Show Notes/Links: https://www.bsdnow.tv/328

The post EPYC Netflix Stack | BSD Now 328 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Show Notes: techsnap.systems/403

The post Keeping Systems Simple | TechSNAP 403 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

##Headlines
###FreeBSD 12.0 is available

• After a long release cycle, the wait is over: FreeBSD 12.0 is now officially available.
• We’ve picked a few interesting things to cover in the show, make sure to read the full Release Notes

Userland:
Group permissions on /dev/acpi have been changed to allow users in the operator GID to invoke acpiconf(8) to suspend the system.
The default devfs.rules(5) configuration has been updated to allow mount_fusefs(8) with jail(8).
The default PAGER now defaults to less(1) for most commands.
The newsyslog(8) utility has been updated to reject configuration entries that specify setuid(2) or executable log files.
The WITH_REPRODUCIBLE_BUILD src.conf(5) knob has been enabled by default.
A new src.conf(5) knob, WITH_RETPOLINE, has been added to enable the retpoline mitigation for userland builds.
Userland applications:
The dtrace(1) utility has been updated to support if and else statements.
The legacy gdb(1) utility included in the base system is now installed to /usr/libexec for use with crashinfo(8). The gdbserver and gdbtui utilities are no longer installed. For interactive debugging, lldb(1) or a modern version of gdb(1) from devel/gdb should be used. A new src.conf(5) knob, WITHOUT_GDB_LIBEXEC has been added to disable building gdb(1). The gdb(1) utility is still installed in /usr/bin on sparc64.
The setfacl(1) utility has been updated to include a new flag, -R, used to operate recursively on directories.
The geli(8) utility has been updated to provide support for initializing multiple providers at once when they use the same passphrase and/or key.
The dd(1) utility has been updated to add the status=progress option, which prints the status of its operation on a single line once per second, similar to GNU dd(1).
The date(1) utility has been updated to include a new flag, -I, which prints its output in ISO 8601 formatting.
The bectl(8) utility has been added, providing an administrative interface for managing ZFS boot environments, similar to sysutils/beadm.
The bhyve(8) utility has been updated to add a new subcommand to the -l and -s flags, help, which when used, prints a list of supported LPC and PCI devices, respectively.
The tftp(1) utility has been updated to change the default transfer mode from ASCII to binary.
The chown(8) utility has been updated to prevent overflow of UID or GID arguments where the argument exceeded UID_MAX or GID_MAX, respectively.
Kernel:
The ACPI subsystem has been updated to implement Device object types for ACPI 6.0 support, required for some Dell, Inc. Poweredge AMD® Epyc systems.
The amdsmn(4) and amdtemp(4) drivers have been updated to attach to AMD® Ryzen 2 host bridges.
The amdtemp(4) driver has been updated to fix temperature reporting for AMD® 2990WX CPUs.
Kernel Configuration:
The VIMAGE kernel configuration option has been enabled by default.
The dumpon(8) utility has been updated to add support for compressed kernel crash dumps when the kernel configuration file includes the GZIO option. See rc.conf(5) and dumpon(8) for additional information.
The NUMA option has been enabled by default in the amd64 GENERIC and MINIMAL kernel configurations.
Device Drivers:
The random(4) driver has been updated to remove the Yarrow algorithm. The Fortuna algorithm remains the default, and now only, available algorithm.
The vt(4) driver has been updated with performance improvements, drawing text at rates ranging from 2- to 6-times faster.
Deprecated Drivers:
The lmc(4) driver has been removed.
The ixgb(4) driver has been removed.
The nxge(4) driver has been removed.
The vxge(4) driver has been removed.
The jedec_ts(4) driver has been removed in 12.0-RELEASE, and its functionality replaced by jedec_dimm(4).
The DRM driver for modern graphics chipsets has been marked deprecated and marked for removal in FreeBSD 13. The DRM kernel modules are available from graphics/drm-stable-kmod or graphics/drm-legacy-kmod in the Ports Collection as well as via pkg(8). Additionally, the kernel modules have been added to the lua loader.conf(5) module_blacklist, as installation from the Ports Collection or pkg(8) is strongly recommended.
The following drivers have been deprecated in FreeBSD 12.0, and not present in FreeBSD 13.0: ae(4), de(4), ed(4), ep(4), ex(4), fe(4), pcn(4), sf(4), sn(4), tl(4), tx(4), txp(4), vx(4), wb(4), xe(4)
Storage:
The UFS/FFS filesystem has been updated to support check hashes to cylinder-group maps. Support for check hashes is available only for UFS2.
The UFS/FFS filesystem has been updated to consolidate TRIM/BIO_DELETE commands, reducing read/write requests due to fewer TRIM messages being sent simultaneously.
TRIM consolidation support has been enabled by default in the UFS/FFS filesystem. TRIM consolidation can be disabled by setting the vfs.ffs.dotrimcons sysctl(8) to 0, or adding vfs.ffs.dotrimcons=0 to sysctl.conf(5).
NFS:
The NFS version 4.1 server has been updated to include pNFS server support.
ZFS:
ZFS has been updated to include new sysctl(8)s, vfs.zfs.arc_min_prefetch_ms and vfs.zfs.arc_min_prescient_prefetch_ms, which improve performance of the zpool(8) scrub subcommand.
The new spacemap_v2 zpool feature has been added. This provides more efficient encoding of spacemaps, especially for full vdev spacemaps.
The large_dnode zpool feature been imported, allowing better compatibility with pools created under ZFS-on-Linux 0.7.x
Many bug fixes have been applied to the device removal feature. This feature allows you to remove a non-redundant or mirror vdev from a pool by relocating its data to other vdevs.
Includes the fix for PR 229614 that could cause processes to hang in zil_commit()
Boot Loader Changes:
The lua loader(8) has been updated to detect a list of installed kernels to boot.
The loader(8) has been updated to support geli(8) for all architectures and all disk-like devices.
The loader(8) has been updated to add support for loading Intel® microcode updates early during the boot process.

Networking:
The pf(4) packet filter is now usable within a jail(8) using vnet(9).
The pf(4) packet filter has been updated to use rmlock(9) instead of rwlock(9), resulting in significant performance improvements.
The SO_REUSEPORT_LB option has been added to the network stack, allowing multiple programs or threads to bind to the same port, and incoming connections load balanced using a hash function.

• Again, read the release notes for a full list, check out the errata notices. A big THANKS to the entire release engineering team and all developers involved in the release, much appreciated!

