codeblog code is freedom — patching my itch

May 29, 2010

Linux Security Summit 2010

Filed under: Blogging,Debian,Security,Ubuntu,Ubuntu-Server — kees @ 5:22 pm

The Call For Participation is open for the 2010 Linux Security Summit, being held just before this year’s LinuxCon.

If you’re interested in helping make Linux more secure, you’ve got ideas to present, want to have your opinion heard, or generally just want to hang out, please join us and/or suggest a topic for discussion (CFP ends June 4th, so please hurry).

I’m hoping to get a chance to discuss what I’m calling the “popular kernel hardening patches” which appear in a lot of distros yet remain missing from the upstream Linux kernel.

© 2010, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

May 27, 2010

too lazy to recompile

Filed under: Blogging,Debian,Multimedia,Ubuntu — kees @ 9:13 pm

I have a camera that takes .MP4 files. MythTV’s Gallery plugin has a static list of extensions it recognizes. MP4 is not one of them. I can rename all my files (which is wrong — they’re MP4s not something else), or I can edit the source and recompile.

Or, since I want to watch them RIGHT NOW, I can binary-edit the shared library and replace something I’ll not have any of (WMV) with MP4.

# strings -a /usr/lib/mythtv/plugins/libmythgallery.so | grep WMV 
*.WMV
# sed -i -e 's/\.WMV/.MP4/' /usr/lib/mythtv/plugins/libmythgallery.so

Ta-da. Just need to make sure I don’t change the size of the binary. :)

(Oddly, I’m not too lazy to open a bug and propose a patch.)

© 2010, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

May 19, 2010

openoffice presenter console

Filed under: Blogging,Debian,Ubuntu — kees @ 5:38 pm

During the Lucid development sprint, Pete showed me the glory that is the OpenOffice presenter console. Since then I’ve switched laptops, and I figured I need to document for myself, and maybe others, how to have your OOo presentation on one screen (e.g. the projector) and the presentation notes, clock, etc, on another (e.g. the main laptop display).

First, install ‘openoffice.org-presenter-console’, and once you have your displays configured, launch OpenOffice and select “Slide Show” / “Slide Show Settings …”. From here, you can configure the displays under “Multiple displays”.

So nice. :)

UPDATE: corrected my typo. thank you! :)

© 2010, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

May 17, 2010

yay for barriers

Filed under: Blogging,Debian,Ubuntu,Ubuntu-Server — kees @ 12:13 pm

I find it surreal to have people guessing at my motivations when they could just ask me. On top of all that, I find it weird that people spend so much time with in-fighting. I just want my system not to suck.

Some time ago (during in the Ubuntu Karmic development cycle maybe in September 2009), I started having giant problems with my build system. All I/O would start to stall, wait times would surge, and usually my entire system would just go unresponsive with the disk light on solid. This scared the crap out of me, and it wasn’t entirely obvious what was triggering it. No one else seemed to be seeing it. I managed to start tracking things using “latencytop”, and saw stuff like liferea going crazy. As I eliminated more and more things, I eventually settled on it being a problem with umount, and I reported an Ubuntu bug. It seemed to look like an upstream bug that no one else but the reporter could reproduce either.

Since no one else was seeing this issue, and it seemed related to LVM snapshots, I migrated off of snapshots, and started using aufs overlays for my builds. For a while, it seemed like things went away. It didn’t, and I started hitting it again. I opened a new (now famous) bug in Ubuntu, since now snapshots weren’t in the picture, and I didn’t want to confuse the earlier history. I managed to find a relatively minimal test-case too. A few other people commenting on the bug were seeing the problem now too, but it was less pronounced for them.

As an aside, this wasn’t a “just wait a few seconds longer” kind of issue on my system. A single umount would last 30-40 minutes. And when I’m doing parallel builds of security updates, this would turn into my system being unavailable for hours at a stretch.

