Linus has released 7.0-rc4 for testing. Then Thursday hit with the networking pull. And then on Friday everybody else decided to send in their work for the week, with a few more trickling in over the weekend. End result: what had for a short few days looked like a nice calm week turned into another "bigger than usual" release candidate. To be fair, that "almost everything comes in at the end of the week" is 100% normal, and none of this is surprising. I was admittedly hoping that things would start to calm down, but that was not to be. I no longer really believe that it was the one extra week we had last release cycle: I'm starting to suspect it's the psychological result of "hey, new major number", and people are just being a bit more active as a result.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.19.8, 6.18.18, and 6.12.77 stable kernels. Each of these kernels includes a number of important fixes; users are advised to upgrade.
Reddit user "Ok_Lingonberry3296" has posted the results of an extensive investigation into the companies that are pushing US state legislatures to enact age-verification bills. I've been pulling public records on the wave of "age verification" bills moving through US state legislatures. IRS 990 filings, Senate lobbying disclosures, state ethics databases, campaign finance records, corporate registries, WHOIS lookups, Wayback Machine archives. What started as curiosity about who was pushing these bills turned into documenting a coordinated influence operation that, from a privacy standpoint, is building surveillance infrastructure at the operating system level while the company behind it faces zero new requirements for its own platforms. (See also this article for a look at the California law.)
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.
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