###Abandon Linux. Move to FreeBSD or Illumos

If you use GNU/Linux and you are only on opensource, you may be doing it wrong. Here’s why.
Is your company based on opensource based software only? Do you have a bunch of developers hitting some kind of server you have installed for them to “do their thing”? Being it for economical reasons (remember to donate), being it for philosophycal ones, you may have skipped good alternatives. The BSD’s and Illumos.
I bet you are running some sort of Debian, openSuSE or CentOS. It’s very discouraging having entered into the IT field recently and discover many of the people you meet do not even recognise the name BSD. Naming Solaris seems like naming the evil itself. The problem being many do not know why. They can’t point anything specific other than it’s fading out. This has recently shown strong when Oracle officials have stated development for new features has ceased and almost 90 % of developers for Solaris have been layed off. AIX seems alien to almost everybody unless you have a white beard. And all this is silly.
And here’s why. You are certainly missing two important features that FreeBSD and Illumos derivatives are enjoying. A full virtualization technology, much better and fully developed compared to the LXC containers in the Linux world, such as Jails on BSD, Zones in Solaris/Illumos, and the great ZFS file system which both share.
You have probably heard of a new Linux filesystem named Btrfs, which by the way, development has been dropped from the Red Hat side. Trying to emulate ZFS, Oracle started developing Btrfs file system before they acquired Sun (the original developer of ZFS), and SuSE joined the effort as well as Red Hat. It is not as well developed as ZFS and it hasn’t been tested in production environments as extensively as the former has. That leaves some uncertainty on using it or not. Red Hat leaving it aside does add some more. Although some organizations have used it with various grades of success.
But why is this anyhow interesting for a sysadmin or any organization? Well… FreeBSD (descendant of Berkeley UNIX) and SmartOS (based on Illumos) aglutinate some features that make administration easier, safer, faster and more reliable. The dream of any systems administrator.
To start, the ZFS filesystem combines the typical filesystem with a volume manager. It includes protection against corruption, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, as well as volume manager.
Jails is another interesting piece of technology. Linux folks usually associate this as a sort of chroot. It isn’t. It is somehow inspired by it but as you may know you can escape from a chroot environment with a blink of an eye. Jails are not called jails casually. The name has a purpose. Contain processes and programs within a defined and totally controlled environment. Jails appeared first in FreeBSD in the year 2000. Solaris Zones debuted on 2005 (now called containers) are the now proprietary version of those.
There are some other technologies on Linux such as Btrfs or Docker. But they have some caveats. Btrfs hasn’t been fully developed yet and it’s hasn’t been proved as much in production environments as ZFS has. And some problems have arisen recently although the developers are pushing the envelope. At some time they will match ZFS capabilities for sure. Docker is growing exponentially and it’s one of the cool technologies of modern times. The caveat is, as before, the development of this technology hasn’t been fully developed. Unlike other virtualization technologies this is not a kernel playing on top of another kernel. This is virtualization at the OS level, meaning differentiated environments can coexist on a single host, “hitting” the same unique kernel which controls and shares the resources. The problem comes when you put Docker on top of any other virtualization technology such as KVM or Xen. It breaks the purpose of it and has a performance penalty.
I have arrived into the IT field with very little knowledge, that is true. But what I see strikes me. Working in a bank has allowed me to see a big production environment that needs the highest of the availability and reliability. This is, sometimes, achieved by bruteforce. And it’s legitime and adequate. Redundancy has a reason and a purpose for example. But some other times it looks, it feels, like killing flies with cannons. More hardware, more virtual machines, more people, more of this, more of that. They can afford it, so they try to maintain the cost low but at the end of the day there is a chunky budget to back operations.
But here comes reality. You’re not a bank and you need to squeeze your investment as much as possible. By using FreeBSD jails you can avoid the performance penalty of KVM or Xen virtualization. Do you use VMWare or Hyper-V? You can avoid both and gain in performance. Not only that, control and manageability are equal as before, and sometimes easier to administer. There are four ways to operate them which can be divided in two categories. Hardcore and Human Being. For the Hardcore use the FreeBSD handbook and investigate as much as you can. For the Human Being way there are three options to use. Ezjail, Iocage and CBSD which are frameworks or programs as you may call to manage jails. I personally use Iocage but I have also used Ezjail.
How can you use jails on your benefit? Ever tried to configure some new software and failed miserably? You can have three different jails running at the same time with different configurations. Want to try a new configuration in a production piece of hardware without applying it on the final users? You can do that with a small jail while the production environment is on in another bigger, chunkier jail.
Want to divide the hardware as a replica of the division of the team/s you are working with? Want to sell virtual machines with bare metal performance? Do you want to isolate some piece of critical software or even data in a more controlled environment? Do you have different clients and you want to use the same hardware but you want to avoid them seeing each other at the same time you maintain performance and reliability?
Are you a developer and you have to have reliable and portable snapshots of your work? Do you want to try new options-designs without breaking your previous work, in a timeless fashion? You can work on something, clone the jail and apply the new ideas on the project in a matter of seconds. You can stop there, export the filesystem snapshot containing all the environment and all your work and place it on a thumbdrive to later import it on a big production system. Want to change that image properties such as the network stack interface and ip? This is just one command away from you.
But what properties can you assign to a jail and how can I manage them you may be wondering. Hostname, disk quota, i/o, memory, cpu limits, network isolation, network virtualization, snapshots and the manage of those, migration and root privilege isolation to name a few. You can also clone them and import and export them between different systems. Some of these things because of ZFS. Iocage is a python program to manage jails and it takes profit from ZFS advantages.
But FreeBSD is not Linux you may say. No it is not. There are no run levels. The systemd factor is out of this equation. This is so since the begginning. Ever wondered where did vi come from? The TCP/IP stack? Your beloved macOS from Apple? All this is coming from the FreeBSD project. If you are used to Linux your adaptation period with any BSD will be short, very short. You will almost feel at home. Used to packaged software using yum or apt-get? No worries. With pkgng, the package management tool used in FreeBSD has almost 27.000 compiled packages for you to use. Almost all software found on any of the important GNU/Linux distros can be found here. Java, Python, C, C++, Clang, GCC, Javascript frameworks, Ruby, PHP, MySQL and the major forks, etc. All this opensource software, and much more, is available at your fingertips.
I am a developer and… frankly my time is money and I appreciate both much more than dealing with systems configuration, etc. You can set a VM using VMWare or VirtualBox and play with barebones FreeBSD or you can use TrueOS (a derivative) which comes in a server version and a desktop oriented one. The latter will be easier for you to play with. You may be doing this already with Linux. There is a third and very sensible option. FreeNAS, developed by iXSystems. It is FreeBSD based and offers all these technologies with a GUI. VMWare, Hyper-V? Nowadays you can get your hands off the CLI and get a decent, usable, nice GUI.
You say you play on the cloud. The major players already include FreeBSD in their offerings. You can find it in Amazon AWS or Azure (with official Microsoft support contracts too!). You can also find it in DigitalOcean and other hosting providers. There is no excuse. You can use it at home, at the office, with old or new hardware and in the cloud as well. You can even pay for a support contract to use it. Joyent, the developers of SmartOS have their own cloud with different locations around the globe. Have a look on them too.
If you want the original of ZFS and zones you may think of Solaris. But it’s fading away. But it really isn’t. When Oracle bouth Sun many people ran away in an stampide fashion. Some of the good folks working at Sun founded new projects. One of these is Illumos. Joyent is a company formed by people who developed these technologies. They are a cloud operator, have been recently bought by Samsung and have a very competent team of people providing great tech solutions. They have developed an OS, called SmartOS (based on Illumos) with all these features. The source from this goes back to the early days of UNIX. Do you remember the days of OpenSolaris when Sun opensourced the crown jewels? There you have it. A modern opensource UNIX operating system with the roots in their original place and the head planted on today’s needs.
In conclusion. If you are on GNU/Linux and you only use opensource software you may be doing it wrong. And missing goodies you may need and like. Once you put your hands on them, trust me, you won’t look back. And if you have some “old fashioned” admins who know Solaris, you can bring them to a new profitable and exciting life with both systems.
Still not convinced? Would you have ever imagined Microsoft supporting Linux? Even loving it? They do love now FreeBSD. And not only that, they provide their own image in the Azure Cloud and you can get Microsoft support, payed support if you want to use the platform on Azure. Ain’t it… surprising? Convincing at all?
PS: I haven’t mentioned both softwares, FreeBSD and SmartOS do have a Linux translation layer. This means you can run Linux binaries on them and the program won’t cough at all. Since the ABI stays stable the only thing you need to run a Linux binary is a translation between the different system calls and the libraries. Remember POSIX? Choose your poison and enjoy it.

###A partly-cloudy IPsec VPN

• Audience

I’m assuming that readers have at least a basic knowledge of TCP/IP networking and some UNIX or UNIX-like systems, but not necessarily OpenBSD or FreeBSD. This post will therefore be light on details that aren’t OS specific and are likely to be encountered in normal use (e.g., how to use vi or another text editor.) For more information on these topics, read Absolute FreeBSD (3ed.) by Michael W. Lucas.

• Overview

I’m redoing my DigitalOcean virtual machines (which they call droplets). My requirements are:

• VPN
• Road-warrior access, so I can use private network resources from anywhere.
• A site-to-site VPN, extending my home network to my VPSes.
• Hosting for public and private network services.
• A proxy service to provide a public IP address to services hosted at home.

The last item is on the list because I don’t actually have a public IP address at home; my firewall’s external address is in the RFC 1918 space, and the entire apartment building shares a single public IPv4 address.1 (IPv6? Don’t I wish.) The end-state network will include one OpenBSD droplet providing firewall, router, and VPN services; and one FreeBSD droplet hosting multiple jailed services.
I’ll be providing access via these droplets to a NextCloud instance at home. A simple NAT on the DO router droplet isn’t going to work, because packets going from home to the internet would exit through the apartment building’s connection and not through the VPN. It’s possible that I could do work around this issue with packet tagging using the pf firewall, but HAProxy is simple to configure and unlikely to result in hard-to-debug problems. relayd is also an option, but doesn’t have the TLS parsing abilities of HAProxy, which I’ll be using later on.
Since this system includes jails running on a VPS, and they’ve got RFC 1918 addresses, I want them reachable from my home network. Once that’s done, I can access the private address space from anywhere through a VPN connection to the cloudy router.
The VPN itself will be of the IPsec variety. IPsec is the traditional enterprise VPN standard, and is even used for classified applications, but has a (somewhat-deserved) reputation for complexity, but recent versions of OpenBSD turn down the difficulty by quite a bit.

• The end-state network should look like: https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/0ccf46fb057e0d50923209bb2e2af0122637e72d/e714e/201812-cloudy/endstate.svg

This VPN both separates internal network traffic from public traffic and uses encryption to prevent interception or tampering.
Once traffic has been encrypted, decrypting it without the key would, as Bruce Schneier once put it, require a computer built from something other than matter that occupies something other than space. Dyson spheres and a frakton of causality violation would possibly work, as would mathemagical technology that alters the local calendar such that P=NP.2 Black-bag jobs and/or suborning cloud provider employees doesn’t quite have that guarantee of impossibility, however. If you have serious security requirements, you’ll need to do better than a random blog entry.

##News Roundup
###KLEAK: Practical Kernel Memory Disclosure Detection

Modern operating systems such as NetBSD, macOS, and Windows isolate their kernel from userspace programs to increase fault tolerance and to protect against malicious manipulations [10]. User space programs have to call into the kernel to request resources, via system calls or ioctls. This communication between user space and kernel space crosses a security boundary. Kernel memory disclosures – also known as kernel information leaks – denote the inadvertent copying of uninitialized bytes from kernel space to user space. Such disclosed memory may contain cryptographic keys, information about the kernel memory layout, or other forms of secret data. Even though kernel memory disclosures do not allow direct exploitation of a system, they lay the ground for it.
We introduce KLEAK, a simple approach to dynamically detect kernel information leaks. Simply said, KLEAK utilizes a rudimentary form of taint tracking: it taints kernel memory with marker values, lets the data travel through the kernel and scans the buffers exchanged between the kernel and the user space for these marker values. By using compiler instrumentation and rotating the markers at regular intervals, KLEAK significantly reduces the number of false positives, and is able to yield relevant results with little effort.
Our approach is practically feasible as we prove with an implementation for the NetBSD kernel. A small performance penalty is introduced, but the system remains usable. In addition to implementing KLEAK in the NetBSD kernel, we applied our approach to FreeBSD 11.2. In total, we detected 21 previously unknown kernel memory disclosures in NetBSD-current and FreeBSD 11.2, which were fixed subsequently. As a follow-up, the projects’ developers manually audited related kernel areas and identified dozens of other kernel memory disclosures.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section II discusses the bug class of kernel memory disclosures. Section III presents KLEAK to dynamically detect instances of this bug class. Section IV discusses the results of applying KLEAK to NetBSD-current and FreeBSD 11.2. Section V reviews prior research. Finally, Section VI concludes this paper.

###How To Create Official Synth Repo

• System Environment

• Make sure /usr/dports is updated and that it contains no cruft (git pull; git status). Remove any cruft.

• Make sure your ‘synth’ is up-to-date ‘pkg upgrade synth’. If you already updated your system you may have to build synth from scratch, from /usr/dports/ports-mgmt/synth.

• Make sure /etc/make.conf is clean.

• Update /usr/src to the current master, make sure there is no cruft in it

• Do a full buildworld, buildkernel, installkernel and installworld

• Reboot

• After the reboot, before proceeding, run ‘uname -a’ and make sure you are now on the desired release or development kernel.

• Synth Environment

• /usr/local/etc/synth/ contains the synth configuration. It should contain a synth.ini file (you may have to rename the template), and you will have to create or edit a LiveSystem-make.conf file.

• System requirements are hefty. Just linking chromium alone eats at least 30GB, for example. Concurrent c++ compiles can eat up to 2GB per process. We recommend at least 100GB of SSD based swap space and 300GB of free space on the filesystem.

• synth.ini should contain this. Plus modify the builders and jobs to suit your system. With 128G of ram, 30/30 or 40/25 works well. If you have 32G of ram, maybe 8/8 or less.

; Take care when hand editing!

