filesystems across using ‘zfs send’, including the filesystem with my home directory in it (we did this for various reasons). Recently I discovered that some old things in my filesystem didn’t have file type information in their directory entries. ZFS has been adding file type information to directories for a long time, but not quite as long as my home directory has been on ZFS.
This illustrates an important difference between the ‘zfs send’ approach and the rsync approach, which is that zfs send doesn’t update or change at least some ZFS on-disk data structures, in the way that re-writing them from scratch from user level does. There are both positives and negatives to this, and a certain amount of rewriting does happen even in the ‘zfs send’ case (for example, all of the block pointers get changed, and ZFS will re-compress your data as applicable).
I knew that in theory you had to copy things at the user level if you wanted to make sure that your ZFS filesystem and everything in it was fully up to date with the latest ZFS features. But I didn’t expect to hit a situation where it mattered in practice until, well, I did. Now I suspect that old files on our old filesystems may be partially missing a number of things, and I’m wondering how much of the various changes in ‘zfs upgrade -v’ apply even to old data.
(I’d run into this sort of general thing before when I looked into ext3 to ext4 conversion on Linux.)
With all that said, I doubt this will change our plans for migrating our ZFS filesystems in the future (to our third generation fileservers). ZFS sending and receiving is just too convenient, too fast and too reliable to give up. Rsync isn’t bad, but it’s not the same, and so we only use it when we have to (when we’re moving only some of the people in a filesystem instead of all of them, for example).
PS: I was going to try to say something about what ‘zfs send’ did and didn’t update, but having looked briefly at the code I’ve concluded that I need to do more research before running my keyboard off. In the mean time, you can read the OpenZFS wiki page on ZFS send and receive, which has plenty of juicy technical details.
PPS: Since eliminating all-zero blocks is a form of compression, you can turn zero-filled files into sparse files through a ZFS send/receive if the destination has compression enabled. As far as I know, genuine sparse files on the source will stay sparse through a ZFS send/receive even if they’re sent to a destination with compression off.

##Beastie Bits

##Feedback/Questions

Todd – 2 Nics, 1 bhyve and a jail cell
Thomas – Deep Dive
Morgan – Send/Receive to Manage Fragmentation?
Dominik – hierarchical jails -> networking

Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv

The post Software Disenchantment | BSD Now 265 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Linux Active Directory | Ask Noah 10

chris — Mon, 05 Jun 2017 19:55:23 +0000

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— Show Notes: —

— The Cliff Notes —

Linux Active Directory Systems

RAZDC

FreeIPA

Etcher.io

Invoice Ninja

DD Command

sudo dd bs=4M if=/path/to/iso of=/dev/sdc && sync

— Guest —

Michael Tunnell

Michael Tunnell is a Designer / Developer / Marketer, Writer, Podcaster, Linux Enthusiast, and Open Source Advocate that has been involved with many web, Linux, and/or open source related projects.

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ZFS Turntables | TechSNAP 143

chris — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 17:54:54 +0000

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2014 starts out with a bang, the NSA spying catalog is leaked, back doors are running wild, and thieves use a simple USB drive to steal thousands of dollars.

Then it’s a great big batch your questions, and our answers!

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— Show Notes: —

NSA Spy tool catalogue

Der Spiegel displays the NSA’s 50 page catalogue of spy tools and “Tailored Access Operations”
Many of the digital weapons are \”remotely installable\”
While others require physical access to the device, called an \”interdiction\”
The malware is installed into the hardware, usually intercepted sometime between leaving the manufacturer and arriving at the customer
The malware is often persistent, meaning it will survive upgrades, and sometimes even reflashing the BIOS or firmware
Some of the implants were new hardware, they provided the NSA with RF communications with the target system, allowing them to control or reinfect the system, or exfiltrate data
The attack against Dell servers, known as ARKSTREAM reflashed the BIOS from a USB stick (so as not to require the attacker to have any technical skills) to implant the infection
The NSA has nearly complete backdoor access to Apple\’s iPhone
EFF: Everything we know about the NSA Spying
One case involved Julian Assange\’s current home at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where visitors were surprised to receive welcome messages from a Ugandan telephone company. It turned out the messages were coming from a foreign base station device installed on the roof, masquerading as a cell tower for surveillance purposes
The program also targeted hard drive manufacturers: Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and Samsung
Responses:
Dell
Juniper
Cisco

