Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Mozilla: Bazel, TLS and Decentralisation

Filed under
Moz/FF
  • evaluating bazel for building firefox, part 2

    In our last post, we highlighted some of the advantages that Bazel would bring. The remote execution and caching benefits Bazel bring look really attractive, but it’s difficult to tell exactly how much they would benefit Firefox. I looked for projects that had switched to Bazel, and a brief summary of each project’s experience is written below.

    The Bazel rules for nodejs highlight Dataform’s switch to Bazel, which took about 2 months. Their build involves some combination of “NPM packages, Webpack builds, Node services, and Java pipelines”. Switching plus enabling remote caching reduced the average time for a build in CI from 30 minutes to 5 minutes; incremental builds for local development have been “reduced to seconds from minutes”. It’s not clear whether the local development experience is also hooked up to the caching infrastructure as well.

  • Validating Delegated Credentials for TLS in Firefox

    At Mozilla we are well aware of how fragile the Web Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) can be. From fraudulent Certification Authorities (CAs) to implementation errors that leak private keys, users, often unknowingly, are put in a position where their ability to establish trust on the Web is compromised. Therefore, in keeping with our mission to create a Web where individuals are empowered, independent and safe, we welcome ideas that are aimed at making the Web PKI more robust. With initiatives like our Common CA Database (CCADB), CRLite prototyping, and our involvement in the CA/Browser Forum, we’re committed to this objective, and this is why we embraced the opportunity to partner with Cloudflare to test Delegated Credentials for TLS in Firefox, which is currently undergoing standardization at the IETF.

    As CAs are responsible for the creation of digital certificates, they dictate the lifetime of an issued certificate, as well as its usage parameters. Traditionally, end-entity certificates are long-lived, exhibiting lifetimes of more than one year. For server operators making use of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) such as Cloudflare, this can be problematic because of the potential trust placed in CDNs regarding sensitive private key material. Of course, Cloudflare has architectural solutions for such key material but these add unwanted latency to connections and present with operational difficulties. To limit exposure, a short-lived certificate would be preferable for this setting. However, constant communication with an external CA to obtain short-lived certificates could result in poor performance or even worse, lack of access to a service entirely.

    The Delegated Credentials mechanism decentralizes the problem by allowing a TLS server to issue short-lived authentication credentials (with a validity period of no longer than 7 days) that are cryptographically bound to a CA-issued certificate. These short-lived credentials then serve as the authentication keys in a regular TLS 1.3 connection between a Firefox client and a CDN edge server situated in a low-trust zone (where the risk of compromise might be higher than usual and perhaps go undetected). This way, performance isn’t hindered and the compromise window is limited. For further technical details see this excellent blog post by Cloudflare on the subject.

  • Tantek Çelik: #Redecentralize 2019 Session: Decentralized Identity & Rethinking Reputation

    On Friday 2019-10-25 I participated in Redecentralize Conference 2019, a one-day unconference in London, England on the topics of decentralisation, privacy, autonomy, and digital infrastructure.

    I gave a 3 minute lightning talk, helped run an IndieWeb standards & methods session in the first open slot of the day, and participated in two more sessions. The second open session had no Etherpad notes, so this post is from my one week ago memory recall.

    [...]

    We did not get into any deep discussions of any specific decentralized identity systems, and that was perhaps ok. Mostly there discussion about the downsides of centrally controlled identity, and how each of us wanted more control over various aspects of our online identities.

    For anyone who asked, I posited that a good way to start with decentralized identity was to buy and use a personal domain name for your primary online presence, setting it up to sign-into sites, and build a reputation using that. Since you can pick the domain name, you can pick whatever facet(s) of your identity you wish to represent. It may not be perfectly distributed, however it does work today, and is a good way to explore a lot of the questions and challenges of decentralized identity.

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.