Since none of the kernel developers I was in contact with were able to track down the root cause, I asked Ted Ts’o in email if he could just quickly peek in on this for me, since I figured he’d be in a good position to confirm or deny it. I didn’t want to start wasting upstream time with this if it wasn’t reproducible (see earlier upstream kernel bug). To my great relief, Ted found a few minutes to check it, and was able to immediately confirm it and give me a viable work-around (“sync; umount …”) for the time being. I confirmed the work-around, and went off to do other things.

A while later, Ted came back to deliver a bit of a rant, the purpose of which was not clear to me, but I ultimately ignored it — I didn’t seem directed at me. I just wanted my system operating normally, and he’d done me a favor to check in on it and got me a work-around.

More time passes, and I eventually get caught in another I/O-wait melt-down. On investigation, it seemed that the in-kernel work-around in the Ubuntu kernel totally back-fired on me in some cases, rendering even the user-space work-around useless. After investigating the Ubuntu-specific work-around, I re-read Ted’s rant in the course of researching what had happened during this bug’s triage.

It seemed that Ted was basically saying:
– this is an upstream problem
– RedHat hasn’t run into it and he didn’t know why

I figured I should confirm for myself if Fedora was affected, so downloaded and installed Fedora to double-check there. Since I was able to reproduce it there, I opened an upstream bug, linking back to the original Ubuntu bug, and then went to open a bug in the Fedora tracker, linking back to upstream.

And it seems to be these actions that everyone has jumped on. I will now bore you with the reality of my motivations: I wanted to fix the bug so no one would end up experiencing the same pain I’d been through over the last 6 months.

The bug was, from my perspective, a serious issue. Since I’d managed to reproduce it in another distro, it was my duty as a Free Software developer to report it to them. And, in what I felt was an unambiguous gesture, I made sure to include the link to the upstream kernel bug. Reproducing it in Ubuntu, in Fedora, and with a stock kernel had me confident that it was an upstream issue. While Ted did correctly suspect the issue was upstream, I really didn’t want to just open an upstream bug and have it be ignored. I wanted some additional proof of reproduction, which I got when I tested it on Fedora.

So, I’m rather saddened that so many people spent so much time questioning my motivations, making fun of Canonical, or doing anything other than trying to just simply solve this problem. I’m totally disinterested in inter-distro fighting. Instead, I continue to assume we’re all on the same team, fighting a philosophical battle against close-source software. And in that regard, I think it’s still true. If I ignore the rants and jeering, I come away thankful for all the people that spent time trying reproduce the issue at Canonical, at RedHat, and in the larger community. I’m hugely thankful that Ted made some time to let me know I wasn’t crazy, and there was actually a problem. I’m thankful for having some work-arounds, and I’m thankful that the root cause was eventually ferreted out, with some possible solutions. I’m even thankful that some people on the LWN thread saw that, far from malicious, I was trying to be helpful with the bug.

I just wanted my filesystem not to eat my computer. And I was hoping other people could maybe help me, since I’m not a filesystem expert. The drama around this bug is pathetic, and now by talking about it for almost 1000 words, I’m just as guilty.

© 2010, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

April 29, 2010

Intrepid Inactive

Filed under: Blogging,Security,Ubuntu,Ubuntu-Server — kees @ 5:00 pm

Intrepid is now officially at end-of-life.

Looking back through my build logs, it seems my desktop did 1340 builds, spending 70 hours, 38 minutes, and 49 seconds doing builds during the development cycle of Intrepid. Once released, it performed an additional 123 builds, taking 19 hours, 29 minutes, and 48 seconds for security updates. As before, these times obviously don’t include patch hunting/development, failed builds, testing, stuff done on my laptop or the porting machines, etc.

Thank you Intrepid! You were the first release to carry the full set of by-default hardened compiler flags.

© 2010, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

April 7, 2010

Debian maintainer scripts diagrams

Filed under: Blogging,Debian,Ubuntu — kees @ 2:27 pm

Since the Debian Women Wiki is on hiatus, I found myself without the handy Maintainer Scripts diagrams today. So, I recovered it from Google’s cache, and put it up on the main Debian wiki: MaintainerScripts.

