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Google Pushed a One-Character Typo To Production, Bricking Chrome OS Devices
by Peter Reutemann 23 Jul '21

23 Jul '21

'Google says it has fixed a major Chrome OS bug that locked users out of their devices. Google's bulletin says that Chrome OS version 91.0.4472.165, which was briefly available this week, renders users unable to log in to their devices, essentially bricking them. From a report: Chrome OS automatically downloads updates and switches to the new version after a reboot, so users who reboot their devices are suddenly locked out them. The go-to advice while this broken update is out there is to not reboot. The bulletin says that a new build, version 91.0.4472.167, is rolling out now to fix the issue, but it could take a "few days" to hit everyone. Users affected by the bad update can either wait for the device to update again or "powerwash" their device -- meaning wipe all the local data -- to get logged in. Chrome OS is primarily cloud-based, so if you're not doing something advanced like running Linux apps, this solution presents less of an inconvenience than it would on other operating systems. Still, some users are complaining about lost data.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/07/22/1955245 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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16-Year-Old HP Printer-Driver Bug Impacts Millions of Windows Machines
by Peter Reutemann 22 Jul '21

22 Jul '21

'Researchers have released technical details on a high-severity privilege-escalation flaw in HP printer drivers (also used by Samsung and Xerox), which impacts hundreds of millions of Windows machines. If exploited, cyberattackers could bypass security products; install programs; view, change, encrypt or delete data; or create new accounts with more extensive user rights. The bug (CVE-2021-3438) has lurked in systems for 16 years, researchers at SentinelOne said, but was only uncovered this year. It carries an 8.8 out of 10 rating on the CVSS scale, making it high-severity. According to researchers, the vulnerability exists in a function inside the driver that accepts data sent from User Mode via Input/Output Control (IOCTL); it does so without validating the size parameter. As the name suggests, IOCTL is a system call for device-specific input/output operations. "This function copies a string from the user input using 'strncpy' with a size parameter that is controlled by the user," according to SentinelOne's analysis, released on Tuesday. "Essentially, this allows attackers to overrun the buffer used by the driver." Thus, unprivileged users can elevate themselves into a SYSTEM account, allowing them to run code in kernel mode, since the vulnerable driver is locally available to anyone, according to the firm. The printer-based attack vector is perfect for cybercriminals, according to SentinelOne, since printer drivers are essentially ubiquitous on Windows machines and are automatically loaded on every startup. "Thus, in effect, this driver gets installed and loaded without even asking or notifying the user," explained the researchers. "Whether you are configuring the printer to work wirelessly or via a USB cable, this driver gets loaded. In addition, it will be loaded by Windows on every boot. This makes the driver a perfect candidate to target since it will always be loaded on the machine even if there is no printer connected." -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/21/07/21/2235207 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Adding Custom Entries To A Create-New-Document Menu
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 22 Jul '21

22 Jul '21

If you look at a file/folder view in various of the common GUI file managers, you should see a contextual menu item with a name like “Create New”, showing a submenu of different document types (e.g. “Text File...”, “Spread Sheet Document...”) that you can create in that location. Select an item, it asks you for a name for the new document, and it creates it under that name, as a copy of the template provided for that document type. You can then click to open the newly-created document in the corresponding app and continue working with it in the usual way. This is an alternative to launching the app, creating a new untitled document, then using its “Save-As” function to name the document file. Of course, you can easily create your own templates. On KDE, when I type kde4-config --path templates to find out where a KDE-based file manager like Dolphin finds these templates, it reports /home/ldo/.kde/share/templates/:/usr/share/templates/ The latter contains templates installed systemwide by repo packages, while the former can contain whatever I like. As to the format of these template files? They are just another variation on the ever-popular text-based .desktop file format, which is used for example to define entries in your application menu, and icons on the desktop (for those who like that sort of thing). Oddly, the official spec for this only briefly mentions <https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/ar01s06.ht…> “Type=Link”, without explaining this option further (that I can find). But some searching found this useful post <https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=224&t=119342> on the KDE user forums. For example, if I look at /usr/share/templates/Illustration.desktop on my system, besides all the localized versions of the name to show for this option, there are the lines Type=Link URL=.source/Illustration.odg That “URL” is actually a file path relative to the .desktop file itself, referencing a document template to be copied as the initial state of the new document. Looking in the referenced directory, /usr/share/templates/.source/, I do indeed see the file Illustration.odg, along with many others. The association of the file extension with the app, in this case LibreOffice Draw, is handled through a separate spec, the shared MIME database <https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec/>. This is also widely supported by GUI desktop environments.

