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Security: Updates, Mozilla AMO and Reproducible Arch Linux Packages

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 11th of November 2019 06:57:22 PM Filed under
Security
  • Security updates for Monday

    Security updates have been issued by Debian (ampache, chromium, djvulibre, firefox-esr, gdal, and ruby-haml), Fedora (chromium, file, gd, hostapd, nspr, and rssh), openSUSE (bcm20702a1-firmware, firefox, gdal, libtomcrypt, php7, python-ecdsa, python3, samba, and thunderbird), SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, libssh2_org, and rsyslog), and Ubuntu (bash).

  • Security improvements in AMO upload tools

    We are making some changes to the submission flow for all add-ons (both AMO- and self-hosted) to improve our ability to detect malicious activity.

    These changes, which will go into effect later this month, will introduce a small delay in automatic approval for all submissions. The delay can be as short as a few minutes, but may take longer depending on the add-on file.

    If you use a version of web-ext older than 3.2.1, or a custom script that connects to AMO’s upload API, this new delay in automatic approval will likely cause a timeout error. This does not mean your upload failed; the submission will still go through and be approved shortly after the timeout notification. Your experience using these tools should remain the same otherwise.

  • Reproducible Arch Linux Packages

    Arch Linux has been involved with the reproducible builds efforts since 2016. The goal is to achieve deterministic building of software packages to enhance the security of the distribution.

    After almost 3 years of continued effort, along with the release of pacman 5.2 and contributions from a lot of people, we are finally able to reproduce packages distributed by Arch Linux!

    This enables users to build packages and compare them with the ones distributed by the Arch Linux team. Users can independently verify the work done by our packagers, and figure out if malicious code has been included in the pristine source during the build, which in turns enhances the overall supply chain security. We are one of the first binary distributions that has achieved this, and can provide tooling down to users.

    That was the TL;DR! The rest of the blog post will explain the reproducible builds efforts, and the technical work that has gone into achieving this.

  • Arch Linux Updates Its Kernel Installation Handling

    Arch Linux has updated the behavior when installing the linux, linux-lts, linux-zen, and linux-hardened kernel options on this popular distribution. 

    The actual kernel images for their official Linux, Linux LTS, Linux Zen, and Linux Hardened flavors will no longer be installed to /boot by default. By not having the actual kernel reside on /boot should help those with separate boot partitions that are quite small and avoid running out of space when keeping multiple kernels installed. 

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