I used a great tool to go from HTML back to MoinMoin syntax: html2wiki

© 2010, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

March 10, 2010

openssl client does not check commonName

Filed under: Blogging,Debian,Security,Ubuntu,Ubuntu-Server — kees @ 10:47 pm

I realize the openssl s_client tool tries to be upper-layer protocol agnostic, but doesn’t everything that uses SSL do commonName checking (HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, FTP, POP, XMPP)? Shouldn’t this be something openssl s_client does by default, maybe with an option to turn it off for less common situations?

Here it doesn’t complain about connecting to “outflux.net” when the cert has a CN for “www.outflux.net”:

echo QUIT | openssl s_client -CApath /etc/ssl/certs \
  -connect outflux.net:443 2>/dev/null | egrep "subject=|Verify"

subject=/CN=www.outflux.net
    Verify return code: 0 (ok)

© 2010, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

Clearing /tmp on boot

Filed under: Blogging,Debian,Ubuntu,Ubuntu-Server — kees @ 3:48 pm

I don’t like unconditionally clearing /tmp on boot, since I’m invariably working on something in there when my system locks up. But I do like /tmp getting cleaned up from time to time. As a compromise, I’ve set TMPTIME=7 in /etc/default/rcS so that only stuff older than 7 days is deleted when I reboot.

© 2010, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

March 8, 2010

Cylon Dorkshield

Filed under: Blogging,Debian,Embedded,Ubuntu — kees @ 8:42 pm

I’ve finally soldered on the LEDs for the Cylon DorkShield I designed and got built in a recent DorkBotPDX PCB run. I’m having trouble with the programmer, but I got the shield mostly working:

Cylon DorkShield

© 2010 – 2015, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

February 28, 2010

egosurfing with git

Filed under: Blogging,Debian,Ubuntu,Ubuntu-Server — kees @ 12:19 pm

I’m never sure when my commits to Linux actually make it into an official release. Luckily, since releases are tagged, I can use “git tag --contains COMMIT” to find them. So, in a stunning display of inefficiency, here’s what I use to find my commits:

git log --author='Kees Cook' --pretty=oneline | \
while read commit name; do \
    echo $(git tag --contains $commit | head -n1): "$name"; \
done

Which lets me know where my code is with respect to releases:

v2.6.33: x86, mm: Report state of NX protections during boot
v2.6.33: sysctl: require CAP_SYS_RAWIO to set mmap_min_addr
v2.6.32: proc: fix reported unit for RLIMIT_CPU
v2.6.31: modules: sysctl to block module loading
...

© 2010, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

February 25, 2010

fun with process scheduling

Filed under: Debian,Ubuntu,Ubuntu-Server — kees @ 11:04 am

In an attempt to force an exec to totally stall so I could attach gdb to a process that does a setuid transition without freaking it out (i.e. can’t launch “sudo gdb …”), I briefly played with process priority, scheduling, and CPU affinity (pinning a process to a CPU).

So far, the best attempt at stalling the process was to set CPU affinity, set its scheduling policy (IDLE), drop the priority value fully (19), and then run a CPU hog with the same CPU affinity with a very high priority (-20).

Staller: sudo schedtool -a 0 -N -n -20 -e /tmp/spin-cpu
Stallee: schedtool -a 0 -D -n 19 -e /usr/bin/sudo -s

The hope was to then run “sudo gdb /usr/bin/sudo $(pidof sudo)“, but it seems that this still isn’t enough to make the exec of sudo totally stall while the “spin-cpu” process is running — it certainly executes more slowly, but I want it to stop.

I have this feeling like I’m missing something obvious about how to accomplish this gdb session sanely. I wonder if I can get gdb to switch targets across a child exec, i.e. run gdb as root on a program that fully drops privs, but then execs sudo. Guess it’s time to go read the gdb manual some more…

© 2010, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

February 18, 2010

data mining for NX bit

Filed under: Blogging,Debian,Security,Ubuntu,Ubuntu-Server — kees @ 11:15 am

9% of Ubuntu systems that were used to report bugs that included their /proc/cpuinfo file need to fix their BIOS settings to gain the NX bit.

