LWN.net's Journal
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
Wednesday, March 13th, 2019
| Time |
Event |
| 2:57p |
Cook: security things in Linux v5.0 Kees Cook reviews
some of the security-related enhancements in the 5.0 kernel. " While the C language has a statement to indicate the end of a switch
case ('break'), it doesn’t have a statement to indicate that execution
should fall through to the next case statement (just the lack of a 'break'
is used to indicate it should fall through — but this is not always the
case), and such 'implicit fall-through' may lead to bugs. Gustavo Silva has
been the driving force behind fixing these since at least v4.14, with well
over 300 patches on the topic alone (and over 20 missing break statements
found and fixed as a result of the work). The goal is to be able to add
-Wimplicit-fallthrough to the build so that the kernel will stay entirely
free of this class of bug going forward. From roughly 2300 warnings, the
kernel is now down to about 200. It’s also worth noting that with Stephen
Rothwell’s help, this bug has been kept out of linux-next by him sending
warning emails to any tree maintainers where a new instance is introduced
(for example, here’s a bug introduced on Feb 20th and fixed on Feb
21st)." | | 3:11p |
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (libsndfile, systemd, waagent, and xmltooling), Fedora (guacamole-server, postgresql-jdbc, and xen), Oracle (cockpit and kernel), Red Hat (cockpit, docker, kernel-alt, and openssl), SUSE (ceph, java-1_7_0-ibm, java-1_7_1-ibm, openssl-1_0_0, python-azure-agent, python-numpy, and supportutils), and Ubuntu (kernel, php5, and walinuxagent). | | 4:08p |
[$] Python dictionary "addition" and "subtraction"
A proposal to add a new dictionary operator for Python has spawned a PEP
and two large threads on the python-ideas mailing list. To a certain
extent, it is starting to look a bit like the "PEP 572 mess"; there are plenty of opinions on
whether the feature should be implemented and how it should be spelled, for
example. As yet, there has been no formal decision made on how the new steering council will be handling PEP
pronouncements, though a review
of open PEPs is the council's
"highest priority". This PEP will presumably be added into
the process; it is likely too late to be included in Python 3.8 even
if it were accepted soon,
so there is plenty of time to figure it all out before 3.9 is released
sometime in 2021. | | 11:13p |
[$] Turris: secure open-source routers
The Czech Republic top-level domain registrar, CZ.NIC, wondered about the safety of home
routers, so it set out to gather some information on the prevalence of
attacks against them. It turns out that one good way to do that is to
create a home router that logs statistics and other information.
Michal Hrušecký from CZ.NIC came to the 2019 Southern California
Linux Expo
(SCALE 17x) in Pasadena, CA to describe the experiment and how it grew into
a larger project that makes and sells open-source routers. |
|