Qualys has sent out a somewhat breathless advisory describing a number of vulnerabilities in the AppArmor security module, which is used in a number of Debian-based distributions (among others). This "CrackArmor" advisory exposes a confused-deputy flaw allowing unprivileged users to manipulate security profiles via pseudo-files, bypass user-namespace restrictions, and execute arbitrary code within the kernel. These flaws facilitate local privilege escalation to root through complex interactions with tools like Sudo and Postfix, alongside denial-of-service attacks via stack exhaustion and Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR) bypasses via out-of-bounds reads.
In 2019, researchers published a way to identify which file-backed pages were being accessed on a system using timing information from the page cache, leading to a handful of unpleasant consequences and a change to the design of the mincore() system call. Discussion at the time led to a number of ad-hoc patches to address the problem. The lack of new page-cache attacks suggested that attempts to fix things in a piecemeal fashion had succeeded. Now, however, Sudheendra Raghav Neela, Jonas Juffinger, Lukas Maar, and Daniel Gruss have found a new set of holes in the Linux kernel's page-cache-timing protections that allow the same general class of attack.
One of the first changes merged for the upcoming 7.0 release was nullfs, an empty filesystem that cannot actually contain any files. One might logically wonder why the kernel would need such a thing. It turns out, though, that there are places where a null filesystem can come in handy. For 7.0, nullfs will be used to make life a bit easier for init programs; future releases will likely use nullfs to increase the isolation of kernel threads from the init process.
Sasha Levin has announced the release of the 6.19.7 and 6.18.17 stable kernels. As usual, each contains important fixes throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.
A recently enacted law in California imposes an age-verification requirement on operating-system providers beginning next year. The language of the Digital Age Assurance Act does not restrict its requirements to proprietary or commercial operating systems; projects like Debian, FreeBSD, Fedora, and others seem to be on the hook just as much as Apple or Microsoft. There is some hope that the law will be amended, but there is no guarantee that it will be. This means that the developer communities behind Linux distributions are having to discuss whether and how to comply with the law with little time and even less legal guidance.
Igalia has announced the Moonforge Linux distribution, based on OpenEmbedded and Yocto. Moonforge is an operating system framework for Linux devices that simplifies the process of building and maintaining custom operating systems. It provides a curated collection of Yocto layers and configuration files that help developers generate immutable, maintainable, and easily updatable operating system images. The goal is to offer the best possible developer experience for teams building embedded Linux products. Moonforge handles the complex aspects of operating system creation, such as system integration, security, updates, and infrastructure, so developers can focus on building and deploying their applications or devices.
There has been ongoing discussion in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) about how to protect internet traffic against future quantum computers. So far, that work has focused on key exchange as the most urgent problem; now, a new IETF working group is looking at adopting post-quantum cryptography for authentication and certificate transparency as well. The main challenge to doing so is the increased size of certificates — around 40 times larger. The techniques that the working group is investigating to reduce that overhead could have efficiency benefits for traditional certificates as well.
The advent of lazy imports in the Python language is upon us, now that PEP 810 ("Explicit lazy imports") was accepted by the steering council and the feature will appear in the upcoming Python 3.15 release in October. There are a number of good reasons, performance foremost, for wanting to defer spending—perhaps wasting—the time to do an import before a needed symbol is used. However, there are also good reasons not to want that behavior, at least in some cases. The tension between those two positions is what led to an earlier PEP rejection, but it is also playing into a recent discussion of the API used to control lazy imports.
Reuters is reporting that private-equity firm EQT may be looking to sell SUSE: EQT has hired investment bank Arma Partners to sound out a group of private equity investors for a possible sale of the company, said the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss confidential matters. The deliberations are at an early stage and there is no certainty that EQT will proceed with a transaction, the sources said. SUSE has traded hands a number of times over the years. Most recently it was acquired by EQT in 2018, was listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 2021, and then taken private again by EQT in August 2023.
Debian is the latest in an ever-growing list of projects to wrestle (again) with the question of LLM-generated contributions; the latest debate stared in mid-February, after Lucas Nussbaum opened a discussion with a draft general resolution (GR) on whether Debian should accept AI-assisted contributions. It seems to have, mostly, subsided without a GR being put forward or any decisions being made, but the conversation was illuminating nonetheless.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (imagemagick), Fedora (chromium, matrix-synapse, mingw-zlib, perl-Net-CIDR, polkit, and rust-pythonize), Mageia (coturn, firefox, and thunderbird), Oracle (delve, git-lfs, gnutls, go-rpm-macros, image-builder, kernel, libsoup, nfs-utils, nginx:1.24, osbuild-composer, postgresql, thunderbird, udisks2, and valkey), Red Hat (grafana, image-builder, and opentelemetry-collector), SUSE (c3p0 and mchange-commons, corepack24, go1, ImageMagick, python-Flask, tomcat, tomcat10, tomcat11, virtiofsd, and weblate), and Ubuntu (apache2 and yara).
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