Check for yourself. (Run it with --verbose for useful details.)

Out of 7511 Ubuntu bugs Brian Murray collected for me that included /proc/cpuinfo files, there were 7270 unique contents (which surprised me — I was expecting this to be much lower).

  • 5 (0.07%) were non-x86.
  • 1 (0.02%) had corrupted contents (likely due to a search/replace in apport gone awry).
  • 5670 (77.99%) had NX (this also surprised me — I was not expecting it to be so high).
  • 337 (4.64%) lacked PAE, and so cannot have NX (I didn’t expect this to be so low; Ubuntu bug reporters must have relatively recent hardware overall).
  • 595 (8.18%) had PAE and correctly lacked NX (I didn’t expect this to be so high — PAE without NX is a bit more common than I’d hoped; hopefully these systems are running 32bit kernels to at least get the partial NX emulation).
  • 662 (9.1%) had PAE but incorrectly lacked NX.

It’s this last group of systems I’m hoping to get fixed through education.

© 2010, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

February 9, 2010

easy example of filesystem capabilities

Filed under: Blogging,Debian,Networking,Security,Ubuntu,Ubuntu-Server — kees @ 11:15 am

Instead of using setuid programs, the goal for the future is to use fine-grained capabilities. For example, here is /bin/ping:

$ ls -la /bin/ping
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 35680 2009-11-05 00:41 /bin/ping
$ ./ping 127.0.0.1
PING 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.041 ms
…
$ sudo setcap CAP_NET_RAW=ep /bin/ping
$ getcap /bin/ping
/bin/ping = cap_net_raw+ep
$ ./ping 127.0.0.1
PING 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.041 ms
…
$ dmesg | tail -n1
[212275.772124] warning: `/bin/ping’ has both setuid-root and effective capabilities. Therefore not raising all capabilities.

The best part is that the kernel will choose the set of least privileges when both setuid and capabilities exist. Easy way to transition!

© 2010, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

February 8, 2010

rng-tools with TPM

Filed under: Blogging,Debian,Security,Ubuntu,Ubuntu-Server — kees @ 7:32 pm

In Ubuntu, I uploaded an rng-tools that supports the RNG in TPM devices (my patch is waiting in Debian). This hardware is available on a bunch of systems, including several Thinkpads and the Intel Q35, Q45 and newer main boards.

While most TPM RNGs aren’t really heavy-duty hardware RNGs, they are at least a mild source of randomness. I’ll be using an entropy key eventually, but for now, the TPM can supplement my collected entropy.

/etc/default/rng-tools:

HRNGDEVICE=/dev/null
RNGDOPTIONS=”–hrng=tpm –fill-watermark=90% –feed-interval=1″

After it’s been running a bit:

Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: bits received from HRNG source: 6180064
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: bits sent to kernel pool: 6166144
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: entropy added to kernel pool: 4624608
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2 successes: 309
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2 failures: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Monobit: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Poker: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Runs: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Long run: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Continuous run: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: HRNG source speed: (min=5.207; avg=6.145; max=6.200)Kibits/s
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS tests speed: (min=66.925; avg=75.789; max=112.861)Mibits/s
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: Lowest ready-buffers level: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: Entropy starvations: 308
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: Time spent starving for entropy: (min=3150263; avg=3178447.994; max=3750848)us

And now the kernel entropy pool is high:

$ echo $(cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail)/$(cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/poolsize)
3968/4096

© 2010, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

January 24, 2010

Google is wardriving

Filed under: Blogging,Debian,General,Networking,Security,Ubuntu,Web — kees @ 8:28 pm

So, a while back, Google started providing location services. This seemed pretty cool, but I kind of ignored it until recently when I was playing with my Android’s location API. With the GPS off, and no cell towers visible (my basement gets terrible cell service), my phone knew within about 500 feet of where it actually was. All I was connected to was my wifi.

Bottom line: it seems that Google, among other methods, is likely wardriving while photographing for Street View. They are now able to pinpoint wifi access points if they happened to see it while driving through your city.

