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Security Leftovers

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Security
  • Matthew Garrett: Bug bounties and NDAs are an option, not the standard

    Zoom had a vulnerability that allowed users on MacOS to be connected to a video conference with their webcam active simply by visiting an appropriately crafted page. Zoom's response has largely been to argue that:

    a) There's a setting you can toggle to disable the webcam being on by default, so this isn't a big deal,
    b ) When Safari added a security feature requiring that users explicitly agree to launch Zoom, this created a poor user experience and so they were justified in working around this (and so introducing the vulnerability), and,
    c) The submitter asked whether Zoom would pay them for disclosing the bug, and when Zoom said they'd only do so if the submitter signed an NDA, they declined.

    (a) and (b ) are clearly ludicrous arguments, but (c) is the interesting one. Zoom go on to mention that they disagreed with the severity of the issue, and in the end decided not to change how their software worked. If the submitter had agreed to the terms of the NDA, then Zoom's decision that this was a low severity issue would have led to them being given a small amount of money and never being allowed to talk about the vulnerability. Since Zoom apparently have no intention of fixing it, we'd presumably never have heard about it. Users would have been less informed, and the world would have been a less secure place.

    [...]

    If your bug bounty requires people sign an NDA, you should think about why. If it's so you can control disclosure and delay things beyond 90 days (and potentially never disclose at all), look at whether the amount of money you're offering for that is anywhere near commensurate with the value the submitter could otherwise gain from the information and compare that to the reputational damage you'll take from people deciding that it's not worth it and just disclosing unilaterally. And, seriously, never ask for an NDA before you're committing to a specific $ amount - it's never reasonable to ask that someone sign away their rights without knowing exactly what they're getting in return.

  • Microsoft July 2019 Patch Tuesday fixes zero-day exploited by Russian hackers [Ed: Let's blame Russia instead of NSA back doors put there by Microsoft. More trash from CBS tabloid ZDNet.]

    Since the Microsoft Patch Tuesday is also the day when other vendors also release security patches, it's also worth mentioning that Adobe and SAP have also published their respective security updates earlier today.

  • William Brown: I no longer recommend FreeIPA

    The FreeIPA project focused on Kerberos and SSSD, with enough other parts glued on to look like a complete IDM project. Now that’s fine, but it means that concerns in other parts of the project are largely ignored. It creates design decisions that are not scalable or robust.

    Due to these decisions IPA has stability issues and scaling issues that other products do not.

    To be clear: security systems like IDM or LDAP can never go down. That’s not acceptable.

  • Ubuntu Source code is Safe in the Canonical GitHub account hacking!

    The canonical Security is once again under questionable notice. The forum has been hacked thrice on different occasions. In July 2013, details of 1.82 Million users were stolen by hackers followed by the second hacking where 2 million users data were stolen in July 2016 and in July 2019, the Github account of Canonical limited has been hacked.

    This company works behind the distribution of Ubuntu Linux and was hacked on July 6th, 2019. The Security team accepted that the Canonical owned account on Github was compromised on credentials and was used to create disturbance and issues among other activities. Though the company has removed the account from the organization in Github, it is still working on checking out the breach. The company believes that the source code or PII was affected in any way.

  • Azure Sphere OS Built on a Compact, Secured Linux

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.