[Global Configuration]
profile_selected= LiveSystem

[LiveSystem]
Operating_system= DragonFly
Directory_packages= /build/synth/live_packages
Directory_repository= /build/synth/live_packages/All
Directory_portsdir= /build/synth/dports
Directory_options= /build/synth/options
Directory_distfiles= /usr/distfiles
Directory_buildbase= /build/synth/build
Directory_logs= /build/synth/logs
Directory_ccache= disabled
Directory_system= /
Number_of_builders= 30
Max_jobs_per_builder= 30
Tmpfs_workdir= true
Tmpfs_localbase= true
Display_with_ncurses= true
leverage_prebuilt= false

• LiveSystem-make.conf should contain one line to restrict licensing to only what is allowed to be built as a binary package:

LICENSES_ACCEPTED= NONE

• Make sure there is no other cruft in /usr/local/etc/synth/

• In the example above, the synth working dirs are in “/build/synth”. Make sure the base directories exist. Clean out any cruft for a fresh build from-scratch:

rm -rf /build/synth/live_packages/*
rm -rf /build/synth/logs
mkdir /build/synth/logs

• Run synth everything. I recommend doing this in a ‘screen’ session in case you lose your ssh session (assuming you are ssh’d into the build machine).

(optionally start a screen session)
synth everything

• A full synth build takes over 24 hours to run on a 48-core box, around 12 hours to run on a 64-core box. On a 4-core/8-thread box it will take at least 3 days. There will be times when swap space is heavily used. If you have not run synth before, monitor your memory and swap loads to make sure you have configured the jobs properly. If you are overloading the system, you may have to ^C the synth run, reduce the jobs, and start it again. It will pick up where it left off.
• When synth finishes, let it rebuild the database. You then have a working binary repo.
• It is usually a good idea to run synth several times to pick up any stuff it couldn’t build the first time. Each of these incremental runs may take a few hours, depending on what it tries to build.

###Interview with founder and maintainer of GhostBSD, Eric Turgeon

• Thanks you Eric for taking part. To start off, could you tell us a little about yourself, just a bit of background?
• How did you become interested in open source?
• When and how did you get interested in the BSD operating systems?
• On your Twitter profile, you state that you are an automation engineer at iXsystems. Can you share what you do in your day-to-day job?
• You are the founder and project lead of GhostBSD. Could you describe GhostBSD to those who have never used it or never heard of it?
• Developing an operating system is not a small thing. What made you decide to start the GhostBSD project and not join another “desktop FreeBSD” related project, such as PC-BSD and DesktopBSD at the time?
• How did you get to the name GhostBSD? Did you consider any other names?
• You recently released GhostBSD 18.10? What’s new in that version and what are the key features? What has changed since GhostBSD 11.1?
• The current version is 18.10. Will the next version be 19.04 (like Ubuntu’s version numbering), or is a new version released after the next stable TrueOS release
• Can you tell us something about the development team? Is it yourself, or are there other core team members? I think I saw two other developers on your Github project page.
• How about the relationship with the community? Is it possible for a community member to contribute, and how are those contributions handled?
• What was the biggest challenge during development?
• If you had to pick one feature readers should check out in GhostBSD, what is it and why?
• What is the relationship between iXsystems and the GhostBSD project? Or is GhostBSD a hobby project that you run separately from your work at iXsystems?
• What is the relationship between GhostBSD and TrueOS? Is GhostBSD TrueOS with the MATE desktop on top, or are there other modifications, additions, and differences?
• Where does GhostBSD go from here? What are your plans for 2019?
• Is there anything else that wasn’t asked or that you want to share?

##Beastie Bits

• dialog(1) script to select audio output on FreeBSD
• Erlang otp on OpenBSD
• Capsicum
• https://blog.grem.de/sysadmin/FreeBSD-On-rpi3-With-crochet-2018-10-27-18-00.html
• Introduction to µUBSan – a clean-room reimplementation of the Undefined Behavior Sanitizer runtime
• pkgsrcCon 2018 in Berlin – Videos
• Getting started with drm-kmod

##Feedback/Questions

• Malcolm – Show segment idea
• Fraser – Question: FreeBSD official binary package options
• Harri – BSD Magazine

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

The post Ho, Ho, Ho - 12.0 | BSD Now 276 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

The post What’s Up with WireGuard | TechSNAP 390 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

A new vulnerability in many websites, Oracle’s Outside In Technology, Turned Inside-Out & the value of a hacked company.

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Show Notes:

New vulnerability in many websites: HTTPoxy

• Background #1: The CGI (Common Gateway Interface) Specification defines the standard way that web servers run backend applications to dynamically generate websites
• CGI can be used to run Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, C, and any other language
• To provide access to information about the original request from the user, the web server sets a number of environment variables to represent the HTTP headers that were sent with the request
• To avoid conflicting with any existing environment variables, the headers are prefixed with HTTP_
• So, when you pass the the Accept-Encoding header, to indicate your browser supports receiving compressed data, the environment variable HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING gets set to the contents of that header
• This allows your application to know what compression algorithms are supported
• Background #2: Most tools support accessing the Internet via a proxy, and in UNIX, this is usually configured by setting an environment variable, which happens to be named: HTTP_PROXY
• “httpoxy is a set of vulnerabilities that affect application code running in CGI, or CGI-like environments. It comes down to a simple namespace conflict:”
  • RFC 3875 (CGI) puts the HTTP Proxy header from a request into the environment variables as HTTP_PROXY
  • HTTP_PROXY is a popular environment variable used to configure an outgoing proxy
• “This leads to a remotely exploitable vulnerability. httpoxy is a vulnerability for server-side web applications. If you’re not deploying code, you don’t need to worry.”
• “What can happen if my web application is vulnerable? If a vulnerable HTTP client makes an outgoing HTTP connection, while running in a server-side CGI application, an attacker may be able to:”
  • Proxy the outgoing HTTP requests made by the web application
• Direct the server to open outgoing connections to an address and port of their choosing
• Tie up server resources by forcing the vulnerable software to use a malicious proxy
• “httpoxy is extremely easy to exploit in basic form. And we expect security researchers to be able to scan for it quickly. Luckily, if you read on and find you are affected, easy mitigations are available.”
• So, I can send a header that will cause your application to make all of its connections, even to things like your backend API, via a proxy that I control. This could allow me to get access to passwords and other data that you thought would only ever be transmitted over your internal network.
• Timeline:
• March 2001: The issue is discovered in libwww-perl and fixed. Reported by Randal L. Schwartz
• April 2001: The issue is discovered in curl, and fixed there too (albeit probably not for Windows). Reported by Cris Bailiff.
• July 2012: In implementing HTTP_PROXY for Net::HTTP, the Ruby team notice and avoid the potential issue. Nice work Akira Tanaka!
• November 2013: The issue is mentioned on the NGINX mailing list. The user humbly points out the issue: “unless I’m missing something, which is very possible”. No, Jonathan Matthews, you were exactly right!
• February 2015: The issue is mentioned on the Apache httpd-dev mailing list. Spotted by Stefan Fritsch.
• July 2016: Scott Geary, an engineer at Vend, found an instance of the bug in the wild. The Vend security team found the vulnerability was still exploitable in PHP, and present in many modern languages and libraries. We started to disclose to security response teams.
• So this issue was found and dealt with in Perl and cURL in 2001, but, not widely advertised enough to make people aware that it could also impact every other CGI application and language
• Luckily, you can solve it fairly easily, the site provides instructions for fixing most popular web servers, including NGINX, Apache. Varnish, Relayd, HAProxy, lighttpd, Microsoft IIS, and others
• The fix is simple, remove or blank out the ‘Proxy’ header before it is sent to the application. Since this is a non-standard header, and should never be used, it is safe to just delete the header
• Other Mitigations: Firewall the web server so it can not make outgoing requests, or use HTTPS for all internal requests, so they cannot be snooped upon.

Oracle’s Outside In Technology, Turned Inside-Out

• From Oracle’s Outside In Technology, Turned Inside-Out Site: “Outside In Technology is a suite of software development kits (SDKs) that provides developers with a comprehensive solution to extract, normalize, scrub, convert and view the contents of 600 unstructured file formats.”
• In April, Talos blogged about one of the OIT-related arbitrary code execution bugs patched by Oracle.
• The impact of that vulnerability, plus these additional eighteen OIT bugs disclosed in these findings, is severe because so many third-party products use Oracle’s OIT to parse and transform files.

A review of an OIT-related CERT advisory from January 2016 reveals a large list of third-party products, especially security and messaging-related products, that are affected. The list of products that, according to CERT, rely on Oracle’s Outside In SDK includes:

• Avira AntiVir for Exchange – antivirus protection for Microsoft Exchange * IBM WebSphere Portal – provides enterprise web portals
• Google Search Appliance – search all content in an enterprise through a single search box
• Guidance Encase – forensic investigation software
• Microsoft Exchange – enterprise email and productivity software
• Novell Groupwise – a collaboration tool for large enterprise
• Raytheon SureView – software designed for enterprise visibility and user activity monitoring

• Veritas (Symantec) Enterprise Vault – a program for information governance through archiving

• Talos has not confirmed that each of the third-party products listed above are affected. We have, however, confirmed that some are running vulnerable OIT-related code. For example, if WebReady Document Viewing is enabled for Microsoft Exchange 2013 (& earlier), an attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities by sending a malicious email attachment to a victim who then opens the email using web preview.

• Further, if Data Loss Prevention is enabled, the vulnerability can be triggered simply by sending an email with a malicious attachment outbound from the affected Exchange server. If Avira AntiVir for Exchange (v12.0.2775.0 & earlier) is in place, just sending or receiving a malicious email is sufficient, since this program will scan all inbound and outbound email. Additionally, multiple OIT vulnerabilities could conceivably be exploited in a chained fashion for a more effective approach.

  • PDF /Size Integer Overflow
  • TIFF ExtraSamples Code Execution
  • TIFF Photometric Interpretation Code Execution
  • GIF ImageWidth Code Execution
  • Gem_Text Code Execution
  • PSI Image File Code Execution
  • Word DggInfo Code Execution
  • Mac Works Database VwStreamSection Code Execution
  • Mac Word ContentAccess libvs_word+63AC Code Execution
  • BMP Heap Buffer Overflow & Code Execution
  • Mac Works VwStreamReadRecord Memory Corruption
  • PDF /Kids Information Leakage
  • PDF NULL Pointer Dereference Denial of Service
  • PDF Recursion Stack Overflow Denial of Service
  • PDF /FlateDecode /Colors Denial of Service
  • PDF /Type /Xref Denial of Service
  • PDF Xref Offset Denial of Service
  • Mac Word ContentAccess libvs_word Denial of Service

• Over, and over again we see problems that arise from software using untrusted data as input without proper and necessary validation of that data, and because not all software developers are experts in the multitude of file formats in existence they are forced to rely on SDKs such as Oracle’s OIT.