I’m really rather astonished that no one is freaking out about this; I’m a bit unnerved. I implemented the location-of-your-wifi API quickly, so I could terrify myself further. You can do lookups via my location website too, if you want.

UPDATE: yeah, it would seem to be crowd-sourced wifi and cell tower triangulation data. I should say “Google is WarCrowding”.

© 2010, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

January 19, 2010

Using huludesktop on MythTV

Filed under: Blogging,Security,Ubuntu — kees @ 11:29 am

Based on a friend’s recommendation, I decided I would install Hulu Desktop for my MythTV system.

The MythTV wiki instructions were very good. However, I didn’t like that it was a closed-source binary doing network traffic. (While “system” doesn’t show up in “readelf -r” output, that doesn’t mean it isn’t doing direct syscalls, or manually finding the “system” offset in the libc library, or is vulnerable to overflows, and on and on.) So, to put my mind at ease, I decided to confine it in an AppArmor profile:

#include <tunables/global>

/usr/bin/huludesktop {
#include <abstractions/gnome>
#include <abstractions/audio>
#include <abstractions/nameservice>

/etc/huludesktop/** r,
@{HOME}/.huludesktop rwkl,
@{HOME}/.local/share/.huludesktop.data rwkl,
@{HOME}/.macromedia/Flash_Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/*.hulu.com/** r,
@{HOME}/.macromedia/Flash_Player/#SharedObjects/ r,
@{HOME}/.macromedia/Flash_Player/#SharedObjects/*/*.hulu.com/ rw,
@{HOME}/.macromedia/Flash_Player/#SharedObjects/*/*.hulu.com/** rwkl,

# MythTV is already managing the screensaver
deny /usr/bin/xdg-screensaver x,
}

Additionally, I disabled its executable stack, which seems to serve no purpose:
$ sudo execstack -c /usr/bin/huludesktop

© 2010, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

December 25, 2009

happy holidays 2009!

Filed under: Blogging,Debian,Ubuntu,Ubuntu-Server — kees @ 9:19 pm

Happy Holidays!

Or, as my firewall reported this morning:

Dec 25 04:39:18 firewall kernel: [1054241.000084] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] ABORT operation started
...
Dec 25 04:40:10 firewall kernel: [1054292.072173] raid1: sdb2: redirecting sector 3490144 to another mirror

I guess I’m getting my firewall a new hard drive for Christmas. :)

© 2009, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

December 16, 2009

headache empathy

Filed under: Blogging,Debian,Multimedia,Ubuntu — kees @ 9:20 pm

Run “gstreamer-properties“, click the “Video” tab, change Default Input Plugin to “Custom”, and add this Pipeline:

v4l2src ! ffmpegcolorspace ! vertigotv ! ffmpegcolorspace

Now when Empathy video-chatting with a friend, you can give them a headache!

Or give yourself a headache by trying it directly from the command line:

gst-launch v4l2src ! ffmpegcolorspace ! vertigotv ! ffmpegcolorspace ! xvimagesink

Feel free to replace “vertigotv” with any other or more of the video effects listed in “gst-inspect effectv“.

Here’s me with edgetv ! vertigotv:

Edge Vertigo

© 2009 – 2015, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

December 9, 2009

install from official repositories only

Filed under: Debian,Security,Ubuntu,Ubuntu-Server — kees @ 10:02 am

As quickly pointed out by Rick, don’t install random software that isn’t in the official distribution archive unless you really know what you’re doing (and copy/pasting commands from a website doesn’t count). You’re just asking to be made part of a botnet.

