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Fwd: [NZLUG] Linux.conf.au Call for Papers.
by Peter Reutemann 25 Jul '18

25 Jul '18

Apologies for cross-posting. Cheers, Peter ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Michael Field <michael.field(a)concepts.co.nz> Date: Thu, Jul 26, 2018 at 9:58 AM Subject: [NZLUG] Linux.conf.au Call for Papers. To: "nzlug(a)lists.nzoss.org.nz" <nzlug(a)lists.nzoss.org.nz> I don’t know if anybody has posted that the Call for Proposals is open for Linux Conference Australia (in Chch this year) – they close on 30th July. See https://linux.conf.au/ if you want to submit Presentation / Tutorial / Miniconf. If accepted, you get free registration, speakers dinner ticket and so on. Mike *Michael Field* | *Senior Systems Engineer* *COMPUTER CONCEPTS LIMITED* <http://concepts.co.nz/> *P:* 03 348 2500 | *W:* concepts.co.nz 21 Durham Street South, Sydenham, Christchurch, New Zealand 8023 This email and any attachments are confidential. They may contain privileged information or copyright material. If you are not an intended recipient, you should not read, copy, use or disclose the contents without authorisation and we request you contact us at once by return email. Please then delete the email and any attachments from your system. We do not accept liability in connection with computer viruses, data corruption, delay, interruption, unauthorised access or unauthorised amendment. Any views expressed in this email and any attachments do not necessarily reflect the views of the company. _______________________________________________ NZLUG mailing list NZLUG(a)lists.nzoss.org.nz http://lists.nzoss.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/nzlug -- 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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Bluetooth Security Flaw Could Let Nearby Attacker Grab Your Private Data
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jul '18

24 Jul '18

'A recently discovered bug in many Bluetooth firmware and OS drivers could allow an attacker within about 30 meters to capture and decrypt data shared between Bluetooth-paired devices. Researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology discovered the flaw, which was flagged today by Carnegie Mellon University CERT. It affects Bluetooth's Secure Simple Pairing and Low Energy Secure Connections. ZDNet reports: As the CERT notification explains, the vulnerability is caused by some vendors' Bluetooth implementations not properly validating the cryptographic key exchange when Bluetooth devices are pairing. The flaw slipped into the Bluetooth key exchange implementation which uses the elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) key exchange to establish a secure connection over an insecure channel. This may allow a nearby but remote attacker to inject a a bogus public key to determine the session key during the public-private key exchange. They could then conduct a man-in-the-middle attack and "passively intercept and decrypt all device messages, and/or forge and inject malicious messages." Thankfully, patches are on the way. "Intel recommended users upgrade to the latest support driver and to check with vendors if they have provided one in their respective updates," reports ZDNet. "Dell has released a new driver for the Qualcomm driver it uses while Lenovo's update is for the flaw in Intel software. LG and Huawei have referenced fixes for CVE-2018-5383 in their respective July updates for mobile devices." It is not yet known if Android, Google, or the Linux kernel are affected. Apple has released a patch for the flaw earlier this month.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/18/07/24/2121215 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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ReactOS 0.4.9 Is Entirely Self-Hosting, Fixes FastFAT Crashes
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jul '18

24 Jul '18

'ReactOS, the "free Windows clone" operating system, has pushed out ReactOS 0.4.9 just recently, which brings a whole slew of improvements. With this latest 0.4.9 version, ReactOS has become entirely self-hosting without any issues, which means ReactOS can fully build itself from within itself, it does not require any third-party operating system to compile ReactOS. Self-hosting was built into older ReactOS versions, but it came with a myriad of issues -- the system would become too stressed under memory usage and storage I/O loads. This was due to a flawed NT-compliant kernel. Additional improvements in ReactOS 0.4.9 include overall stability and performance enhancements. The hardware abstraction layer and the FastFAT drivers received significant attention, and FastFAT should no longer eat through the cache so fast it causes system crashes due to resource leakage. FastFAT has also been rewritten to trigger a "chkdsk" repair on dirty / corrupt volumes during boot detections. Some other quality improvements are the addition of a built-in zipfldr extension -- ReactOS can now natively unpackage zipped archives, without the need of a third-party tool like WinZip.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/07/24/0139247 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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In Encryption Push, Chrome Flags HTTP Sites as 'Not Secure'
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jul '18

24 Jul '18

'On Tuesday, Chrome started marking sites that don't use HTTPS as "not secure." From a report: First announced two years ago, Google said it would flag any site that still uses unencrypted HTTP to deliver its content in the latest version of Chrome, out Tuesday. It's part of the company's years-long effort effort to gradually nudge more webmasters and site owners into adopting HTTPS, a secure encryption standard for data in transit. Any site that doesn't load with green padlock or a "secure" message in the browser's address bar will be flagged -- and shamed -- as insecure. [...] According to nightly data compiled by security experts Troy Hunt and Scott Helme, roughly 100 of the top 500 websites are still serving their pages over unencrypted HTTP -- all of which will today be flagged as "insecure." Many of those sites -- like Baidu, JD.com, and Google.cn -- are Chinese language sites, but many popular Western sites -- including BBC.com, DailyMail.co.uk, and Fedex.com -- are HTTP. Of the top million sites, a little over half do not redirect to HTTPS. Chrome 68 also brings with it Page Lifecycle API, and the Payment Handler API. From a report: The Payment Handler API builds on the Payment Request API, which helped users check out online. The new API enables web-based payment apps to facilitate payments directly within the Payment Request experience, as seen above. As with every version, Chrome 68 includes an update to the V8 JavaScript engine: version 6.8. It reduces memory consumption as well as includes improvements to array destructuring, Object.assign, and TypedArray.prototype.sort. Check out the full list of changes for more information.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/07/24/177207 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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Firefox Blocks Autoplaying Web Audio
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jul '18

