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Tuesday, February 9th, 2021
| Time |
Event |
| 3:15p |
Cook: security things in Linux v5.8 Kees Cook catches
up with the security-related changes in the 5.8 kernel release. " With this in place, Jump-Oriented Programming (JOP, where code
gadgets are chained together with jumps and calls) is no longer available
to the attacker. An attacker’s code must make direct function calls. This
basically reduces the 'usable' code available to an attacker from every
word in the kernel text to only function entries (or jump targets). This is
a 'low granularity' forward-edge Control Flow Integrity (CFI) feature,
which is important (since it greatly reduces the potential targets that can
be used in an attack) and cheap (implemented in hardware). It’s a good
first step to strong CFI, but (as we’ve seen with things like CFG) it isn’t
usually strong enough to stop a motivated attacker." | | 4:44p |
Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (flatpak), Debian (connman, golang-1.11, and openjpeg2), Fedora (pngcheck), Mageia (php, phppgadmin, and wpa_supplicant), openSUSE (privoxy), Oracle (flatpak and kernel), Red Hat (qemu-kvm-rhev), SUSE (kernel, python-urllib3, and python3), and Ubuntu (firefox). | | 4:44p |
Pattern matching accepted for Python The Python steering council has, after some discussion, accepted the controversial proposal to add a
pattern-matching primitive to the language. " We acknowledge that
Pattern Matching is an extensive change to Python and that reaching
consensus across the entire community is close to impossible. Different
people have reservations or concerns around different aspects of the
semantics and the syntax (as does the Steering Council). In spite of this,
after much deliberation, reviewing all conversations around these PEPs, as
well as competing proposals and existing poll results, and after several
in-person discussions with the PEP authors, we are confident that Pattern
Matching as specified in PEP 634, et al, will be a great addition to the
Python language." | | 7:31p |
Jordan: ktest: Automated Testing For Kernel Programmers Daniel Jordan looks at
ktest on the Oracle Linux blog. " Where ktest is especially
useful, though, is in its ability to do these things for each patch in a
series, thereby freeing you from a significant amount of tedium. For your
chosen configs, the series will be cleanly bisectable and won't trigger
upstream build bots with easily avoided errors and warnings
mid-series. (Those bots are nice for less common configs though.) Code
reviewers' moods improve too because each patch will stand alone with all
the necessary code." | | 9:52p |
The 2021 Season of Docs application for organizations is open Google Open Source has announcedthe 2021 edition of Season of
Docs. " In 2021, the Season of Docs program will continue to
support better documentation in open source and provide opportunities for
skilled technical writers to gain open source experience. In addition,
building on what we’ve learned from the successful 2019 and 2020 projects,
we’re expanding our focus to include learning about effective metrics for
evaluating open source documentation." Open source organizations may apply to take part in Season of Docs until March 26. |
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