• However, the unfortunate reality is that vulnerabilities that are found in an SDK that is utilized by third-parties will take additional time to patch: First the organization that maintains the SDK issues a fix, and some amount of time later, third-parties that utilize the SDK provide an update to their customers including these fixes.
• This provides a rather large window of time in which miscreants can exploit vulnerabilities in third-party products.
• In related news: TALOS also found a similar vulnerability in Apple’s OS X
• Additional Coverage
• In other news: Oracle has released its Critical Patch Update for July 2016 to address 276 vulnerabilities across multiple products
• Includes 4 Java vulnerabilities with CVSS scores of 9.6 out of 10

Krebs: The value of a hacked company

• Based on his previous infographic, the value of a hacked email address, this new post covers the value of a hacked company
• “Most organizations only grow in security maturity the hard way — that is, from the intense learning that takes place in the wake of a costly data breach. That may be because so few company leaders really grasp the centrality of computer and network security to the organization’s overall goals and productivity, and fewer still have taken an honest inventory of what may be at stake in the event that these assets are compromised.”
• “If you’re unsure how much of your organization’s strategic assets may be intimately tied up with all this technology stuff, ask yourself what would be of special worth to a network intruder. Here’s a look at some of the key corporate assets that may be of interest and value to modern bad guys.”
• There is a lot of value that an attack can extract from a hacked company:
  • Intellectual Property, like trade secrets, plans, or even just a list of customers
  • Physical Property: Desktops, backups, telecom equipment, access to VOIP infrastructure
  • Partners: Access to other companies that the hacked company deals with, weather it be for the sake of Phishing those companies, accessing their bank details, or spreading the compromise to their network
  • HR Data: Information about employees, for tax fraud, insurance fraud, identity theft, or as further targeting data for future attacks
  • Financials: Draining the company bank account, company credit card details, customer credit card details, employee bank account details (payroll), sensitive financial data
  • Virtual Property: Access to cloud services, websites (watering hole attacks), software licenses, encryption keys, etc.
• “This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list; I’m sure we can all think of other examples, and perhaps if I receive enough suggestions from readers I’ll update this graphic. But the point is that whatever paltry monetary value the cybercrime underground may assign to these stolen assets individually, they’re each likely worth far more to the victimized company — if indeed a price can be placed on them at all.”
• “In years past, most traditional, financially-oriented cybercrime was opportunistic: That is, the bad guys tended to focus on getting in quickly, grabbing all the data that they knew how to easily monetize, and then perhaps leaving behind malware on the hacked systems that abused them for spam distribution.”
• “These days, an opportunistic, mass-mailed malware infection can quickly and easily morph into a much more serious and sustained problem for the victim organization (just ask Target). This is partly because many of the criminals who run large spam crime machines responsible for pumping out the latest malware threats have grown more adept at mining and harvesting stolen data.”
• “It’s also never been easier for disgruntled employees to sell access to their employer’s systems or data, thanks to the proliferation of open and anonymous cybercrime forums on the Dark Web that serve as a bustling marketplace for such commerce.”
• “Organizational leaders in search of a clue about how to increase both their security maturity and the resiliency of all their precious technology stuff could do far worse than to start with the Cybersecurity Framework developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the federal agency that works with industry to develop and apply technology, measurements, and standards. This primer (PDF) from PWC does a good job of explaining why the NIST Framework may be worth a closer look.”

Feedback:

• ZFS Fillin Up

• InfiniBand

• IPSEC VPN server & OS options

Mention: Networking for Information Security/Penetration Testing

Round Up:

• Feds Seize KickassTorrents Domains, Arrest Alleged Owner
• How to many money by abusing 2 Factor Auth — Have Google, Instagram, etc, call your premium rate (900) number to verify your 1000s of accounts
• Apple Has Its Own Stagefright Vulnerability
• PostgreSQL EnterpriseDB first open source database to pass Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) testing, and publish a Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG)
• Skype is Transitioning to a More Modern, Mobile-Friendly Architecture
• Microsoft killing off last bits of p2p in skype, and all old clients, in favour of new cloud-server backed infrastructure
• Seagate launches its new line of 10TB Helium drives: BarraCuda (Desktop HDD), FireCuda (Desktop SSHD), BarraCuda Pro (5 year Warrenty), IronWolf (NAS), and SkyHawk (Surveillance).
• Stack Exchange Outage Postmortem – July 20, 2016
• Engineer gets tired of waiting for Telcos, wires up his whole town
• Microsoft ordered to fix ‘excessively intrusive, insecure’ Windows 10
• France’s National Data Protection Commission (CNIL) has ordered Microsoft to “stop collecting excessive data and tracking browsing by users without consent”
• How (and why) FreeDOS keeps DOS alive
• Verizon to disconnect unlimited data customers who use over 100GB/month
• BT Outage the fault of Data Center and Exchange operator Equanix
• Mitsubishi Outlander Flaw Opens Door to Thieves—Literally – Infosecurity Magazine
• The Ubuntu forums have been hacked, IP address, username, and email address of over two million users have been compromised

The post Bitmap Pox | TechSNAP 276 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Cisco has a wormable vulnerability in its Firewall appliances, crimeware that allows unlimited ATM withdrawals & the big problem with the Java installer.

Plus great questions, a rocking round up & much, much more!

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— Show Notes: —

Cisco ASA IPSec vulnerability given highest possible CVSS score

• Cisco has released a patch for a critical vulnerability its ASA (Adaptive Security Appliance) firewalls
• “The Cisco ASA Adaptive Security Appliance is an IP router that acts as an application-aware firewall, network antivirus, intrusion prevention system, and virtual private network (VPN) server. It is advertised as “the industry’s most deployed stateful firewall.” When deployed as a VPN, the device is accessible from the Internet and provides access to a company’s internal networks.”
• “A vulnerability in the Internet Key Exchange (IKE) version 1 (v1) and IKE version 2 (v2) code of Cisco ASA Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a reload of the affected system or to remotely execute code.“
• “The vulnerability is due to a buffer overflow in the affected code area. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted UDP packets to the affected system. An exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code and obtain full control of the system or to cause a reload of the affected system.”
• So the router can be owned by a single UDP packet. It could then be controlled by the attack and used to send more of those UDP packets, making this a “wormable” exploit
• Affected devices include:
  • Cisco ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliances
  • Cisco ASA 5500-X Series Next-Generation Firewalls
  • Cisco ASA Services Module for Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switches and Cisco 7600 Series Routers
  • Cisco ASA 1000V Cloud Firewall
  • Cisco Adaptive Security Virtual Appliance (ASAv)
  • Cisco Firepower 9300 ASA Security Module
  • Cisco ISA 3000 Industrial Security Appliance
• Users of ASA software versions 7.x, 8.0 – 8.6, will be forced to upgrade to ASA version 9.1
• The researchers had dubbed the exploit “Execute My Packet”
• “The algorithm for re-assembling IKE payloads fragmented with the Cisco fragmentation protocol contains a bounds-checking flaw that allows a heap buffer to be overflowed with attacker-controlled data.”
• Attempts to exploit the attack can be detected with packet inspection:
• “Looking for the value of the length field of a Fragment Payload (type 132) IKEv2 or IKEv1 packet allows detecting an exploitation attempt. Any length field with a value < 8 must be considered as an attempt to exploit the vulnerability. The detection also has to deal with the fact that the multiple payloads can be chained inside an IKEv2 packet, and that the Fragment Payload may not be the only/first payload of the packet.”
• Researcher Post
• Additional Coverage: SANS
• SANS says “We are seeing a LARGE INCREASE in port 500/UDP traffic (see and select TCP Ratio for the left Y axis. earlier spikes affecting this port were mostly TCP)”

Metel crimeware allows unlimited ATM withdrawls

• An APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) crimeware package has been found in the wild, being used to drain ATMs and bank accounts
• This type of attack was previously the exclusive territory of Nation States
• “It contains more than 30 separate modules that can be tailored to the computer it’s infecting. One of the most powerful components automatically rolls back ATM transactions shortly after they’re made. As a result, people with payment cards from a compromised bank can withdraw nearly unlimited sums of money from ATMs belonging to another bank. Because the Metel module repeatedly resets card balances, the criminals never pass the threshold that would normally freeze the card. Last year, the rollback scheme caused an unnamed bank in Russia to lose millions of rubles in a single night.”
• “Metel usually gains an initial foothold by exploiting vulnerabilities in browsers or through spear phishing e-mails that trick employees to execute malicious files. Members of the Metel hacking gang then use legitimate software used by server administrators and security researchers to compromise other PCs in an attempt to further burrow into the targeted network. They will often patiently work this way until they gain control over a system with access to money transactions, for example, PCs used by call center operators or IT support.”
• “Metel illustrates the growing sophistication of hackers targeting banks. It wasn’t long ago that reconnaissance, social engineering, state-of-the-art software engineering, lateral movements through a network, and long-term persistence were largely the exclusive hallmarks of so-called advanced persistent threat actors that painstakingly hack high-profile targets, usually on behalf of government spy agencies. Hackers targeting financial institutions, by contrast, took a more opportunistic approach that infected the easiest targets and didn’t bother with more challenging ones. Now, sophisticated techniques are increasingly a part of financially motivated hacking crimes as well.”
• Other groups have been found doing similar things:
• “The so-called GCMAN group, which gets its name because its malware is built using the GCC compiler. Like Metel, its members gain an initial foothold into financial institutions using spearphishing e-mails and from there use widely available tools such as Putty, VNC, and Meterpreter to broaden their access. In one case, GCMAN members had access to one targeted network for 18 months before siphoning any funds. When the group finally sprang into action, it used automated scripts to slowly transfer funds—about $200 per minute—into the account of a so-called “mule,” who was designated to withdraw the money.”
• “The Carbanak 2.0 malware, which in one recent case used its access to a financial institution to change ownership details of a large company. The records were modified to list a money mule as one of the shareholders. After attacking a variety of banks last year, the gang took a five-month sabbatical that caused Kaspersky researchers to think it had disbanded. In December, Kaspersky confirmed the group was active and had overhauled its malware to target new classes of victims”
• “Kaspersky researchers said all three gangs appear to be active and are known to have collectively infected 29 organizations in Russia. The researchers said they suspect the number of institutions hit by the groups is much higher.”
• Researcher Post
• Indicators and Signatures