© 2009, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

November 24, 2009

missing kernel features in ARM

Filed under: Debian,Security,Ubuntu — kees @ 10:38 pm

As more attention is given to the ARM ports of Linux, I’m hoping someone (maybe me if I learn a bunch) will be able to implement some upstream kernel features that are implemented only on x86 so far:

  • ASLR of mmap allocations
  • ASLR of text/exec area
  • ASLR of vdso
  • ASLR of brk area

Stack is already randomized, it should be easy to do the rest! ;)

© 2009, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

October 24, 2009

karmic and log rotation

Filed under: Debian,Ubuntu,Ubuntu-Server — kees @ 10:00 am

In Ubuntu’s Karmic and and Debian’s Lenny, sysklogd was replaced with rsyslog. This is fine, since rsyslog will have converted your /etc/syslog.conf to /etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf. However, if you modified the (maddeningly strange sysklogd-specific) log file rotation in /etc/cron.daily/sysklogd or /etc/cron.weekly/sysklogd, you’ll want to review the new (sane) /etc/logrotate.d/rsyslog. (Note also that savelog uses .0 as the first rotated file extension, and logrotate uses .1.)

© 2009, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

October 22, 2009

TPM as RNG

Filed under: Debian,Security,Ubuntu,Ubuntu-Server — kees @ 10:43 pm

I was reminded about some TPM coding I’d done to get random bytes from the pRNG on my TPM-enabled system from Matt Domsch’s recent post. I’m not fully convinced that the pRNG of the TPM is an appropriate source of entropy, but it does pass my simple FIPS-140-2 test.

I had to find the Intel TPM docs to figure out how to enable TPM on my system. It was under “Advanced / Peripherals”. I was expecting it under “Security”, like every other BIOS I’d seen. After that:

$ sudo apt-get install trousers tpm-tools
...
$ sudo modprobe tpm_tis
$ dmesg | grep -i tpm
[676618.167313] tpm_tis 00:07: 1.2 TPM (device-id 0xFE, rev-id 70)
$ sudo service trousers start
...
$ tpm_version
TPM 1.2 Version Info:
Chip Version: 1.2.2.16
Spec Level: 2
Errata Revision: 1
TPM Vendor ID: WEC
TPM Version: 01010000
Manufacturer Info: 57454300
$ ./tpm-getrand | hexdump -C
00000000 61 07 23 ff 71 3e 25 e8 f0 d5 de a7 a3 07 21 dc |a.#.q>%.......!.|

I could run rngd with a named pipe, but it’d be nice to have a new driver that could run a command instead to get the next 20000 bits.

UPDATE: I’ve implemented this in rngd now.

© 2009, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

October 7, 2009

Larson Scanner on Arduino

Filed under: Blogging,Embedded,Ubuntu — kees @ 8:58 am

Inspired by the Larson Scanner project, I finally broke out my Arduino and ported the code from the ATtiny to the ATmega. (The Arduino IDE runs fine with openjdk-6.) I’m sure the power usage is terrible, but I wasn’t after long battery life. I wanted my very own Cylon eye.

DorkBoard running the Cylon eye

Since I was successful with porting the code and wiring up the Arduino, I figured I’d see if the tiny Arduino-clone called the “DorkBoard” would work with it too.

Later in the weekend I grabbed a AAA-battery holder and hooked that up so the eye is untethered from the USB power source. Next up, coding the pesky self-awareness.

© 2009 – 2015, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

September 12, 2009

uninstall sun-java6

Filed under: Blogging,Debian,Ubuntu,Ubuntu-Server — kees @ 11:59 am

With the vrms meme raging on Planet Ubuntu, I noticed some people still have sun-java6 installed. I’ve been using openjdk-6 since Hardy, and everything I use works fine with it (e.g. Vuze, Catan, Eclipse, FreeMind, and even Facebook’s photo uploader thing). Given the Ubuntu Tech Board’s “remove sun-java6 from the archive” Agenda item, it’s possible sun-java6 (being redundant and orphaned) would go away in Ubuntu Karmic (sun-java5 is already gone because Sun will drop support for it in October, and sun-java6 is not far behind).

I’ve heard some noises about openjdk-6 not working for people, but I haven’t actually seen any direct technical evidence of something working in one and not the other. Seeing as Jaunty’s OpenJDK was certified by Sun, it would be very interesting to find failures, as this would indicate that Sun’s certifications are missing something.