Thieves use USB sticks to compromise ATMs

The attackers physically cut holes in the ATM to be able to access the USB port, then once they had infected the machines with their own code, they patched the holes to avoid discovery
Once infected, the thieves just had to approach the ATM and enter a 12 digit code to get access
“Analysis of software installed onto four of the affected machines demonstrated that it displayed the amount of money available in each denomination of note and presented a series of menu options on the ATM\’s screen to release each kind”
The mastermind behind the attack designed it such that it required two-factor authentication, to ensure that the mules with the USB sticks could not ‘go rogue’
The researchers added the organisers displayed \”profound knowledge of the target ATMs\” and had gone to great lengths to make their malware code hard to analyse.
However, they added that the approach did not extend to the software\’s filenames – the key one was called hack.bat.

FreeNAS Mini from iXsystems

Canadian Federal Departments consider banning USB devices

After a number of incidents where USB sticks have been lost or stolen, the Canadian government is considering banning USB devices
A week-long investigations led security officials to conclude it was “impossible to assess [the] compromise” related to the loss of the device
Nor was it clear who was telling the truth about the number of hands the one small device passed through: Employees pointed fingers at each other, with none knowing where the USB key ended up
Another USB key that was neither password protected nor encrypted was found on a downtown Ottawa sidewalk by a Good Samaritan. It contained protected information — albeit out-of-date details — of a federal project
File servers are behind firewalls, support auditing and stronger access control, and are a better solution
However, since any unsophisticated user can easily use a USB stick, they tend to get used to circumvent IT policy

Feedback:

Round Up:

The post ZFS Turntables | TechSNAP 143 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

The Sound of Security | TechSNAP 142

chris — Thu, 26 Dec 2013 13:27:18 +0000

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Researches prove its possible to extract an RSA key from the noises your computer makes, the NSA foils the great BIOS plot, but we’re a little skeptical….

Then it’s a batch of your questions, our answers, and much much more!

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— Show Notes: —

RSA Key Extraction via Acoustic Cryptanalysis

Many computers emit a high-pitched noise during operation, due to vibration in some of their electronic components.
These acoustic emanations are more than a nuisance: they can convey information about the software running on the computer, and in particular leak sensitive information about security-related computations.
In the report they describe a new acoustic cryptanalysis key extraction attack, applicable to GnuPG\’s current implementation of RSA.
The attack can extract full 4096-bit RSA decryption keys from laptop computers (of various models), within an hour, using the sound generated by the computer during the decryption of some chosen ciphertexts.
Experimentally they demonstrate that such attacks can be carried out, using either a plain mobile phone placed next to the computer, or a more sensitive microphone placed 4 meters (13 feet) away.
A modern mobile phone placed next to the computer is sufficient to carry out the attack, but up to four meters have been successfully tested using specially designed microphones.
They have disclosed the attack to GnuPG developers under CVE-2013-4576, suggested suitable countermeasures, and worked with the developers to test them. New versions of GnuPG 1.x and of libgcrypt (which underlies GnuPG 2.x), containing these countermeasures and resisting our current key-extraction attack, were released concurrently with the first public posting of these results
PDF Report
Adi Shamir – Wikipedia
Inventor of SSSS (Shamir\’s secret-sharing scheme)
CVE – CVE-2013-4576

