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Chromium Project Finds 70% of Its Serious Security Bugs Are Memory Safety Problems
by Peter Reutemann 25 May '20

25 May '20

'"Around 70% of our serious security bugs are memory safety problems," the Chromium project announced this week. "Our next major project is to prevent such bugs at source." ZDNet reports: The percentage was compiled after Google engineers analyzed 912 security bugs fixed in the Chrome stable branch since 2015, bugs that had a "high" or "critical" severity rating. The number is identical to stats shared by Microsoft. Speaking at a security conference in February 2019, Microsoft engineers said that for the past 12 years, around 70% of all security updates for Microsoft products addressed memory safety vulnerabilities. Both companies are basically dealing with the same problem, namely that C and C++, the two predominant programming languages in their codebases, are "unsafe" languages.... Google says that since March 2019, 125 of the 130 Chrome vulnerabilities with a "critical" severity rating were memory corruption-related issues, showing that despite advances in fixing other bug classes, memory management is still a problem... Half of the 70% are use-after-free vulnerabilities, a type of security issue that arises from incorrect management of memory pointers (addresses), leaving doors open for attackers to attack Chrome's inner components... While software companies have tried before to fix C and C++'s memory management problems, Mozilla has been the one who made a breakthrough by sponsoring, promoting and heavily adopting the Rust programming language in Firefox... Microsoft is also heavily investing in exploring C and C++ alternativesâ¦ But this week, Google also announced similar plans as well... Going forward, Google says it plans to look into developing custom C++ libraries to use with Chrome's codebase, libraries that have better protections against memory-related bugs. The browser maker is also exploring the MiraclePtr project, which aims to turn "exploitable use-after-free bugs into non-security crashes with acceptable performance, memory, binary size and minimal stability impact." And last, but not least, Google also said it plans to explore using "safe" languages, where possible. Candidates include Rust, Swift, JavaScript, Kotlin, and Java.' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/20/05/24/1349204 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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'FOSS Responders' Want to Help Open-Source Groups Survive
by Peter Reutemann 25 May '20

25 May '20

'"Thanks to the coronavirus, technology events have been canceled left and right," writes ZDNet. "This, in turn, is damaging the finances of companies and groups that depend on these events." Some open-source groups, such as The Linux Foundation, can deal with it. Others aren't so fortunate. Some, such as Drupal Foundation, the Open Source Initiative (OSI), Open Source Matters (Joomla), and Ajv JSON Schema validator, are in real trouble. FOSS Responders is trying to help these and other groups and individuals... Nuritzi Sanchez, a FOSS Responder co-founder and GitLab senior open-source program manager, said: We "started out around mid-March as a response to COVID-19 event cancellations. It's a group of open source leaders from companies like Indeed, Facebook, Google, Red Hat, GitHub, GitLab, etc." They've set up a process to help both open-source individuals and organizations facing financial trouble. So far, Sanchez said, "organizations are the ones that have been reaching out most so far." They're also consolidating information on how to plan and execute virtual events and provide a place where people can look for and offer help. FOSS Responders has already had some success in raising donations. Alyssa Wright, Open Collective's director of social engineering, reports that it's raised funds from Indeed, Open Source Collective, Linux Fund, GitHub, Google, Sentry, Ethereum Foundation, and the Sloan Foundation. As a result "FOSS Responders is contributing over $100K to open-source organizations that are experiencing financial strain because of the COVID-19 pandemic." "The main focus of philanthropic efforts will be elsewhere, as they should be," noted LWN.net back in March, "but it is nice to see our community finding ways to help itself out internally."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/05/23/2351224 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Another Patent Troll Sent Packing
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 22 May '20

22 May '20

<https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/21/gnome_foundation_settles_patent_tr…>: In an article comment on this story, [CEO Neil] McGovern said: "For those asking about payment, I can confirm we paid RPI and Leigh Rothschild a grand total of $0.00 for the settlement."