Looking for examples of failures in Google, I couldn’t find anything with obvious test-cases that failed with openjdk-6. I suspect I’m just not trying hard enough, but I’m curious what other people have run into.

Test for yourself:

sudo apt-get purge sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-jre sun-java6-bin sun-java6-plugin
sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk icedtea6-plugin

(Don’t forget to restart your browser.)

© 2009 – 2016, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

September 10, 2009

vrms meme: 15.2%

Filed under: Blogging,Ubuntu — kees @ 6:57 pm

Inspired by Jorge, I decided to see how high a vrms score I could manage. I started with a minimal chroot (via mk-sbuild-lv), and did:

$ sudo -s
# echo "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ jaunty partner" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
# sudo apt-get update
# apt-get --no-install-recommends install $(grep ^Package /var/lib/apt/lists/*{multiverse,partner}*Packages | awk '{print $NF}' | sort -u | egrep -v '^(ttf-lucida|crafty-books-medium|crafty-books-small|festvox-rablpc8k|kxmame|funguloids|ltsp-controlaula|mplayer-nogui|ora2pg|python-pygpu|sdlmame|sdlmame-tools|linux-rt|e-uae|e-uae-dbg|sun-java5-fonts|sun-java6-fonts)$')

Since we want to minimize free packages, I added --no-install-recommends since it would only pull in free stuff (since I was already installing all of multiverse and partner directly). I tried to solve conflicts by making choices that would install the maximum number of packages. After installing 10G worth of packages, I had my results:

# vrms | grep ^[a-z0-9] | wc -l
514
# vrms | tail -n2
342 non-free packages, 15.2% of 2252 installed packages.
172 contrib packages, 7.6% of 2252 installed packages.

© 2009, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

July 31, 2009

blocking module loading

Filed under: Blogging,Debian,Security,Ubuntu,Ubuntu-Server — kees @ 11:47 am

New for Linux 2.6.31 (and Ubuntu 9.10) is the ability to throw a one-way toggle to block module loading via /proc/sys/kernel/modules_disabled:

# uname -a
Linux sec-karmic-amd64 2.6.31-4-generic #23-Ubuntu SMP Mon Jul 27 18:39:59 UTC 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux
# lsmod | head -n3
Module Size Used by
binfmt_misc 10220 1
ppdev 8200 0
# cat /proc/sys/kernel/modules_disabled
0
# modprobe usb-storage
# lsmod | head -n3
Module Size Used by
usb_storage 65600 0
binfmt_misc 10220 1
# echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/modules_disabled
# rmmod usb-storage
ERROR: Removing 'usb_storage': Operation not permitted
# modprobe zlib_deflate
FATAL: Error inserting zlib_deflate (/lib/modules/2.6.31-4-generic/kernel/lib/zlib_deflate/zlib_deflate.ko): Operation not permitted
# echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/modules_disabled
bash: echo: write error: Invalid argument
# cat /proc/sys/kernel/modules_disabled
1

The intent is for this to allow paranoid server admins (or other people not expecting to hot-plug new hardware or kernel services) the ability to block module loading without compiling a monolithic kernel.

This kind of thing used to be available through the “lcap” utility modifying the global capability bounding set (which was removed in 2.6.25), but init could always be made to turn it back on.

Combined with the removal of /dev/kmem and the hardening of /dev/mem, this closes another kernel rootkit door. It’s not a cure-all, but it’s another layer.

Now we just have to figure out ways to stamp out unexpected ioport-triggered DMA access.

© 2009, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

July 16, 2009

Diminished Dapper

Filed under: Blogging,Security,Ubuntu,Ubuntu-Server — kees @ 10:18 am

Dapper has reached it’s half-way support age. This means that only shipped server packages are getting official support. If you’re still running Dapper, upgrade to Hardy (and then consider upgrading through Intrepid to Jaunty too, since Intrepid and newer has awesome compiler defaults).

Looking back through my build logs, I can see that my desktop spent 51 hours, 48 minutes, and 37 seconds building 389 security updates. As before, these times obviously don’t include patch hunting/development, failed builds, testing, stuff done on my laptop or the porting machines, etc.