NSA Says It Foiled the BIOS Plot

Called a BIOS plot, the exploit would have ruined, or \”bricked,\” computers across the country, causing untold damage to the national and even global economy.
Debora Plunkett, director of cyber defense for the The National Security Agency described for the first time a cataclysmic cyber threat the NSA claims to have stopped On Sunday\’s \”60 Minutes.\”
CBS suggest China is to Blame, the NSA does not confirm or deny that in the interview.
CBS reported the “virus” would be delivered via a software update to every computer’s BIOS.
The NSA says it closed this vulnerability by working with computer manufacturers.
No further technical, or general details provided.
CBS Airs NSA Propaganda Informercial Masquerading As \’Hard Hitting\’ 60 Minutes Journalism By Reporter With Massive Conflict Of Interes
In the end, this appears to be the NSA stealing the plot from our book recommendation a few weeks ago. Mark Russinovich’s Zero Day – which is very much the same plot (Copyright March 2011), except the attackers were wealthy backers of Al Qaeda instead of the Chinese
In the sequel Trojan Horse , China uses APT techniques to compromise computers at the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs, and alter a report about Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program to disrupt international attempts to prevent Iran from getting Nuclear Weapons. Look for this story on the news next year…

Krebs: The Case For a Global, Compulsory Bug Bounty

Security experts have long opined that one way to make software more secure is to hold software makers liable for vulnerabilities in their products
This idea is often dismissed as unrealistic and one that would stifle innovation in an industry that has been a major driver of commercial growth and productivity over the years. But a new study released this week presents perhaps the clearest economic case yet for compelling companies to pay for information about security vulnerabilities in their products
Stefan Frei, director of research at NSS Labs, suggests compelling companies to purchase all available vulnerabilities at above black-market prices.
The director of research for Austin, Texas-based NSS Labs examined all of the software vulnerabilities reported in 2012, and found that the top 10 software makers were responsible for more than 30 percent of all flaws fixed.
Even if vendors were required to pay $150,000 per bug, it would still come to less than two-tenths of one percent of these companies\’ annual revenue
To ensure that submitted bugs get addressed and not hijacked by regional interests, Frei also proposes building multi-tiered, multi-region vulnerability submission centers that would validate bugs and work with the vendor and researchers.
The questions is, would this result in a reduction in cybercrime overall, or would it simply hamper innovation? As one person quoted in the article points out, a majority of data breaches that cost companies tens of millions of dollars have far more to do with other factors unrelated to software flaws, such as social engineering, weak and stolen credentials, and sloppy server configurations.
The Case for a Compulsory Bug Bounty — Krebs on Security
How many Zero-Days hit you today?

Feedback:

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Fedora 20 Review | LAS s30e02

chris — Sun, 22 Dec 2013 14:51:35 +0000

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Fedora 20 has arrived and we’ve put it through its paces. Is this the ultimate Linux workstation for those who want to ride the cutting edge? Or are there a few too many rough edges on this well intentioned distribution? Tune in to find out!

Plus: Some of our favorite tools built into Fedora 20, the good news from Kdenlive, a re-spin of SteamOS…

AND SO MUCH MORE!

All this week on, The Linux Action Show!

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— Show Notes: —

Fedora 20 Heisenbug Review:

Brought to you by: System76

– Fedora Specs: –

Kernel 3.12.5 (updated during review from 3.11)
GNOME 3.10
KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11
Cinnamon 2.0
ARM as a Primary Architecture
No Syslog – systemd journal now takes the place as the default logging.
No Default Sendmail – Most Fedora users don’t require an MTA.

– Cool Fedora Tools: –

Boxes – GNOME Wiki!

A simple GNOME 3 application to access remote or virtual systems. It is based on a design from Jon McCann and Jakub Steiner.

Gnome Software

The new tool, named gnome-software, is designed from the beginning for installing applications. It will present applications with information that is relevant to users (icons, screenshots, reviews, descriptions, ratings,…) instead of information that is relevant for packagers (dependencies, package size, file lists,…).