24 Jul '18

'Mozilla's latest Nightly builds for Firefox now include an option to mute autoplaying audio. The feature was recently added to the Chrome browser, but Mozilla's update offers a few more options. According to Engadget, "You can turn the feature off entirely, force it to ask for permission, and make exceptions for specific sites." Keep in mind that these are nightly releases, so you will most likely run into some bugs. The "polished version" is likely weeks away.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/07/24/2055217 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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Researchers Detail New CPU Side-Channel Attack Named SpectreRSB
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jul '18

24 Jul '18

'"Scientists from the University of California, Riverside (UCR) have published details last week about a new Spectre-class attack that they call SpectreRSB," reports Bleeping Computer. "Just like all 'Spectre-class' attacks, SpectreRSB takes advantage of the process of speculative execution -- a feature found in all modern CPUs that has the role of improving performance by computing operations in advance and later discarding unneeded data. The difference from previous Spectre-like attacks is that SpectreRSB recovers data from the speculative execution process by attacking a different CPU component involved in this 'speculation' routine, namely the Return Stack Buffer (RSB)." In a research paper, academics say they've used SpectreRSB attacks to recover data belonging to other processes, and have even tricked the RSB into spilling SGX secrets. The attack works on Intel, AMD, and ARM processors, known to use RSB. The attack can also bypass all the mitigations put in place for the original Spectre/Meltdown flaws.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/18/07/23/2143259 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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None of Google's 85, 000 Employees Have Been Phished in More Than a Year After Company Required Them to Use Physical Security Keys For 2FA
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jul '18

24 Jul '18

'Google has not had any of its 85,000+ employees successfully phished on their work-related accounts since early 2017, when it began requiring all employees to use physical Security Keys in place of passwords and one-time codes, the company told KrebsOnSecurity. From the report: Security Keys are inexpensive USB-based devices that offer an alternative approach to two-factor authentication (2FA), which requires the user to log in to a Web site using something they know (the password) and something they have (e.g., a mobile device). A Google spokesperson said Security Keys now form the basis of all account access at Google. "We have had no reported or confirmed account takeovers since implementing security keys at Google," the spokesperson said. "Users might be asked to authenticate using their security key for many different apps/reasons. It all depends on the sensitivity of the app and the risk of the user at that point in time." The basic idea behind two-factor authentication is that even if thieves manage to phish or steal your password, they still cannot log in to your account unless they also hack or possess that second factor.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/07/23/1944236 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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Academics Publish New Software-Level Protections Against Spectre and Rowhammer Attacks
by Peter Reutemann 23 Jul '18

23 Jul '18

'Academics from multiple universities have announced fixes for two severe security flaws known as Spectre and Rowhammer. Both these fixes are at the software level, meaning they don't require CPU or RAM vendors to alter products, and could, in theory, be applied as basic software patches. The first of these new mitigation mechanisms was announced on Thursday, last week. A research team from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire says it created a fix for Spectre Variant 1 (CVE-2017-5753), a vulnerability discovered at the start of the year affecting modern CPUs. Their fix uses ELFbac, an in-house-developed Linux kernel patch that brings access control policies to runtime virtual memory accesses of Linux processes, at the level of ELF binary executables. [...] The second fix for a major flaw announced last week came on Saturday from the Systems and Network Security Group at VU Amsterdam. Researchers announced a new technique called ZebRAM that they said is a comprehensive software protection against Rowhammer attacks.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/18/07/23/1613217 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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NetBSD 8.0 Released
by Peter Reutemann 22 Jul '18

22 Jul '18

'The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 8.0, the sixteenth major release of the NetBSD operating system. This release brings stability improvements, hundreds of bug fixes, and many new features. Some highlights of the NetBSD 8.0 release are: — USB stack rework, USB3 support added. — In-kernel audio mixer (audio_system(9)). — Reproducible builds — PaX MPROTECT (W^X) memory protection enforced by default — PaX ASLR enabled by default — Position independent executables by default [...] NetBSD is free. All of the code is under non-restrictive licenses, and may be used without paying royalties to anyone.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/07/21/2341255 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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A Fifth Undocumented Cisco Backdoor Has Been Discovered
by Peter Reutemann 21 Jul '18

21 Jul '18

'Cisco released 25 security updates Wednesday, including a critical patch removing an undocumented password for "root" accounts of Cisco Policy Suite (sold to ISPs and large corporate clients). "The vulnerability received a rare severity score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10 on the CVSSv3 scale," reports Bleeping Computer. An anonymous reader quotes Tom's Hardware: Over the past few months, not one, not two, but five different backdoors joined the list of security flaws in Cisco routers.... In March, a hardcoded account with the username "cisco" was revealed. The backdoor would have allowed attackers to access over 8.5 million Cisco routers and switches remotely. That same month, another hardcoded password was found for Cisco's Prime Collaboration Provisioning software, which is used for remote installation of Cisco's video and voice products. Later this May, Cisco found another undocumented backdoor account in Cisco's Digital Network Architecture Center, used by enterprises for the provisioning of devices across a network. In June, yet another backdoor account was found in Cisco's Wide Area Application Services, a software tool for Wide Area Network traffic optimization... Whether or not the backdoor accounts were created in error, Cisco will need to put an end to them before this lack of care for security starts to affect its business.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/07/21/2133202 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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