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Check Point Releases Open-Source Fix For Common Linux Memory Corruption Security Hole
by Peter Reutemann 22 May '20

22 May '20

'For years, there's been a known security vulnerability hiding in the GNU C Library (glibc). This library, which is critical for Linux and many other operating systems and programs, had a dynamic memory management security hole that could be used for denial of service (DoS) attacks. Now, the security company, Check Point, has issued an open-source patch, which will make it much more difficult to exploit this memory allocation (malloc) problem. Check Point re-encountered this known problem when it discovered that so-called smart light bulbs could be used to hack into networks by exploiting unprotected single-linked-lists. The double-linked-list version of this problem had been fixed back in 2005 with Safe-Unlinking. But, the single-linked-list version, which is present in the memory primitive functions Fast-Bins and Thread Cache (TCache), remained vulnerable. Now, the fix is in for this problem. This new built-in security mechanism is called Safe-Linking. It protects malloc by signing its single-linked-list pointers with random numbers derived from Linux's Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) functionality. Combined with memory chunk alignment integrity checks, it protects the memory pointers from hijacking attempts and thus the system itself. The patch is now being integrated with the most common standard C library implementation, glibc. Safe-Linking will be released in glibc 2.32 in August 2020. It's already up and running in glibc's popular embedded counterpart: uClibc-NG.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/20/05/21/2018256 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Raspberry Pi 4 Beta Firmware Brings True USB Boot for High-Speed Storage, No microSD Required
by Peter Reutemann 22 May '20

22 May '20

'Owners of a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single-board computer looking to make the most of the device's high-speed USB 3.0 connectivity by turning it into the device's primary storage can now do so — at least, if they're willing to help out with beta-testing the latest firmware. The Raspberry Pi 4 launched last year with a range of improvements over its predecessor, including the option of up to four times as much memory and high-speed USB 3.0 connectivity for peripherals, but with a couple of regressions: The loss of the ability, present in the Raspberry Pi 3 range, to boot from a network server or USB Mass Storage device.' -- source: https://www.hackster.io/news/raspberry-pi-4-beta-firmware-brings-true-usb-b… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Term Of The Week: “RPA”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 21 May '20

21 May '20

Came across this phrase “robotic process automation” (RPA) <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/05/sba_rpa_ban/> which seems to be just another name for “web-scraping”. The site in question also offers APIs that can be used more directly to make requests and receive info. It’s just that the scraping works on a GUI designed for human users and human response times and data rates, so it creates a lot more overhead on the servers when being driven automatically with a lot of requests. Some outfits try to say that using such technology on their site is a violation of their terms of service. As one of the reader comments points out, if a company is banned from using a scraper bot that is batching its requests, and has to resort to hiring an army of humans, creating a concomitant swarm of separate login sessions, to enter the same data, the result can be even worse load on the servers.

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Information Technology Asset Management (ITAM) Forum
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 21 May '20

21 May '20

Choice quote from the founder/chairman <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/20/itam_forum_launches/>: “One of the reasons people have been interested in ITAM in the past is because they are sick of software audits and want to learn to defend themselves against audits...” Given the way the proprietary licence agreements are worded, it’s hard to see how you can avoid this and still use the same software. Further: “Ten years ago, people thought everything would be compliant in the cloud. Although software compliance is less of an issue, costs certainly aren’t planned. It is as complex as ever. Whether it's on the desktop, in the data centre or in the cloud, you’re looking at roughly 35 per cent waste across all of those platforms.” That’s a pretty high figure. It means that, when you buy proprietary software, you are paying about a 50% markup on the supposed price.

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Samsung Smart TV - blocking ads
by Peter Reutemann 21 May '20

21 May '20

Hi everyone Just came across this tip on reddit for blocking ads on your Samsung Smart TV: https://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/gn7fw5/ysk_if_you_own_a_sam… Blocking "ads.samsung.com" (or similar) on the router seems to be sufficient... The above link has more domains listed for Samsung and LG. Not that I'm connecting my TV to the internet in the first place... ;-) Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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List Of Spreadsheet Horror Stories
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 21 May '20

21 May '20

One of the things the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group likes to do is collect horror stories about the (mis)use of spreadsheets <http://eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm>. Found the link in a reader comment <https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/all/2020/05/19/sap_analytics_cloud_o…> to this article <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/19/sap_analytics_cloud_office_integra…> about how software company SAP, creator of a complete business analytics suite, has felt compelled to include an interface to Microsoft Excel, just because that’s what most of its customers are familiar with.

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SD Cards Version 8 Are Coming
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 20 May '20

20 May '20

According to the pic linked from this article <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/20/sd_8_for_sd_express/>, the new SD card spec uses PCIe instead of the previous “SD Bus” interface to achieve around ... is it 4GB/s, or 4Gb/s? The article says it both ways, while the diagram uses capital B throughout. The current fastest SD cards have two rows of pins; this spec adds a third row.

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