Fedora 20 arives near Fedora’s 10th Annversary

The Fedora 20 release coincides with Fedora’s tenth anniversary. The first Fedora release (then called Fedora Core 1) came out on November 6, 2003

– Living with Fedora: –

Korora Project

Korora is a Fedora Remix that aims to make Linux easier for new users, while still being useful for experts. We provide a complete, easy to use computing system that “just works” out of the box.

Fedora Utils – Tweak your Fedora

Fedora Utils lets you install codecs and additional software that Fedora doesn’t want to ship, like MP3 codecs, Adobe Flash, Oracle Java etc. It can also fix problems, tweak and cleanup your system, show system information and much more with just few clicks.

Despite being 10 years old, Fedora feels modern and devioid of technical debt (looking at you Ubuntu & openSUSE). That can be good and bad. Sometimes that technical debt is part of the distro’s legacy, ie YaST.
Yum Extender

The next generation of Yum Extender, using Python3, Gtk3 and yum-daemon

Although Fedora 20 works out of the box but still lack some necessary functionality for obvious reasons. Here is a post install step by step guide for Fedora 20.

– Fedora.next… Is next… –

Fedora.next might be coming after Fedora 20

– Picks –

Runs Linux:

Lockheed Martin’s DARPA Robotics computers, Run Linux. Building the robots of the Future

As part of the DARPA Robotics Challenge, Lockheed Martin is developing autonomous systems that work together with human operators.

Desktop App Pick

Musique, music player for Mac, Windows and Linux

Musique unclutters your music listening experience with a clean and innovative interface. Read more

Weekly Spotlight:

SteamOS for the rest of us: Ye Olde SteamOSe

A modified SteamOS installer, with support for older and virtualized computers

Git yours hands all over our STUFF:

— NEWS —

– Feedback: –

— Chris’ Stash —

Pre-Recorded holiday schedule
Show’s might not be live, but we have pre-recorded episode for release at their regular times.
Thank you to everyone in the community, and to those of you who helped in a capacity from moderator, to developer. We’re a small team at JB, but because of real group effort collectively we all accomplish something bigger than you’d think possible.
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The post Fedora 20 Review | LAS s30e02 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

FTP Treasure Trove | TechSNAP 105

chris — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:58:17 +0000

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A treasure trove of data was found on an open FTP site, leaving AMI BIOS users open to attack.

Plus a look at PunkSPIDER, a batch of your questions, and so much more!

On this week’s of TechSNAP.

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New distributed web application vulnerability scanner linked to search engine

HyperionGray have announced a new project, where they have connected their open source distributed PunkSCAN webapp scanner to an Apache Hadoop Cluster and set it loose on the Internet
The goal of the project is to highlight the abysmal state of security on the Internet
The scanner finds sites that are vulnerable to SQL Injection, Blind SQL Injection, and Cross-Site Scripting
This information is then stored in a database, and is searching using PunkSPIDER
You can search by keyword in the URL or Title of the site and search by vulnerability types
PunkSPIDER Search Engine
PunkSPIDER is similar to another online search engine we have discussed previously, SHODAN is an online index of banner messages and version info
Additional Coverage

How power failures can corrupt Flash SSDs

Researchers at Ohio State University have conducted extensive testing of Flash SSD drives to determine how they react to unexpected power failures
By creating a worst case scenario that involves many concurrent writes of incompressible data, and a direct loss of power (cutting power between the PSU and the SSD rather than cutting power to the PSU), the researchers were able to enumerate a number of possible failure scenarios
The possible failures they looked for were:
- Bit Corruption – Random bits in the data set incorrectly
- Flying Writes – The correct data written to the wrong block/sector
- Shorn Writes – A write is interrupted while overwriting a sector, leaving the sector with some of the new bits and some of the old bits
- Metadata Corruption – The Flash Translation Layer (FTL, the complex firmware on an SSD that makes the NAND Flash chips appear like a regular hard drive) metadata is corrupted
- Dead Device – The SSD no longer functions at all
- Unserializability – The disk is in a state where writes were completed out of order
Researchers tested 15 different SSDs and 2 regular spinning drives
They did not release the manufacturer names or model numbers
Additional Coverage
Paper
Erretum Insert
A case of a similar problem? SSD suddenly only 34kb

