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Security: Meltdown, Spectre, Apple, CoffeeMiner, EMC, VMware and More

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Security
  • NSA Didn't Know of Meltdown, Spectre, Trump Cyber Czar Says

    The National Security Agency didn't know about the Meltdown or Spectre flaws, White House cybersecurity coordinator Rob Joyce said at the International Conference on Cyber Security at Fordham University Law School here today (Jan. 11).

  • spectre and the end of langsec

    Like many I was profoundly saddened by this analysis. I want to believe in constructive correctness, in math and in proofs. And so with the rise of functional programming, I thought that this historical slide from reason towards observation was just that, historical, and that the "safe" languages had a compelling value that would be evident eventually: that "another world is possible".

    In particular I found solace in "langsec", an approach to assessing and ensuring system security in terms of constructively correct programs. One obvious application is parsing of untrusted input, and indeed the langsec.org website appears to emphasize this domain as one in which a programming languages approach can be fruitful. It is, after all, a truth universally acknowledged, that a program with good use of data types, will be free from many common bugs. So far so good, and so far so successful.

    The basis of language security is starting from a programming language with a well-defined, easy-to-understand semantics. From there you can prove (formally or informally) interesting security properties about particular programs. For example, if a program has a secret k, but some untrusted subcomponent C of it should not have access to k, one can prove if k can or cannot leak to C. This approach is taken, for example, by Google's Caja compiler to isolate components from each other, even when they run in the context of the same web page.

    But the Spectre and Meltdown attacks have seriously set back this endeavor. One manifestation of the Spectre vulnerability is that code running in a process can now read the entirety of its address space, bypassing invariants of the language in which it is written, even if it is written in a "safe" language. This is currently being used by JavaScript programs to exfiltrate passwords from a browser's password manager, or bitcoin wallets.

  • Is Apple Even Paying Attention To macOS Security Anymore?

    A new Mac security flaw lets you type literally any username and password in order to unlock the Mac App Store panel in System Preferences. It’s probably not a big deal practically speaking—the panel is unlocked by default—but the fact that this issue exists at all is a worrying reminder that Apple isn’t prioritizing security like they used to.

  • Ubuntu Linux Unbootable After Users Install Meltdown And Spectre Patches
  • Ubuntu Update For Meltdown And Spectre Chip Flaws Leaves Some PCs Unbootable

    Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. Just ask the affected users of older AMD systems who had their PCs bricked after downloading and installing a Windows update that was supposed to protect them from Meltdown and Spectre. It is not just Windows users who are suffering, either. Some Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 users also report that the latest update for their OS has rendered their system unable to boot.

  • How CoffeeMiner Attack Hacks Public Wi-Fi And Uses Your PC For Mining Cryptocurrency

    After a series of ransomware attacks capturing the headlines past year, crypto mining malware and cryptojacking attacks came into the play. Just last month, a Starbucks customer found that the infected Wi-Fi hotspot was trying to mine Monero digital coins. It was a new kind of threat associated with using public hotspots, which are often labeled unsafe and users are advised to use VPN services for extra privacy.

  • Prosecutors say Mac spyware stole millions of user images over 13 years

    An indictment filed Wednesday in federal court in Ohio may answer some of those questions. It alleges Fruitfly was the creation of an Ohio man who used it for more than 13 years to steal millions of images from infected computers as he took detailed notes of what he observed.

  • EMC, VMware security bugs throw gasoline on cloud security fire

    While everyone was screaming about Meltdown and Spectre, another urgent security fix was already in progress for many corporate data centers and cloud providers who use products from Dell's EMC and VMware units. A trio of critical, newly reported vulnerabilities in EMC and VMware backup and recovery tools—EMC Avamar, EMC NetWorker, EMC Integrated Data Protection Appliance, and vSphere Data Protection—could allow an attacker to gain root access to the systems or to specific files, or inject malicious files into the server's file system. These problems can only be fixed with upgrades. While the EMC vulnerabilities were announced late last year, VMware only became aware of its vulnerability last week.

  • Malware based on open source Kotlin language discovered lurking in Google Play [Ed: This has nothing to do with "open source". They don't say "proprietary" when the framework is.]

    Basically, it's pretty typical of the malware that crops up in dodgy apps that have wormed their way past the digital bouncers on the Play Store.

  • How to increase Linux security by disabling USB support

    This may sound like a crazy way of enhancing security on a server, but if you can get away with it—as in you don't need any USB devices such as keyboards, mice, external drives—disabling USB support can be an added means of ensuring malicious files do not find their way onto your servers. Obviously, this will only work for headless machines, so you better make certain you can SSH into those servers, otherwise, you'll find yourself in trouble trying to input anything via keyboard or mouse.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.