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PlasticArm is a 32-bit bendable processor
by Peter Reutemann 22 Jul '21

22 Jul '21

'Wearable electronics, like watches and fitness trackers, represent the next logical step in computing. They've sparked an interest in the development of flexible electronics, which could expand the category to include products like clothing and backpacks. Flexible electronics run into a problem, however: Our processing hardware is anything but flexible. Most efforts to deal with that limitation have involved splitting up processors into a collection of smaller units, linking them with flexible wiring, and then embedding all the components in a flexible polymer. To an extent, the process is a throwback to the early days of computing, when a floating-point unit might reside on a separate chip. But a group within the semiconductor company Arm has now managed to implement one of the company's smaller embedded designs using flexible silicon. The design works and executes all the instructions you'd expect from it, but it also illustrates the compromises we have to make to produce truly flexible electronics.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/researchers-build-a-bendable-arm-pr… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Audacity’s new owner is in another fight with the open source community
by Peter Reutemann 21 Jul '21

21 Jul '21

'Muse Group—owner of the popular audio-editing app Audacity—is in hot water with the open source community again. This time, the controversy isn't over Audacity—it's about MuseScore, an open source application which allows musicians to create, share, and download musical scores (especially, but not only, in the form of sheet music). The MuseScore app itself is licensed GPLv3, which gives developers the right to fork its source and modify it. One such developer, Wenzheng Tang ("Xmader" on GitHub) went considerably further than modifying the app—he also created separate apps designed to bypass MuseScore Pro subscription fees. After thoroughly reviewing the public comments made by both sides at GitHub, Ars spoke at length with Muse Group's Head of Strategy Daniel Ray—known on GitHub by the moniker "workedintheory"—to get to the bottom of the controversy.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/audacitys-new-owner-is-in-another-f… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Nasty Linux Systemd Security Bug Revealed
by Peter Reutemann 21 Jul '21

21 Jul '21

'Qualys has discovered a new systemd security bug that enables any unprivileged user to cause a denial of service via a kernel panic. Slashdot reader inode_buddha shares the news via ZDNet's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: As Bharat Jogi, Qualys's senior manager of Vulnerabilities and Signatures, wrote, "Given the breadth of the attack surface for this vulnerability, Qualys recommends users apply patches for this vulnerability immediately." You can say that again. Systemd is used in almost all modern Linux distributions. This particular security hole arrived in the systemd code in April 2015. It works by enabling attackers to misuse the alloca() function in a way that would result in memory corruption. This, in turn, allows a hacker to crash systemd and hence the entire operating system. Practically speaking, this can be done by a local attacker mounting a filesystem on a very long path. This causes too much memory space to be used in the systemd stack, which results in a system crash. That's the bad news. The good news is that Red Hat Product Security and systemd's developers have immediately patched the hole. ' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/07/20/211230 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Experimental Rust Support Patches Submitted to Linux Kernel Mailing List
by Peter Reutemann 21 Jul '21