Source code and possibly private keys for AMI BIOS/Firmware leaked

Security researchers Brandan Wilson and Adam Caudill found some interesting things on an open FTP server in Taiwan
On the FTP site they found numerous goodies, including internal emails, system images, high resolution PCB images, and Excel sheets loaded with private data
In addition, they also found a directory named ‘code’, that contained the source code and a private key for the AMI Firmware
According to AMI, the FTP site belongs to one of its customers, and the private key that was exposed is a testing key they use for all of their images, but they instruct all of their customers to generate their own keys and not use that testing key in production
It is not clear if this is the case, one or more manufacturer making use of the AMI Firmware are using that testing key
If that key is trusted in the wild, it means someone with access to this leaked source code could make a malicious firmware update that would be considered valid, it would also mean that the entire UEFI trust system for the affected machines could be invalid
“The worst case is the creation of a persistent, Trojanized update that would allow remote access to the system at the lowest possible level,” Caudill said. “Another possibility would be the creation of an update that would render the system unbootable, requiring replacement of the mainboard.”
“This kind of leak is a dream-come-true for advanced corporate espionage or intelligence operations,” Caudill wrote. “The ability to create a nearly undetectable, permanent hole in a system’s security is an ideal scenario for covert information collection.”

Feedback:

Round-Up:

The post FTP Treasure Trove | TechSNAP 105 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Ultimate RAID | TechSNAP 24

chris — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 19:58:08 +0000

When your data is important, understanding RAID can make the difference between a major loss, or saving the day. We’ll break down the different types of RAID, and the setups we’ve found to work best!

All that and more, in this week’s TechSNAP.

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Show Notes:

EFF to build early warning system for rouge SSL certificates

The system would have browsers anonymously submit copies of all certificates that they encounter to the EFFs SSL Observatory
Rouge certificates would be detected and the users could be warned about the danger
The system would work in a similar way to Google’s SafeSearch
We discussed the EFFs SSL Observatory and some of it’s very troubling findings in the very first episode of TechSNAP

Adobe released out-of-band Flash fix for critical vulnerability

Adobe reported that the vulnerability is actively being exploited by attempting to trick user into clicking on a malicious link delivered in an email message.
A similar attack was used against RSA as we discussed in episode 2 of TechSNAP
Additional Article

New SSL attack targets older versions of SSL and TLS

SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0 are vulnerable to an attack that can disclose private data
The researchers proof of concept can be used against popular sites such as PayPal
The exploit requires the attacker to be in a ‘man-in-the-middle’ position, and uses a ‘chosen plain-text attack’ against the AES encryption algorithm often used by SSL/TLS.
The attack works by having malicious javascript inject known plain text into the encrypted data stream, offering the attackers a chosen plain text to target their cryptanalysis against.
Not all SSL implementations default to AES, OpenSSL prefers the Camellia cipher first, however, a man-in-the-middle attack could influence the list of allowable ciphers, causing AES to be chosen as the cipher suite.
The researchers have been working with browser vendors since May to develop a solution, however every proposed patch has been found to break compatibility with some major SSL appliance resulting in a number of major sites not being reachable over SSL. Thus far browser vendors have not resolved the issue.
The attack is relatively slow, and requires a MiTM position, so it not likely to result in the breakdown of all e-commerce, however, it could be used quite effectively against public wifi spots.
Interesting notes from my own research, Cipher Suite Preference Order:
PayPal
- AES256-SHA
- AES128-SHA
- DES-CBC3-SHA
- RC4-SHA
- RC4-MD5
Google (Docs, Gmail)
- RC4-SHA
- RC4-MD5
- AES256-SHA
- DES-CBC3-SHA
- AES128-SHA
Facebook
- RC4-MD5
- RC4-SHA
- AES128-SHA
- AES256-SHA
- DES-CBC3-SHA
Hotmail
- AES128-SHA
- AES256-SHA
- RC4-SHA
- DES-CBC3-SHA
- RC4-MD5
StarTrekOnline.com
- AES256-SHA
- AES128-SHA
- DES-CBC3-SHA
- DES-CBC-SHA
- RC4-SHA
- RC4-MD5
ScaleEngine.com (OpenSSL HIGH:!MD5)
- DHE-RSA-CAMELLIA256-SHA, CAMELLIA256-SHA
- DHE-RSA-CAMELLIA128-SHA, CAMELLIA128-SHA
- DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA, AES256-SHA
- DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA, AES128-SHA
- EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA, DES-CBC3-SHA
None of these sites support SSLv2
Additional Article
Statistics shows that as many as 35% of SSL enabled sites are still vulnerable to a 2009 attack. Some sites purposely delay deploying SSL updates due to concerts about compatibility with outdated browsers, especially since SSL is used primary for e-commerce.