Java installer vulnerable to binary planting

• “On Friday, Oracle published a security advisory recommending that users delete all the Java installers they might have laying around on their computers and use new ones for versions 6u113, 7u97, 8u73 or later.”
• Oracle Advisory
• “On most computers, the default download folder quickly becomes a repository of old and unorganized files that were opened once and then forgotten about. A recently fixed flaw in the Java installer highlights why keeping this folder clean is important.”
• “The reason is that older Java installers are designed to look for and automatically load a number of specifically named DLL (Dynamic Link Library) files from the current directory. In the case of Java installers downloaded from the Web, the current directory is typically the computer’s default download folder.”
• This allows an attacker to plant their own malicious binaries there, and then when the “trusted” Java installer is run with enhanced privileges, the malicious .dll gains those enhanced permissions
• “To be successfully exploited, this vulnerability requires that an unsuspecting user be tricked into visiting a malicious web site and download files into the user’s system before installing Java SE 6, 7 or 8. Though relatively complex to exploit, this vulnerability may result, if successfully exploited, in a complete compromise of the unsuspecting user’s system.”
• It is not clear how Oracle’s new java downloader is improved, but it is likely not as good as it should be
• Many other downloaders are also likely vulnerable, but the applications do not have the same install base as java
• For less sophisticated users, the process of “clearing download history” would seem to imply that the files are removed as well, which is not the case

Feedback:

• R Pi 2 as proxy server?

• PFSense Central Management

• ZFS on the desktop

Round Up:

• Super Bowl fans use a record 10TB of data on Levi’s Stadium WiFi network, up 63% from 2015
• Paper: How Complex Systems Fail
• Hacker leaks thousands of FBI, DHS employees’ details
• Norse are not the only ones that can do Visualizations
• Google Will Reject All Flash Based Adverts In a Push For HTML5
• Krebs: Credit Card skimmers at the self checkout at Safeway
• U.S. can’t ban encryption because it’s a global phenomenon, Harvard study finds
• Krebs: New e-commerce fraud, order expensive merchandise just to steal the rewards points
• Linux kernel bug delivers corrupt TCP/IP data to Mesos, Kubernetes, Docker containers
• New tool from Harvard, AMBER, a wordpress and drupal plugin that automatically archives pages you link to, and uses that copy if the original goes away, or falls back to the Archive.org wayback machine
• “Revenue per employee, 2015: Yahoo: $419,830 Twitter: $462,009 MSFT: $789,145 Google: $1,160,648 Facebook: $1,412,655 Apple: $2,032,304”
• “Profit per employee, 2015: Twitter: -$129,334 Yahoo: $54,182 MSFT: $102,822 Google: $250,367 Facebook: $290,600 Apple: $464,296”

The post Cisco's Perfect 10 | TechSNAP 253 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

This week on the show, we’ll be talking with Peter Toth. He’s got a jail management system called “iocage” that’s been getting pretty popular recently. Have we finally found a replacement for ezjail? We’ll see how it stacks up.

Thanks to:

• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

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– Show Notes: –

Headlines

FreeBSD on Olimex RT5350F-OLinuXino

• If you haven’t heard of the RT5350F-OLinuXino-EVB, you’re not alone (actually, we probably couldn’t even remember the name if we did know about it)
• It’s a small board with a MIPS CPU, two ethernet ports, wireless support and… 32MB of RAM
• This blog series documents installing FreeBSD on the device, but it is quite a DIY setup at the moment
• In part two of the series, he talks about the GPIO and how you can configure it
• Part three is still in the works, so check the site later on for further progress and info

The modern OpenBSD home router

• In a new series of blog posts, one guy takes you through the process of building an OpenBSD-based gateway for his home network
• “It’s no secret that most consumer routers ship with software that’s flaky at best, and prohibitively insecure at worst”
• Armed with a 600MHz Pentium III CPU, he shows the process of setting up basic NAT, firewalling and even getting hostap mode working for wireless
• This guide also covers PPP and IPv6, in case you have those requirements
• In a similar but unrelated series, another user does a similar thing – his post also includes details on reusing your consumer router as a wireless bridge
• He also has a separate post for setting up an IPSEC VPN on the router

NetBSD at Open Source Conference 2015 Kansai

• The Japanese NetBSD users group has teamed up with the Kansai BSD users group and Nagoya BSD users group to invade another conference
• They had NetBSD running on all the usual (unusual?) devices, but some of the other BSDs also got a chance to shine at the event
• Last time they mostly had ARM devices, but this time the centerpiece was an OMRON LUNA88k
• They had at least one FreeBSD and OpenBSD device, and at least one NetBSD device even had Adobe Flash running on it
• And what conference would be complete without an LED-powered towel

OpenSSH 7.0 released

• The OpenSSH team has just finished up the 7.0 release, and the focus this time is deprecating legacy code
• SSHv1 support is disabled, 1024 bit diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 KEX is disabled and the v00 cert format authentication is disabled
• The syntax for permitting root logins has been changed, and is now called “prohibit-password” instead of “without-password” (this makes it so root can login, but only with keys) – all interactive authentication methods for root are also disabled by default now
• If you’re using an older configuration file, the “without-password” option still works, so no change is required
• You can now control which public key types are available for authentication, as well as control which public key types are offered for host authentications
• Various bug fixes and documentation improvements are also included
• Aside from the keyboard-interactive and PAM-related bugs, this release includes one minor security fix: TTY permissions were too open, so users could write messages to other logged in users
• In the next release, even more deprecation is planned: RSA keys will be refused if they’re under 1024 bits, CBC-based ciphers will be disabled and the MD5 HMAC will also be disabled

Interview – Peter Toth – peter.toth198@gmail.com / @pannonp

Containment with iocage

News Roundup

More c2k15 reports

• A few more hackathon reports from c2k15 in Calgary are still slowly trickling in
• Alexander Bluhm’s up first, and he continued improving OpenBSD’s regression test suite (this ensures that no changes accidentally break existing things)
• He also worked on syslogd, completing the TCP input code – the syslogd in 5.8 will have TLS support for secure remote logging
• Renato Westphal sent in a report of his very first hackathon
• He finished up the VPLS implementation and worked on EIGRP (which is explained in the report) – the end result is that OpenBSD will be more easily deployable in a Cisco-heavy network
• Philip Guenther also wrote in, getting some very technical and low-level stuff done at the hackathon
• His report opens with “First came a diff to move the grabbing of the kernel lock for soft-interrupts from the ASM stubs to the C routine so that mere mortals can actually push it around further to reduce locking.” – not exactly beginner stuff
• There were also some C-state, suspend/resume and general ACPI improvements committed, and he gives a long list of random other bits he worked on as well

FreeBSD jails, the hard way

• As you learned from our interview this week, there’s quite a selection of tools available to manage your jails
• This article takes the opposite approach, using only the tools in the base system: ZFS, nullfs and jail.conf
• Unlike with iocage, ZFS isn’t actually a requirement for this method
• If you are using it, though, you can make use of snapshots for making template jails

OpenSSH hardware tokens

• We’ve talked about a number of ways to do two-factor authentication with SSH, but what if you want it on both the client and server?
• This blog post will show you how to use a hardware token as a second authentication factor, for the “something you know, something you have” security model
• It takes you through from start to finish: formatting the token, generating keys, getting it integrated with sshd
• Most of this will apply to any OS that can run ssh, and the token used in the example can be found online for pretty cheap too

LibreSSL 2.2.2 released

• The LibreSSL team has released version 2.2.2, which signals the end of the 5.8 development cycle and includes many fixes
• At the c2k15 hackathon, developers uncovered dozens of problems in the OpenSSL codebase with the Coverity code scanner, and this release incorporates all those: dead code, memory leaks, logic errors (which, by the way, you really don’t want in a crypto tool…) and much more
• SSLv3 support was removed from the “openssl” command, and only a few other SSLv3 bits remain – once workarounds are found for ports that specifically depend on it, it’ll be removed completely
• Various other small improvements were made: DH params are now 2048 bits by default, more old workarounds removed, cmake support added, etc
• It’ll be in 5.8 (due out earlier than usual) and it’s in the FreeBSD ports tree as well

Feedback/Questions

• James writes in
• Stuart writes in

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
• BSD Now tshirts are now available to preorder, and will be shipping in September (you have until the end of August to place an order, then they’re gone)
• Next week’s episode will be a shorter prerecorded one, since Allan’s going to BSDCam

The post May Contain ZFS | BSD Now 102 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

This week, we’ll be talking to Henning Brauer about OpenNTPD and its recently revived portable version. After that, we’ll be discussing different ways to securely tunnel your traffic: specifically OpenVPN, IPSEC, SSH and Tor. All that and the latest news, coming up on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

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• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

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– Show Notes: –

Headlines

Strange timer bug in FreeBSD 11

• Peter Wemm wrote in to the FreeBSD -CURRENT mailing list with an interesting observation
• Running the latest development code in the infrastructure, the clock would stop keeping time after 24 days of uptime
• This meant things like cron and sleep would break, TCP/IP wouldn’t time out or resend packets, a lot of things would break
• A workaround until it was fixed was to reboot every 24 days, but this is BSD we’re talking about – uptime is our game
• An initial proposal was adding a CFLAG to the build options which makes signed arithmetic wrap
• Peter disagreed and gave some background, offering a different patch to fix the issue and detect it early if it happens again
• Ultimately, the problem was traced back to an issue with the recent clang 3.5 import
• It only affected -CURRENT, not -RELEASE or -STABLE, but was definitely a bizarre bug to track down

An OpenBSD mail server

• There’s been a recent influx of blog posts about building a BSD mail server for some reason
• In this fancy series of posts, the author sets up OpenSMTPD in its native OpenBSD home, whereas previous posts have been aimed at FreeBSD and Linux
• In addition to the usual steps, this one also covers DKIMproxy, ClamAV for scanning attachments, Dovecot for IMAP and also multiple choices of spam filtering: spamd or SpamAssassin
• It also shows you how to set up Roundcube for building a web interface, using the new in-base httpd
• That means this is more of a “complete solution” – right down to what the end users see
• The series is split up into categories so it’s very easy to follow along step-by-step

How DragonFlyBSD uses git

• DragonFlyBSD, along with PCBSD and EdgeBSD, uses git as its version control system for the system source code
• In a series of posts, Matthew Dillon (the project lead) details their internal setup
• They’re using vanilla git over ssh, with the developers’ accounts set to git-only (no shell access)
• The maintainers of the server are the only ones with shell access available
• He also details how a cron job syncs from the master to a public box that anyone can check out code from
• It would be interesting to hear about how other BSD projects manage their master source repository

Why not try PCBSD?