21 Jul '21

'"The Rust for Linux project, sponsored by Google, has advanced..." reported the Register earlier this week: A new set of patches submitted to the Linux kernel mailing list summarizes the progress of the project to enable Rust to be used alongside C for implementing the Linux kernel. The progress is significant. - ARM and RISC-V architectures are now supported, thanks to work on rustc_codgen_gcc, which is a GCC codegen for rustc. This means that rustc does the initial compilation of Rust code but GCC (the GNU Compiler Collection) does the backend compilation, enabling support for the architectures that GCC supports... - Overall, "the Rust support is still to be considered experimental. However, as noted back in April, support is good enough that kernel developers can start working on the Rust abstractions for subsystems and write drivers and other modules," continued project leader Miguel Ojeda, a computer scientist at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, now working full time on Rust for Linux... There is substantial support for the project across the industry. Google said in April "we feel that Rust is now ready to join C as a practical language for implementing the kernel" and that it would reduce the number of potential bugs and security vulnerabilities. Google is sponsoring Ojeda to work full time on the project for a year, via the ISRG (Internet Security Research Group), which said last month that it is part of "efforts to move the internet's critical software infrastructure to memory safe code," under the project name Prossimo. The ISRG is also the nonprofit organisation behind Let's Encrypt free security certificates. Ojeda also mentioned that Microsoft's Linux Systems Group is contributing and hopes to submit "select Hyper-V drivers written in Rust." Arm is promising assistance with Rust for Linux on ARM-based systems. IBM has contributed Rust kernel support for its PowerPC processor. More detail is promised at the forthcoming Linux Plumber's Conference in September. In the meantime, the project is on GitHub here. "In addition, we would like to announce that we are organizing a new conference that focuses on Rust and the Linux kernel..." Ojeda posted. "Details will be announced soon." And for context, the Register adds: Linus Torvalds has said on several occasions that he welcomes the possibility of using Rust alongside C for kernel development, and told IT Wire in April that it is "getting to the point where maybe it might be mergeable for 5.14 or something like that."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/21/07/10/0447253 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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MicroG Project
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 21 Jul '21

21 Jul '21

Came across this <https://microg.org/>, which is an open-source reimplementation of much of Google’s proprietary Play Services for Android. Their repos are on GitHub <https://github.com/microg>. They’ve been getting some funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

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DuckDuckGo Launches New Email Protection Service To Remove Trackers
by Peter Reutemann 21 Jul '21

21 Jul '21

'DuckDuckGo is launching a new email privacy service meant to stop ad companies from spying on your inbox. From a report: The company's new Email Protection feature gives users a free "@duck.com" email address, which will forward emails to your regular inbox after analyzing their contents for trackers and stripping any away. DuckDuckGo is also extending this feature with unique, disposable forwarding addresses, which can be generated easily in DuckDuckGo's mobile browser or through desktop browser extensions. The personal DuckDuckGo email is meant to be given out to friends and contacts you know, while the disposable addresses are better served when signing up for free trials, newsletters, or anywhere you suspect might sell your email address. If the email address is compromised, you can easily deactivate it. These tools are similar to anti-tracking features implemented by Apple in iOS 14 and iOS 15, but DuckDuckGo's approach integrates into iOS, Android, and all major web browsers. DuckDuckGo will also make it easier to spin up disposable email addresses on the fly, for newsletters or anywhere you might share your email.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/21/07/20/1532258 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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For years, a backdoor in popular KiwiSDR product gave root to project developer
by Peter Reutemann 20 Jul '21

20 Jul '21

'KiwiSDR is hardware that uses a software-defined radio to monitor transmissions in a local area and stream them over the Internet. A largely hobbyist base of users does all kinds of cool things with the playing-card-sized devices. For instance, a user in Manhattan could connect one to the Internet so that people in Madrid, Spain, or Sydney, Australia, could listen to AM radio broadcasts, CB radio conversations, or even watch lightning storms in Manhattan. On Wednesday, users learned that for years, their devices had been equipped with a backdoor that allowed the KiwiSDR creator—and possibly others—to log in to the devices with administrative system rights. The remote admin could then make configuration changes and access data not just for the KiwiSDR but in many cases to the Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black, or other computing devices the SDR hardware is connected to.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/for-years-a-backdoor-in-popular-kiw… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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