Intel integrates RealVNC at the BIOS level, allowing full remote access via the existing Intel vPro management engine

Intel has worked with RealVNC to embed a VNC Remote Frame Buffer server directly into the BIOS and vPro management chipset
Featuring include allowing you to remotely change BIOS settings, mount virtual images for reinstalling or repairing the OS, full remote-kvm features and remote reboot capability
The VNC access is secured using the existing on board encryption and certificate system built into the Intel vPro Management Engine Chipset.
vPro must be enabled, assigned an IP address and certificate (or strong password) in order to be used, so this will not expose unconfigured computers to the risk of being unintentionally remotely controlled.

Feedback:

Home Server Segment – Storage. There are many different types of RAID, a set of technologies that allow multiple independent physical disks to act as a single logical disk. The different types of RAID provide different advantages and disadvantages and have various uses.

RAID 0 – Striping
RAID 0 uses any number of disks and spreads the data between the disks, usually in blocks of 64 or 128kb. The total size of the logical disk will be N * smallest disk
This means that while reading and writing data, you have more physical heads doing the work, meaning that when read or writing a large amount of data, all of the disks can work in tandem, resulting in higher throughput
The disadvantage to RAID 0 is that there is no redundancy, if any one disk in the set fails to work, all data in the entire RAID array is no longer usable.
Common use cases for RAID 0 are things such as Video Editing that requires extremely high throughput rates
RAID 1 – Mirroring
RAID 1 is the most basic type of RAID, it requires an even number of disks. Each pair of disks contains identical information. The total size of the logical disk is N/2 * smallest disk.
When one of the two disks fails, the other contains exactly the same data, and the system can continue to operate. The failed disk can then be replaced, and the remaining disk has it’s data cloned to the new disk (this process is called Resilvering), restoring the system to full operational status.
RAID 1 can improve read performance because two heads can be seeking at the same time, however it cannot improve write performance, as both disks must write all changes made to the data
The disadvantage to RAID 1 is that you lose half of the storage capacity of the drives you put in to the array
RAID 1 is typically used for systems that require high fault tolerance, and the ability to continue to operate even during a disk failure
RAID 2 is not currently used, the original specification called for disks that would rotate and seek in unison and offer the possibility of higher transfer rates.
RAID 3 is similar to RAID 0, however instead of using large blocks, data is split between the drives at the byte level. This is very rare in practise because of the limited number of IOPS that most disks can handle, and the fact that RAID 3 suffers from a great loss of speed if more than 1 operation is run concurrently
RAID 4 works similar to RAID 5 below, except that it uses a dedicated parity disk
RAID 5
RAID 5 combines striping (RAID 0) with parity. This means that as each group of blocks is written, a parity block is calculated and written to one of the disks. This way, if any one of the disks were to fail, using the remaining blocks and the parity block, it would be possible to calculate what the missing block should be. The total size of the logical disk is N – 1 * smallest disk.
During operations, if a disk fails, the RAID array will be in what is know as ‘degraded’ mode, where the controller must do the calculations to determine what the missing data would be. This results in significantly lower performance. However the array can be restored to healthy status by replacing the failed disk, and allowing it to ‘resilver’ (the process of calculating each block of data that should exist on that drive, and writing it to the disk).
RAID 5 provides a the advantages of RAID 0 (speed, use of most of your disk capacity), while still providing some fault tolerance.
The parity data is storage spread across all of the disks, rather than always one one specific disk, for more even performance, because the parity calculation is
RAID 5 is typically used in servers where a large amount of storage and performance is required, but some degree of fault tolerance is also warranted. RAID 5 is rarely available on built-in RAID controllers due to the complexity of the parity calculations.
RAID 6
RAID 6 works like RAID 5 except with two copies of the parity information. The size of the logical disk is N–2 * the smallest disk
RAID 6 provides additional fault tolerance, specifically it allows the array to continue to operate if more than 1 disks fails at once, or if a second disk fails before the first can be resilvered. In a RAID 5 array, if a second disk dies before the first failed disk is completely restored, the entire array is lost.
RAID 6 is typically used in servers that require more storage and more fault tolerance than RAID 1 can provide, and where RAID 5 is just not enough fault tolerance. RAID 6 usually requires a rather expensive hardware controller.
Some complex controllers can allow you to do ‘nested raid levels’.
RAID 0+1
A mirrored array of two striped arrays, allowing both speed and fault tolerance
RAID 50
RAID 60
A stripped array of two RAID 6 arrays, providing additional performance on top of the fault tolerance and larger capacity of RAID 6. This setup is also common in setups where the RAID 6 arrays are on separate controllers.