• ITwire, another more mainstream tech site, published a recent article about switching to PCBSD
• They interview a guy named Kris that we’ve never heard of before
• In the article, they touch on how easy it can potentially be for Linux users looking to switch over to the BSD side – lots of applications are exactly the same
• “With the growing adoption of systemd, dissatisfaction with Linux has reached proportions not seen in recent years, to the extent that people have started talking of switching to FreeBSD.”
• If you have some friends who complain to you about systemd all the time, this might be a good article to show them

Interview – Henning Brauer – henning@openbsd.org / @henningbrauer

OpenNTPD and its portable variant

News Roundup

Authenticated time in OpenNTPD

• We recorded that interview with Henning just a few days ago, and it looks like part of it may be outdated already
• While at the hackathon, some developers came up with an alternate way to get authenticated NTP responses
• You can now add an HTTPS URL to your ntpd.conf in addition to the time server pool
• OpenNTPD will query it (over TLS, with CA verification) and look at the date sent in the HTTPS header
• It’s not intended to be a direct time source, just a constraint to keep things within reason
• If you receive regular NTP packets that are way off from the TLS packet, those will be discarded and the server(s) marked as invalid
• Henning and Theo also weigh in to give some of the backstory on the idea
• Lots more detail can be found in Reyk’s email explaining the new feature (and it’s optional of course)

NetBSD at Open Source Conference 2015 Oita and Hamanako

• It’s been a while since we’ve featured one of these trip reports, but the Japanese NetBSD users group is still doing them
• This time the conferences were in Oita and Hamanako, Japan
• Machines running NetBSD included the CubieBoard2 Allwinner A20, Raspberry Pi and Banana Pi, Sharp NetWalker and a couple Zaurus devices
• As always, they took lots of pictures from the event of NetBSD on all these weird machines

Poudriere in a jail

• A common question we get about our poudriere tutorial is “how do I run it in a jail?” – this blog post is about exactly that
• It takes you through the networking setup, zpool setup, nginx setup, making the jail and finally poking the right holes in the jail to allow poudriere to work its magic

Bruteblock, another way to stop bruteforce

• We’ve mentioned a few different ways to stop ssh bruteforce attempts in the past: fail2ban, denyhosts, or even just with pf’s built-in rate limiting
• Bruteblock is a similar tool, but it’s not just for ssh logins – it can do a number of other services
• It can also work directly with IPFW, which is a plus if you’re using that as your firewall
• Add a few lines to your syslog.conf and bruteblock will get executed automatically
• The rest of the article takes you through the different settings you can configure for blocking

New iwm(4) driver and cross-polination

• The OpenBSD guys recently imported a new “iwm” driver for newer Intel 7260 wireless cards (commonly found in Thinkpads)
• NetBSD wasted no time in porting it over, giving a bit of interesting backstory
• According to Antti Kantee, “it was created for OpenBSD by writing and porting a NetBSD driver which was developed in a rump kernel in Linux userspace”
• Both projects would appreciate further testing if you have the hardware and can provide useful bug reports
• Maybe FreeBSD and DragonFly will port it over too, or come up with something that’s partially based on the code

PC-BSD current images

• The first of our PC-BSD -CURRENT images should be available this weekend
• This image will be tagged 11.0-CURRENTFEB2015, with planned monthly updates
• For the more adventurous this will allow testing both FreeBSD and PC-BSD bleeding edge

Feedback/Questions

• Antonio writes in
• Richard writes in
• Charlie writes in
• Ben writes in

Mailing List Gold

• A systematic effort
• GCC’s lunch
• Hopes and dreams

Discussion

Comparison of ways to securely tunnel your traffic

• OpenVPN, OpenBSD IKED, FreeBSD IPSEC, OpenSSH, Tor

• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
• Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (19:00 UTC)
• Right on time for this episode, the ISC NTPd team announced more security problems just a few days ago

The post Time for a Change | BSD Now 76 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Lizard Squad’s DDoS for sale, NSA breaks VPNs, our Kickstarter of the week & more!

It’s the last Tech Talk Today of 2014, see you next week!

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Show Notes:

Lizard Squad’s Xbox Live, PSN attacks were a ‘marketing scheme’ for new DDoS service

The service, dubbed Lizard Stresser, launched early Tuesday morning via Twitter (redacted below) and is fully operational, a Lizard Squad member who goes by the alias “dragon” told the Daily Dot via a direct message on Twitter and subsequent conversation through the instant messaging service Jabber. Customers can use the service against any target they wish, including large websites or Internet services, such as PSN or Xbox Live. Dragon, who is listed as co-owner of the service, says the launch of Lizard Stresser will be the group’s last move before they “vanish off back to the caves where we came from.”

Once customers log into Lizard Squad’s new service, they are greeted by a list of the group’s accomplishments:

The cost of attacks range anywhere from $6 to $500, paid for with Bitcoin, the difficult-to-trace cryptocurrency. The most expensive tier offers 30,000 seconds of attack (a little more than 20 days), and costs just $130 per month. For $500, customers can launch unlimited attacks.

With the notoriety achieved from their attacks on Xbox Live and Playstation Network, Lizard Squad plans to utilize their huge social media reach to attract potential customers.

NSA has VPNs in Vulcan death grip—no, really, that’s what they call it

The National Security Agency’s Office of Target Pursuit (OTP) maintains a team of engineers dedicated to cracking the encrypted traffic of virtual private networks (VPNs) and has developed tools that could potentially uncloak the traffic in the majority of VPNs used to secure traffic passing over the Internet today, according to documents published this week by the German news magazine Der Speigel. A slide deck from a presentation by a member of OTP’s VPN Exploitation Team, dated September 13, 2010, details the process the NSA used at that time to attack VPNs—including tools with names drawn from Star Trek and other bits of popular culture.

When an IPSec VPN is identified and “tasked” by NSA analysts, according to the presentation, a “full take” of its traffic is stored in VULCANDEATHGRIP, a VPN data repository. There are similar, separate repositories for PPTP and SSL VPN traffic dubbed FOURSCORE and VULCANMINDMELD, respectively.

The NSA has a specific repository for capturing VPN metadata called TOYGRIPPE. The repository stores information on VPN sessions between systems of interest, including their “fingerprints” for specific machines and which VPN services they’ve connected to, their key exchanges, and other connection data. VPN “fingerprints” can also be extracted from XKEYSCORE, the NSA’s distributed “big data” store of all recently captured Internet traffic, to be used in identifying targets and developing an attack.

Newly published NSA documents show agency could grab all Skype traffic

The nature of the Skype data collection was spelled out in an NSA document dated August 2012 entitled “User’s Guide for PRISM Skype Collection.” The document details how to “task” the capture of voice communications from Skype by NSA’s NUCLEON system, which allows for text searches against captured voice communications. It also discusses how to find text chat and other data sent between clients in NSA’s PINWALE “digital network intelligence” database.

The full capture of voice traffic began in February of 2011 for “Skype in” and “Skype out” calls—calls between a Skype user and a land line or cellphone through a gateway to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), captured through warranted taps into Microsoft’s gateways. But in July of 2011, the NSA added the capability of capturing peer-to-peer Skype communications—meaning that the NSA gained the ability to capture peer-to-peer traffic and decrypt it using keys provided by Microsoft through the PRISM warrant request.

KICKSTATER OF THE WEEK: Next Keyboard – The Perfect Keyboard for iPhone by Next Keyboard — Kickstarter

A keyboard that puts more power at your fingertips with super fast editing, predictive typing, instant emojis, and beautiful themes!

The post NSA Skype Trek | Tech Talk Today 111 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Coming up on the show this week, we’ve got an interview with Brendan Gregg of Netflix. He’s got a lot to say about performance tuning and benchmarks & even some pretty funny stories about how people have done them incorrectly. As always, this week’s news & answers to your emails, on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

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– Show Notes: –

Headlines

Even more BSD presentation videos

• More videos from this year’s MeetBSD and OpenZFS devsummit were uploaded since last week
• Robert Ryan, At the Heart of the Digital Economy
• FreeNAS & ZFS, The Indestructible Duo – Except for the Hard Drives
• Richard Yao, libzfs_core and ioctl stabilization
• OpenZFS, Company lightning talks
• OpenZFS, Hackathon Presentation and Awards
• Pavel Zakharov, Fast File Cloning
• Rick Reed, Half a billion unsuspecting FreeBSD users
• Alex Reece & Matt Ahrens, Device Removal
• Chris Side, Channel Programs
• David Maxwell, The Unix command pipeline
• Be sure to check out the giant list of videos from last week’s episode if you haven’t seen them already

NetBSD on a Cobalt Qube 2

• The Cobalt Qube was a very expensive networking appliance around 2000
• In 2014, you can apparently get one of these MIPS-based machines for about forty bucks
• This blog post details getting NetBSD installed and set up on the rare relic of our networking past
• If you’re an old-time fan of RISC or MIPS CPUs, this’ll be a treat for you
• Lots of great pictures of the hardware too

OpenBSD vs. AFL

• In their never-ending security audit, some OpenBSD developers have been hitting various parts of the tree with a fuzzer
• If you’re not familiar, fuzzing is a semi-automated way to test programs for crashes and potential security problems
• The program being subjected to torture gets all sorts of random and invalid input, in the hopes of uncovering overflows and other bugs
• American Fuzzy Lop, in particular, has provided some interesting results across various open source projects recently
• So far, it’s fixed some NULL pointer dereferences in OpenSSH, various crashes in tcpdump and mandoc and a few other things
• AFL has an impressive list of CVEs (vulnerabilities) that it’s helped developers discover and fix
• It also made its way into OpenBSD ports, FreeBSD ports and NetBSD’s pkgsrc very recently, so you can try it out for yourself

