This week Jonathan Bennett and Rob Campbell chat with Carl Richell about System 76, COSMIC, Wayland, Rust and more! What was the “last straw” that convinced System 76 to write their own desktop environment (DE)? What’s the story with smithay, and why did that jump start the whole process? Listen to find out!
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 798: Building The Rust Desktop With COSMIC”
There have been some hilarious issues on mobile devices over the years. The HTC Dream had a hidden shell that was discovered when a phone rebooted after sending a text containing just the word “reboot”. iOS has gotten in on the fun from time to time, and this time it’s ""::. Type the double quotes, a colon, and any other character, and Apple’s Springboard service crashes.
Another hacker dug in a bit, and realized that Springboard is trying to jump execution to a null pointer, leading to a crash. It’s very odd that user input breaks the query parser badly enough to jump to null like that. There are a couple interesting questions that we have to ask. Given that the crash trigger is quite flexible, "anything goes":x, is it possible to manipulate that function pointer to be something other than null? And perhaps more importantly, why is the code crashing, instead of an invalid address error as one would expect from a Pointer Authentication Code (PAC) violation? Regardless, the bug seems to be fixed in the latest iOS 18 builds.
Continue reading “This Week In Security: Crash Your IPhone, Hack Your Site, And Bluetooth Woes”
This week Jonathan Bennett and Dan Lynch chat with Pádraig Brady about Coreutils! It’s been around since the 90s, and is still a healthy project under active development. You’ve almost certainly used these tools whether you realize it or not! What’s the relationship with the other coreutils implementations? And why is GNU Coreutils the most cautious of them all?
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 797: Coreutils — Don’t Rm -r Up The Tree”
You may have heard about a very large data breach, exposing the Social Security numbers of three billion individuals. Now hang on. Social Security numbers are a particularly American data point, and last time we checked there were quite a few Americans shy of even a half of a billion’s worth. As [Troy Hunt] points out, there are several things about this story that seem just a bit odd.
First up, the claim is that this is data grabbed from National Public Data, and there’s even a vague notice on their website about it. NPD is a legitimate business, grabbing data on as many people as possible, and providing services like background checks and credit checks. It’s not impossible that this company has records on virtually every citizen of the US, UK, and Canada. And while that’s far less than 2.9 billion people, it could feasibly add up to 2.9 billion records as was originally claimed.
The story gets strange as we consider the bits of data that have been released publicly, like a pair of files shared with [Troy] that have names, birthdays, addresses, phone numbers, and social security numbers. Those had a total of 2.69 billion records, with an average of 3 records for each ID number. That math is still just a little weird, since the US has to date only generated 450 million SSNs and change.
So far all we have are partial datasets, and claims on the Internet. The story is that there’s a grand total of 4 TB of data once uncompressed. The rest of the details are unclear, and it’s likely to take some time for the rest of the story to come out. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Three Billion SS Numbers, IPv6 RCE, And Ring -2”
This week Jonathan Bennett and David Ruggles chat with John Britton and Mike McQuaid about Homebrew! That’s the missing package manager for macOS; and Workbrew, the commercial offering built on top of it. We cover lots of territory, like why the naming scheme sounds like it was conceived during a pub visit, how Workbrew helps businesses actually use Homebrew, and why you might even want to run Homebrew on a Linux machine!
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 796: Homebrew, I’m More Of A Whopper Guy”
You may have heard some scary news about RISC-V CPUs. There’s good news, and bad news, and the whole thing is a bit of a cautionary tale. GhostWrite is a devastating vulnerability in a pair of T-Head XuanTie RISC-V CPUs. There are also unexploitable crashes in another T-Head CPU and the QEMU soft core implementation. These findings come courtesy of a group of researchers at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Germany. They took at look at RISC-V cores, and asked the question, do any of these instructions do anything unexpected? The answer, obviously, was “yes”.
Undocumented instructions have been around just about as long as we’ve had Van Neumann architecture processors. The RISC-V ISA put a lampshade on that reality, and calls them “vendor specific custom ISA extensions”. The problem is that vendors are in a hurry, have limited resources, and deadlines wait for no one. So sometimes things make it out the door with problems. To find those problems, CISPA researchers put together a test framework is called RISCVuzz, and it’s all about running each instruction on multiple chips, and watching for oddball behavior. They found a couple of “halt-and-catch-fire” problems, but the real winner (loser) is GhostWrite.
Now, this isn’t a speculative attack like Meltdown or Spectre. It’s more accurate to say that it’s a memory mapping problem. Memory mapping helps the OS keep programs independent of each other by giving them a simplified memory layout, doing the mapping from each program to physical memory in the background. There are instructions that operate using these virtual addresses, and one such is vs128.v. That instruction is intended to manipulate vectors, and use virtual addressing. The problem is that it actually operates directly on physical memory addresses, even bypassing cache. That’s not only memory, but also includes hardware with memory mapped addresses, entirely bypassing the OS. This instruction is the keys to the kingdom. Continue reading “This Week In Security: GhostWrite, Localhost, And More”
This week Jonathan Bennett and Doc Searls chat with Olaf Kock and Dave Nebinger about Liferay! That’s a Java project that started as an implementation of a web portal, and has turned into a very flexible platform for any sort of web application. How has this Open Source project turned into a very successful business? And how is it connected to most iconic children’s educational show of all time? Listen to find out!
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 795: Liferay, Now We’re Thinking With Portals”