Roundup

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The post Ultimate RAID | TechSNAP 24 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Ultimate Home Router | TechSNAP 23

chris — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 19:16:01 +0000

Exploits are in the wild that can take down critical infrastructure equipment, and some highly trusted sites were attacked this week and used against their own visitors.

Plus – We’ll tell you how to build the ultimate home router, that can do more than many Enterprise grade systems, with the press of a few buttons – and for FREE!

All that and more, on this week’s TechSNAP!

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Show Notes:

Italian hacker publishes 10+ 0 day SCADA exploits with proof of concept code

SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) are Industrial control systems
The Stuxnet worm targeted the specific SCADA system used by the Iranian centrifuges
These exploits could cause serious disruption if the systems are not properly protected from external access
SCADA systems are used to control numerous important industrial systems including water and sewage treatment, dams and power plants, as well as manufacturing automation systems.
In January 2000, the remote compromised of a SCADA system was responsible for pumping sewage into a nearby park and contaminated an open surface-water drainage ditch.
News Article

Official uTorrent website compromised, users download spyware

On or before Tuesday September 13th, the Official uTorrent.com website was compromised, and on the 13th, the attackers replaced the download files with spyware.
Users who downloaded uTorrent on the 13th instead received a scareware fake anti-virus package called ‘Security Shield’
The scareware told them they were infected with malware and demanded payment to remove it
Any users who downloaded uTorrent between 12.20 and 14.10 BST likely received the malware instead of uTorrent.
In this case, the attack was fairly obvious, but a similar hack against popular software distribution points could have resulted in the stealth infection of 1000s of systems via the auto-update feature built in to most modern applications.
This is always the nightmare security situation, when legitimate trusted sites are compromised and start to distribute harmful content.