GNOME 3 hits the FreeBSD ports tree

• While you’ve been able to run GNOME 3 on PC-BSD and OpenBSD for a while, it hasn’t actually hit the FreeBSD ports tree.. until now
• Due to systemd dependencies and the upstream developers not really being interested in non-Linux OSes, it took a considerable amount of effort to port
• Now you can play with GNOME 3 and all its goodies (as well as Cinnamon 2.2, which this also brings in) on vanilla FreeBSD
• Be sure to check the commit message and /usr/ports/UPDATING if you’re upgrading from GNOME 2
• You might also want to go back and listen to our interview with Joe Marcus Clark about GNOME’s portability

Interview – Brendan Gregg – bgregg@netflix.com / @brendangregg

Performance tuning, benchmarks, debugging

News Roundup

DragonFlyBSD 4.0 released

• A new major version of DragonFly, 4.0.1, was just recently announced
• This version includes support for Haswell GPUs, lots of SMP improvements (including some in PF) and support for up to 256 CPUs
• It’s also the first release to drop support for i386, so it joins PCBSD in the 64 bit-only club
• Check the release notes for all the details, including networking and kernel improvements, as well as some crypto changes

Can we talk about FreeBSD vs Linux

• Hackernews had a recent thread about discussing Linux vs BSD, and the trolls stayed away for once
• Rather than rehashing why one is “better” than the other, it was focused on explaining some of the differences between ecosystems and communities
• If you’re one of the many people who watch our show just out of curiosity about the BSD world, this might be a good thread to read
• Someone in the comments even gave bsdnow.tv a mention as a good resource to learn, thanks guy

OpenBSD IPSEC tunnel guide

• If you’ve ever wanted to connect two networks with OpenBSD gateways, this is the article for you
• It shows how to set up an IPSEC tunnel between destinations, how to lock it down and how to access all the machines on the other network just like they were on your LAN
• The article also explains some of the basics of IPSEC if you’re not familiar with all the terminology, so this isn’t just for experts
• Though the article itself is a few years old, it mostly still applies to the latest stuff today
• All the tools used are in the OpenBSD base system, so that’s pretty handy too

DragonFly starts work on IPFW2

• DragonFlyBSD, much like FreeBSD, comes with more than one firewall you can use
• Now it looks like you’re going to have yet another choice, as someone is working on a fork of IPFW (which is actually already in its second version, so it should be “IPFW3”)
• Not a whole lot is known yet; it’s still in heavy development, but there’s a brief roadmap page with some planned additions
• The guy who’s working on this has already agreed to come on the show for an interview, but we’re going to give him a chance to get some more work done first
• Expect that sometime next year, once he’s made some progress

Feedback/Questions

• Michael writes in
• Samael writes in
• Steven writes in
• Remy writes in
• Michael writes in

• All the tutorials are posted in their entirety at bsdnow.tv
• Michael Lucas’ new book, “FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials” is on sale now, check it out if you want to learn about FreeBSD’s disk subsystems
• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv – don’t be shy, we’d love to hear what you have to say
• Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (19:00 UTC)
• We’ve got a fun idea for the holidays this year: just like we ask during the interviews, we want to hear how all the viewers and listeners first got into BSD. Email us your story, either written or a video version, and we’ll read and play some of them for the Christmas episode. You’ve got until December 17th to send them in (that’s when we’re prerecording)

The post 8,000,000 Mogofoo-ops | BSD Now 65 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

This week on the show, we sat down with John-Mark Gurney to talk about modernizing FreeBSD’s IPSEC stack. We’ll learn what he’s adding, what needed to be fixed and how we’ll benefit from the changes. As always, answers to your emails and all of this week’s news, on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

Thanks to:

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– Show Notes: –

Headlines

BSD panel at Phoenix LUG

• The Phoenix, Arizona Linux users group had a special panel so they could learn a bit more about BSD
• It had one FreeBSD user and one OpenBSD user, and they answered questions from the organizer and the people in the audience
• They covered a variety of topics, including filesystems, firewalls, different development models, licenses and philosophy
• It was a good “real world” example of things potential switchers are curious to know about
• They closed by concluding that more diversity is always better, and even if you’ve got a lot of Linux boxes, putting a few BSD ones in the mix is a good idea

Book of PF signed copy auction

• Peter Hansteen (who we’ve had on the show) is auctioning off the first signed copy of the new Book of PF
• All the profits from the sale will go to the OpenBSD Foundation
• The updated edition of the book includes all the latest pf syntax changes, but also provides examples for FreeBSD and NetBSD’s versions (which still use ALTQ, among other differences)
• If you’re interested in firewalls, security or even just advanced networking, this book is a great one to have on your shelf – and the money will also go to a good cause
• Michael Lucas has challenged Peter to raise more for the foundation than his last book selling – let’s see who wins
• Pause the episode, go bid on it and then come back!

FreeBSD Foundation goes to EuroBSDCon

• Some people from the FreeBSD Foundation went to EuroBSDCon this year, and come back with a nice trip report
• They also sponsored four other developers to go
• The foundation was there “to find out what people are working on, what kind of help they could use from the Foundation, feedback on what we can be doing to support the FreeBSD Project and community, and what features/functions people want supported in FreeBSD”
• They also have a second report from Kamil Czekirda
• A total of $2000 was raised at the conference

OpenBSD 5.6 released

• Note: we’re doing this story a couple days early – it’s actually being released on November 1st (this Saturday), but we have next week off and didn’t want to let this one slip through the cracks – it may be out by the time you’re watching this
• Continuing their always-on-time six month release cycle, the OpenBSD team has released version 5.6
• It includes support for new hardware, lots of driver updates, network stack improvements (SMP, in particular) and new security features
• 5.6 is the first formal release with LibreSSL, their fork of OpenSSL, and lots of ports have been fixed to work with it
• You can now hibernate your laptop when using a fully-encrypted filesystem (see our tutorial for that)
• ALTQ, Kerberos, Lynx, Bluetooth, TCP Wrappers and Apache were all removed
• This will serve as a “transitional” release for a lot of services: moving from Sendmail to OpenSMTPD, from nginx to httpd and from BIND to Unbound
• Sendmail, nginx and BIND will be gone in the next release, so either migrate to the new stuff between now and then or switch to the ports versions
• As always, 5.6 comes with its own song and artwork – the theme this time was obviously LibreSSL
• Be sure to check the full changelog (it’s huge) and pick up a CD or tshirt to support their efforts
• If you don’t already have the public key releases are signed with, getting a physical CD is a good “out of bounds” way to obtain it safely
• Here are some cool images of the set
• After you do your installation or upgrade, don’t forget to head over to the errata page and apply any patches listed there

Interview – John-Mark Gurney – jmg@freebsd.org / @encthenet

Updating FreeBSD’s IPSEC stack

News Roundup

Clang in DragonFly BSD

• As we all know, FreeBSD got rid of GCC in 10.0, and now uses Clang on i386/amd64 almost exclusively
• Some DragonFly developers are considering migrating over as well, and one of them is doing some work to make the OS more Clang-friendly
• We’d love to see more BSDs switch to Clang/LLVM eventually, it’s a lot more modern than the old GCC most are using

reallocarray(): integer overflow detection for free

• One of the less obvious features in OpenBSD 5.6 is a new libc function: “reallocarray()”
• It’s a replacement function for realloc(3) that provides integer overflow detection at basically no extra cost
• Theo and a few other developers have already started a mass audit of the entire source tree, replacing many instances with this new feature
• OpenBSD’s explicit_bzero was recently imported into FreeBSD, maybe someone could also port over this too

Switching from Linux blog

• A listener of the show has started a new blog series, detailing his experiences in switching over to BSD from Linux
• After over ten years of using Linux, he decided to give BSD a try after listening to our show (which is awesome)
• So far, he’s put up a few posts about his initial thoughts, some documentation he’s going through and his experiments so far
• It’ll be an ongoing series, so we may check back in with him again later on

Owncloud in a FreeNAS jail

• One of the most common emails we get is about running Owncloud in FreeNAS
• Now, finally, someone made a video on how to do just that, and it’s even jailed
• A member of the FreeNAS community has uploaded a video on how to set it up, with lighttpd as the webserver backend
• If you’re looking for an easy way to back up and sync your files, this might be worth a watch

Feedback/Questions

• Ernõ writes in
• David writes in
• Kamil writes in
• Torsten writes in
• Dominik writes in

Mailing List Gold

• That’s not our IP
• Is this thing on?

• All the tutorials are posted in their entirety at bsdnow.tv
• The OpenBSD router, dpb, PXE autoinstall and patched ISO building tutorials have all been updated for 5.6
• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv – tell us how we’re doing or what you’d like to see in future episodes
• You can usually watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (18:00 UTC), but…
• We’ll be in California at MeetBSD next week, so there will be a prerecorded episode
• Speaking of conferences, the operatingsystems.io event has gotten a few more BSD speakers – check it out if you’re in London on November 25th

The post IPSECond Wind | BSD Now 61 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

It’s our one year anniversary episode, and we’ll be talking with Reyk Floeter about the new OpenBSD webserver – why it was created and where it’s going. After that, we’ll show you the ins and outs of DragonFly’s HAMMER FS. Answers to viewer-submitted questions and the latest headlines, on a very special BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

Thanks to:

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– Show Notes: –

Headlines

FreeBSD foundation’s new IPSEC project

• The FreeBSD foundation, along with Netgate, is sponsoring some new work on the IPSEC code
• With bandwidth in the 10-40 gigabit per second range, the IPSEC stack needs to be brought up to modern standards in terms of encryption and performance
• This new work will add AES-CTR and AES-GCM modes to FreeBSD’s implementation, borrowing some code from OpenBSD
• The updated stack will also support AES-NI for hardware-based encryption speed ups
• It’s expected to be completed by the end of September, and will also be in pfSense 2.2

NetBSD at Shimane Open Source Conference 2014

• The Japanese NetBSD users group held a NetBSD booth at the Open Source Conference 2014 in Shimane on August 23
• One of the developers has gathered a bunch of pictures from the event and wrote a fairly lengthy summary
• They had NetBSD running on all sorts of devices, from Raspberry Pis to Sun Java Stations
• Some visitors said that NetBSD had the most chaotic booth at the conference

pfSense 2.1.5 released

• A new version of the pfSense 2.1 branch is out
• Mostly a security-focused release, including three web UI fixes and the most recent OpenSSL fix (which FreeBSD has still not patched in -RELEASE after nearly a month)
• It also includes many other bug fixes, check the blog post for the full list

Systems, Science and FreeBSD

• Our friend George Neville-Neil gave a presentation at Microsoft Research
• It’s mainly about using FreeBSD as a platform for research, inside and outside of universities
• The talk describes the OS and its features, ports, developer community, documentation, who uses BSD and much more

