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Security: Currencies, Marcus Hutchins, and Hardware Bugs

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Security
  • Hot New Cryptocurrency Trend: Mining Malware That Could Fry Your Phone
  • PyCryptoMiner Attacks Linux Machines And Turns Them Into Monero-mining Bots
  • Marcus Hutchins' lawyers seek information around arrest

    Lawyers acting for British security researcher Marcus Hutchins have filed a motion seeking additional information on a number of aspects surrounding his arrest in order to prepare for a trial that is expected to take place this year.

  • AMD Did NOT Disable Branch Prediction With A Zen Microcode Update

    With the plethora of software security updates coming out over the past few days in the wake of the Meltdown and Spectre disclosure, released by SUSE was a Family 17h "Zen" CPU microcode update that we have yet to see elsewhere... It claims to disables branch prediction, but I've confirmed with AMD that is not actually the case.

    AMD did post a processor security notice where they noted their hardware was not vulnerable to variant threee / rogue data cache load, for the "branch target injection" variant that there was "near zero risk" for exploiting, and with the bounds check bypass it would be resolved by software/OS updates.

  • Spectre and Meltdown Attacks Against Microprocessors

    "Throw it away and buy a new one" is ridiculous security advice, but it's what US-CERT recommends. It is also unworkable. The problem is that there isn't anything to buy that isn't vulnerable. Pretty much every major processor made in the past 20 years is vulnerable to some flavor of these vulnerabilities. Patching against Meltdown can degrade performance by almost a third. And there's no patch for Spectre; the microprocessors have to be redesigned to prevent the attack, and that will take years. (Here's a running list of who's patched what.)

  • OpenBSD & FreeBSD Are Still Formulating Kernel Plans To Address Meltdown+Spectre

    On Friday DragonFlyBSD's Matthew Dillon already landed his DragonFly kernel fixes for the Meltdown vulnerability affecting Intel CPUs. But what about the other BSDs?

    As outlined in that article yesterday, DragonFlyBSD founder Matthew Dillon quickly worked through better kernel/user separation with their code to address the Intel CPU bug. Similar to Linux, the DragonFlyBSD fix should cause minimal to small CPU performance impact for most workloads while system call heavy / interrupt-heavy workloads (like I/O and databases) could see more significant drops.

  • Retpoline v5 Published For Fending Off Spectre Branch Target Injection

    David Woodhouse of Amazon has sent out the latest quickly-revising patches for introducing the "Retpoline" functionality to the Linux kernel for mitigating the Spectre "variant 2" attack.

    Retpoline v5 is the latest as of Saturday morning as the ongoing effort for avoiding speculative indirect calls within the Linux kernel for preventing a branch target injection style attack. These 200+ lines of kernel code paired with the GCC Retpoline patches are able to address vulnerable indirect branches in the Linux kernel.

    The Retpoline approach is said to only have up to a ~1.5% performance hit when patched... I hope this weekend to get around to trying these kernel and GCC patches on some of my systems for looking at the performance impact in our commonly benchmarked workloads. The Retpoline work is separate from the KPTI page table isolation work for addressing the Intel CPU Meltdown issue.

  • Intel hit with three class-action lawsuits over chip flaws
  • Meltdown, aka "Dear Intel, you suck"

    We have received *no* non-public information. I've seen posts elsewhere by other *BSD people implying that they receive little or no prior warning, so I have no reason to believe this was specific to OpenBSD and/or our philosophy. Personally, I do find it....amusing? that public announcements were moved up after the issue was deduced from development discussions and commits to a different open source OS project. Aren't we all glad that this was under embargo and strongly believe in the future value of embargoes?

  • Hack-proof Quantum Data Encryption

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.