Funny Virus Pic – Google+

BIOS rootkit found in the wild

The virus can infect most any computer with an Award BIOS (very popular, used in most all Motherboards that I own).
The virus dumps a copy of the BIOS, and then adds an ISA ROM that will rewrite the MBR (Master Boot Record) on the hard drive at each bootup.
The MBR virus then rootkits winlogon.exe to take over control of the system
The rootkit then prevents modification of the MBR, making it harder to remove the virus
Even if the MBR is repaired, it is reinfected at the next boot by the BIOS portion of the virus
The rootkit also downloads a trojan and allows the system to be remotely controlled.
This attack is related to the attack we discussed in a previous episode of TechSNAP where a researcher was able to infect the battery in a MacBook with a virus. If the virus was similar to this one, it would add an additional layer of complexity, if the BIOS could be reinfected from the battery.
Details from Symantec

TWiT.tv compromised, malicious iframe injected, loads Java malware

The popular TWiT.tv page was compromised and a snippet of malicious code was added, an iframe that directed users’ browsers to a page that attempted to use Java and PDF exploits.
Google’s safe browsing started blocking the site. Firefox and Google Chrome users will be presented with a warning before visiting the site.

War Story:

At approximately 4:00 PM facility local time on Sunday, September 11, 2011, the Seattle 1 data center experienced an unexpected service interruption. It was determined that the cause of the issue was a malfunction in one of the edge routers servicing the facility.
The device was rebooted to correct the issue and we proceeded to work with the device manufacturers TAC (Technical Assistance Center) to determine the cause of the issue and proper resolution to avert any future problems.
At 6:20 PM facility local time, the same issue occurred again, and the device was again rebooted.
To prevent any future unexpected service interruptions, it was decided that the best course of action would be to replace the device with the standby device available at the facility.
At approximately 7:00 PM facility local time, we began the process of replacing the faulting device with a new one. The old device was removed and the new device was put in its place.
Once powered on the replacement device alerted us to a number of errors within the switch fabric modules that were causing inter-line card communication to not work properly.
We again contacted the device manufactures TAC, and at approximately 8:30 PM, we decided with the TAC that the best option was to replace the switch fabrics in the replacement device with the switch fabrics from the old device.
Once this was completed the device was restarted but produced the same errors.
The issue was then escalated to tier 2 support at the device manufactures TAC.
We concluded that the issue was likely a problem somewhere within the replacement device’s chassis, and proceeded to replace the chassis with the one from the old device.
Upon doing so, we began getting a different set of errors, this time with the management modules communication to the line cards.
At approximately 4:30 AM facility local time, the matter was escalated to tier 3 support at the device manufactures TAC. At this time, we also dispatched our head network technician to the facility from Phoenix with a spare device which is stored at our office in the event of issues such as this one.
At approximately 6:30 AM facility local time, the TAC tier 3 technician concluded that the likely cause of the issue was an electrical problem either within the switch fabric modules or the replacement device chassis which resulted in improper current being sent to various parts of the device and damaging several of the sensitive electronic components in the line card, forwarding engines and switch fabrics. Because the electrical subsystem within the device had potentially caused damage to all of the switch fabric modules that we had available at the facility, we were advised that we should power down both devices and not use either of them any further until a full diagnostic of the electrical sub-system could be completed by the manufacturer.
At approximately 12:00 PM our head network technician arrived at the Seattle airport, and by 1:00 PM was at the facility with the replacement device from our Phoenix office.
At approximately 2:00 PM our head network technician completed the installation of the replacement device from our Phoenix office and service was fully restored.
Total time offline: 19 hours 8 minutes.

Feedback:

A few questions about home servers
Q: crshbndct I’ve built a spare computer out of some spare parts and I want to use it as a home server. I’d like to use it as a router, a DNS server, a caching server, and maybe also throttle the usage of my servers. What should I use?
A: Chris and I both love pfSense, it is a FreeBSD based router appliance. You can basically turn any computer with 2 network cards into a Router/Firewall, with DHCP, DNS/DDNS, VPN (IPSec, PPTP, OpenVNP), VLANs, Captive Portal, Traffic Shaping and Graphing. It has a web interface similar but more expansive than what most people are already used to from a normal off the shelf home router.

Next Week: RAID types, what they are and some use cases for each.

Round-Up:

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The post Ultimate Home Router | TechSNAP 23 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.