Interview – Reyk Floeter – reyk@openbsd.org / @reykfloeter

OpenBSD’s HTTP daemon

Tutorial

A crash course on HAMMER FS

News Roundup

OpenBSD’s rcctl tool usage

• OpenBSD recently got a new tool for managing /etc/rc.conf.local in -current
• Similar to FreeBSD’s “sysrc” tool, it eliminates the need to manually edit rc.conf.local to enable or disable services
• This blog post – from a BSD Now viewer – shows the typical usage of the new tool to alter the startup services
• It won’t make it to 5.6, but will be in 5.7 (next May)

pfSense mini-roundup

• We found five interesting pfSense articles throughout the week and wanted to quickly mention them
• The first item in our pfSense mini-roundup details how you can stream Netflix to in non-US countries using a “smart” DNS service
• The second post talks about setting ip IPv6, in particular if Comcast is your ISP
• The third one features pfSense on Softpedia, a more mainstream tech site
• The fourth post describes how to filter HTTPS traffic with Squid and pfSense
• The last article describes setting up a VPN using the “tinc” daemon and pfSense
• It seems to be lesser known, compared to things like OpenVPN or SSH tunnels, so it’s interesting to read about
• This pfSense HQ website seems to have lots of other cool pfSense items, check it out

OpenBSD’s new buffer cache

• OpenBSD has traditionally used the tried-and-true LRU algorithm for buffer cache, but it has a few problems
• Ted Unangst has just switched to a new algorithm in -current, partially based on 2Q, and details some of his work
• Initial tests show positive results in terms of cache responsiveness
• Check the post for all the fine details

BSDTalk episode 244

• Another new BSDTalk is up and, this time around, Will Backman interviews Ken Moore, the developer of the new BSD desktop environment
• They discuss the history of development, differences between it and other DEs, lots of topics
• If you’re more of a visual person, fear not, because…
• We’ll have Ken on next week, including a full “virtual walkthrough” of Lumina and its applications

Feedback/Questions

• Ghislain writes in
• Raynold writes in
• Van writes in
• Sean writes in
• Stefan writes in

• All the tutorials are posted in their entirety at bsdnow.tv
• We want to give a huge thank you to our viewer Toby for writing this week’s tutorial
• Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
• Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (18:00 UTC)

The post It's HAMMER Time | BSD Now 53 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

A comprehensive study shows that you’re probably taking way too long to patch your box.

Plus research on possible iOS backdoors, TOR’s nasty bug, your questions, our answers, and much much more!

Thanks to:

Become a supporter on Patreon:

— Show Notes: —

Qualys releases “The Laws of Vulnerabilities 2.0”

• Qualys, known for the SSL Labs site where you can test the encryption capabilities of your browser and web server, has released the new version of their “laws”
• Qualys sells an “on demand vulnerability management solution” which does continuous perimeter monitoring of a network and scans servers for vulnerable versions of software and services
• Using the data they have collected they did statistical analysis and came up with some basic laws that cover the “vulnerability half-life, prevalence, persistence and exploitation trends for five critical industry segments including Finance, Healthcare, Retail, Manufacturing and Services.”
• The average system remains vulnerable for 30 days. Service sector usually patched within 21 days, whereas Manufacturing usually took 51 days
• The most popular vulnerabilities are regularly replaced, leaving some systems almost continuously vulnerable
• “the lifespan of most, if not all vulnerabilities is unlimited and a large percentage of vulnerabilities are never fully fixed.”
• “Eighty percent of vulnerability exploits are now available within single digit days after the vulnerabilities public release. In 2008, Qualys Labs logged 56 vulnerabilities with zero-day exploits, including the RPC vulnerability that produced Conficker. In 2009, the first vulnerability released by Microsoft, MS09-001 had an exploit available within seven days. Microsoft’s April Patch Tuesday included known exploits for over 47 percent of the published vulnerabilities. This law had the most drastic change from the Laws 1.0 in 2004, which provided a comfortable 60 days as guidance”
• Compared to in the past, installing updates in a timely fashion is even more important. The old 60 day window is gone

Payment Card Data Theft: Tips For Small Business

• An article at DarkReading.com by Chris Nutt, Director of Incident Response and Malware at Mandiant, on steps small businesses can take to avoid being the next credit card breach
• Things to consider when processing credit cards via a computer:
• Does the company browse the Internet or read email on the computer used for credit card processing?
• Is unencrypted card data transmitted through any exposed cables or over the internal network?
• Is the card-processing software configured correctly and up-to-date?
• Has the computer’s operating system up to date? has it been hardened?
• Is the computer running antivirus and is it up-to-date?
• Does the company outsource IT management and is there a remote management port open to the Internet?
• Small business often have an advantage in this area, it is easier to upgrade software when there is only a single system involved, not a complex back office system with multiple servers
• Some Recommendations
  • Use a dedicated LAN (or VLAN) or use a cellular connection instead of running the payment system on the same LAN or WiFi that is used for regular business and/or used by customers
• “Do not maintain a Payment Card Industry (PCI) environment or maintain the smallest PCI environment possible”
  • Instead, use a PCI compliant reader like Stripe or Square, data should be encrypted and sent directly to the payment processor, never stored on a device
  • Never store credit card details, a service like Stripe will give you a unique token that can be used for rebilling, refunds etc, without requiring you store the original card details
  • “Do not outsource the maintenance of POS devices to a company that will directly access remote management ports over the Internet.”
  • “Protect the physical security of all systems that store, process, or transmit cardholder information. All security is lost if an attacker can alter or replace your equipment”
  • “Do not allow systems in you PCI environment to connect to the Internet, aside from the connections required to process card transactions or patch the system”
  • “Do not allow systems in your PCI environment to connect to any systems on your network that are not necessary for processing card transactions or patching”
• Some possibly bad advice from the article: Use a mobile device or a tablet, they are more secure than a desktop
• Where possible, offload the processing to a provider, it might be slightly more expensive, but it moves most of the risk to the provider, rather than you

Government Accountability Office report shows shortcomings in incident response procedures

• GAO Report: Agencies Need to Improve Cyber Incident Response Practices
• “Based on a statistical sample of cyber incidents reported in fiscal year 2012, GAO projects that these agencies did not completely document actions taken in response to detected incidents in about 65 percent of cases”
• “For example, agencies identified the scope of an incident in the majority of cases, but frequently did not demonstrate that they had determined the impact of an incident. In addition, agencies did not consistently demonstrate how they had handled other key activities, such as whether preventive actions to prevent the reoccurrence of an incident were taken.”
• “agencies had recorded actions to halt the spread of, or otherwise limit, the damage caused by an incident in about 75 percent of incidents government-wide. However, agencies did not demonstrate such actions for about 25 percent of incidents government-wide.”
• “for about 77 percent of incidents government-wide, the agencies had identified and eliminated the remaining elements of the incident. However, agencies did not demonstrate that they had effectively eradicated incidents in about 23 percent of incidents”
• “agencies returned their systems to an operationally ready state for about 81 percent of incidents government-wide. However, they had not consistently documented remedial actions on whether they had taken steps to prevent an incident from reoccurring. Specifically, agencies did not demonstrate that they had acted to prevent an incident from reoccurring in about 49 percent of incidents government-wide.”
• “In another incident, an agency received a report from US-CERT indicating that login credentials at two of the agency’s components may have been compromised. When contacting the impacted components, agency incident handlers mistyped the potentially compromised credentials for one component and did not respond to an e-mail from the component requesting clarification, and failed to follow up with the second component when it did not respond to the initial alert. Despite these errors, the incident handlers closed the incident without taking further action.”
• “In a malware incident, sensors on an agency’s network recorded an agency computer contacting an external domain known to host malicious files, and downloading a suspicious file. Incident handlers closed the ticket without recording any actions taken to contain or otherwise remediate the potential malware infection”
• The GAO used NIST Special Publication 800-61: Computer Security Incident Handling Guide as a reference
• FireEye, makes of an enterprise security real-time threat protection platform, had some reactions to these findings:
• “Anything less than 100% containment is essentially 0% containment”. “If a government agency fails to completely contain an intrusion, any gaps leave the adversary freedom of maneuver. He can exploit the containment failure to proliferate to other systems and remain in control of an organization’s systems.“
• “If an adversary retains access to even one system, he can rebuild his position and retake control of the victim”
• “If a victim fails to make the environment tougher for the adversary, the intruder will likely return using the same techniques that he utilized to first gain access.” Victims need to learn from intrusions and implement remediation
• It is not clear from the report, but if a machine is compromised, it should be reformatted, rather than merely ‘cleaned’. In light of recent reports about persistent malware, the BIOS should also be flashed before the fresh OS is reinstalled.

Feedback:

• IPSec vs OpenVPN

• Canvas Fingerprinting – A New Threat To Privacy

• Meet the Online Tracking Device That is Virtually Impossible to Block

• ksoftirqd – High Network Throughput

• Why is ksoftirqd/0 process using all of my CPU?

• In the kernel command line (/etc/grub.conf), add “nohz=off” CentOS Forum

• multiple vm’s with 1 ip

• What is a true backup?

Round Up:

• Tails live OS affected by critical zero-day vulnerabilities
• European Central Bank hacked, only founds out after attacker demands ransom. Stolen: database of 20,000 email addresses of people who had registered for ECB conferences, visits and other events
• WSJ website hacked, data offered for sale for 1 bitcoin
• Google announces project zero, “hunt down security vulnerabilities in every popular piece of software that touches the internet”
• Tor Project working to fix weakness that can unmask anonymous users
• New IE vulnerabilities up over 100% since 2013
• How Hackers Hid a Money-Mining Botnet in Amazon’s Cloud
• Researcher finds hidden way to access plaint-text version of encrypted data on iOS devices
• Chromium Switching to BoringSSL.
• Identifying Back Doors, Attack Points, and Surveillance Mechanisms in iOS Devices
• The Open Source Responsible Disclosure Framework
• How your profile picture can be used against you
• Posh-SSH – Open Source PowerShell module for SSH, SFTP, SCP
• What the feds really know about you
• Australian deals website waits 3 years to tell customers and privacy commissioner. Told police, banks and credit card companies immediately. Only told customers now because “technological advances” mean the old hashes are now easier to crack
• NY Metro Card Terminal still runs Windows NT 4.03
• Sony to pay up to $17.75 million in 2011 PSN hacking settlemen

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