Current combined devel/security build standings per release:

hardy: 172:23:11
intrepid: 85:34:53
jaunty: 20:11:53

Thank you Dapper Desktop! I am reminded what you look like each time I start a Dapper VM. If not for that, my memory of you would have diminished long ago.

© 2009, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

May 14, 2009

partial NX emulation in Ubuntu

Filed under: Security,Ubuntu — kees @ 9:18 am

Now available for early testing, Ubuntu Karmic Alpha 1 has a kernel feature I’ve long wanted in Ubuntu: NX emulation. Basically, if your hardware lacks NX support, the kernel will emulate the feature using memory segment limits and ordering. This was AFAIBT originally developed by PaX, and a similar version (with histories including work by Solar Designer and maybe OpenBSD?) has been carried in RedHat/Fedora for a while now (under the larger project called “ExecShield”, covering multiple protection technologies).

As more and more of the monolithic ExecShield kernel patch has been taken upstream (many thanks to Arjan van de Ven for pushing them), the patch in RedHat has been shrinking. Recently, Dave Jones split up the remaining pieces into logical chunks small enough that I could actually read it without going cross-eyed. From this, I ported the nx-emulation patches to Ubuntu’s kernel, and now they’re happily live in Karmic.

So, instead of this:

$ ./vulnerable-setuid-program $OVERFLOW_AND_SHELLCODE
# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root)

We get this:

$ ./vulnerable-setuid-program $OVERFLOW_AND_SHELLCODE
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
$ dmesg | tail -n1
[170131.763976] vulnerable-set[16278]: general protection ip:80489c5 sp:bfa3e330 error:0 in vulnerable-setuid-program[8048000+1000]

Though, as always, please just use 64bit instead. :)

Update: gave credit to PaX, thanks for the corrections!

© 2009, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

April 19, 2009

recording from PulseAudio

Filed under: Blogging,Debian,General,Multimedia,Ubuntu — kees @ 11:42 am

Every PulseAudio “Sink” has a “Source” named “monitor”. This lets you attach to a given Sink and chain more stuff to it, for example, recording the audio that is playing through PulseAudio at any given moment. This is very handy for creating, for example, PubQuiz-style clips of songs, movies, etc.

Here is a script to find the monitor for the most recently added Sink, record from it, and shove it through “sox” to get a WAV instead of raw sound data (requires recent sox, Pulse, etc):

#!/bin/bash
WAV="$1"
if [ -z "$WAV" ]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 OUTPUT.WAV" >&2
    exit 1
fi
rm -f "$WAV"

# Get sink monitor:
MONITOR=$(pactl list | egrep -A2 '^(\*\*\* )?Source #' | \
    grep 'Name: .*\.monitor$' | awk '{print $NF}' | tail -n1)
echo "set-source-mute ${MONITOR} false" | pacmd >/dev/null

# Record it raw, and convert to a wav
echo "Recording to $WAV ..."
echo "Close this window to stop"
parec -d "$MONITOR" | sox -t raw -r 44k -sLb 16 -c 2 - "$WAV"

© 2009 – 2011, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

April 17, 2009

Goodbye Gutsy

Filed under: Blogging,Security,Ubuntu,Ubuntu-Server — kees @ 3:05 pm

(In reading my prior EOL posts, I realize I should have said “Enough Edgy” or something like that to be appropriately alliterative.)

Gutsy is now officially at end-of-life.

Looking back through my build logs, I can see that my desktop spent 25 hours, 6 minutes, and 47 seconds building 208 security updates. (And 18 hours, 23 minutes, 45 seconds doing 335 builds during the Gutsy devel window.) As before, these times obviously don’t include patch hunting/development, failed builds, testing, stuff done on my laptop or the porting machines, etc.

Current combined devel/security build standings per release:

dapper: 51:27:29
hardy: 171:21:40
intrepid: 84:23:19
jaunty: 18:43:09

Thank you Gutsy! You were much nicer than Feisty, especially for wifi on my poor laptop.

© 2009, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

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