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Thursday, June 17th, 2021
| Time |
Event |
| 12:58a |
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for June 17, 2021
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for June 17, 2021 is available. | | 1:40p |
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (gnupnp and postgresql), Fedora (dino, microcode_ctl, and xen), Mageia (apache, gsoap, libgd, openssh, perl-Image-ExifTool, python-bleach, and qt4 and qtsvg5), openSUSE (chromium, containerd, docker, runc, djvulibre, htmldoc, kernel, libjpeg-turbo, libopenmpt, libxml2, spice, squid, and ucode-intel), Red Hat (dhcp and glib2), SUSE (apache2, inn, java-1_8_0-openjdk, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (nettle). | | 6:17p |
Supporting Miguel Ojeda’s Work on Rust in the Linux Kernel (Prossimo blog) The Prossimo project has announced
that it has contracted with Miguel Ojeda to work on Rust in the Linux kernel
for the next year. Prossimo is a new name for the memory-safety
projects being run by the Internet Security Research
Group (ISRG), which is the organization behind the Let's Encrypt certificate authority
(CA) project. Google provided the funds to enable Ojeda to work full-time
on the project starting back in April.
The Linux kernel is at the heart of the modern Internet, from
servers to client devices. It’s on the front line for processing network
data and other forms of input. As such, vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel
can have a wide-ranging impact, putting security and privacy for people,
organizations, and devices at risk. Since it’s written largely in the C
language, which is not memory-safe, memory safety vulnerabilities such as
buffer overflows and use-after-frees are a constant concern. By making it
possible to write parts of the Linux kernel in Rust, which is memory-safe,
we can entirely eliminate memory safety vulnerabilities from certain
components, such as drivers.
We have previously covered another
Prossimo project, which provides funding for
Rustls development, as well as Ojeda's work
on Rust in the kernel. | | 6:47p |
[$] Landlock (finally) sets sail Kernel development is not for people who lack persistence; changes can take a number of revisions and a lot of time to make it into a mainline release. Even so, the story of the Landlock security module, developed by Mickaël Salaün, seems like an extreme case; this code was merged for 5.13 after more than five years of development and 34 versions of the patch set. This sandboxing mechanism has evolved considerably since LWN covered version 3 of the patch set in 2016, so a look at what Landlock has become is warranted. |
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