Linux Kernel Maintainer Statistics

As part of preparing my last two talks at LCA on the kernel community, “Burning Down the Castle” and “Maintainers Don’t Scale”, I have looked into how the Kernel’s maintainer structure can be measured. One very interesting approach is looking at the pull request flows, for example done in the LWN article “How 4.4’s patches got to the mainline”. Note that in the linux kernel process, pull requests are only used to submit development from entire subsystems, not individual contributions. What I’m trying to work out here isn’t so much the overall patch flow, but focusing on how maintainers work, and how that’s different in different subsystems.

Security: Updates, Trustjacking, Breach Detection

• Security updates for Monday

• iOS Trustjacking – A Dangerous New iOS Vulnerability

  An iPhone user's worst nightmare is to have someone gain persistent control over his/her device, including the ability to record and control all activity without even needing to be in the same room. In this blog post, we present a new vulnerability called “Trustjacking”, which allows an attacker to do exactly that. This vulnerability exploits an iOS feature called iTunes Wi-Fi sync, which allows a user to manage their iOS device without physically connecting it to their computer. A single tap by the iOS device owner when the two are connected to the same network allows an attacker to gain permanent control over the device. In addition, we will walk through past related vulnerabilities and show the changes that Apple has made in order to mitigate them, and why these are not enough to prevent similar attacks.

• What Is ‘Trustjacking’? How This New iOS Vulnerability Allows Remote Hacking?

  This new vulnerability called trustjacking exploits a convenient WiFi feature, which allows iOS device owners to manage their devices and access data, even when they are not in the same location anymore.

• Breach detection with Linux filesystem forensics

  Forensic analysis of a Linux disk image is often part of incident response to determine if a breach has occurred. Linux forensics is a different and fascinating world compared to Microsoft Windows forensics. In this article, I will analyze a disk image from a potentially compromised Linux system in order to determine the who, what, when, where, why, and how of the incident and create event and filesystem timelines. Finally, I will extract artifacts of interest from the disk image. In this tutorial, we will use some new tools and some old tools in creative, new ways to perform a forensic analysis of a disk image.

SUSE Launches Beta Program for SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing

While SUSE is working hard on the major SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 release, they recently announced that the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing (HPC) platform is now a dedicated SUSE Linux Enterprise product based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 15, available for public testing on 64-bit and ARM 64-bit architectures. SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 will introduce numerous new features and improvements, including a brand new installer that offers a single unified method to install one of the supported SUSE Linux Enterprise products, including the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing module, which comes with a set of components used in high-performance computing environments. Also: SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Prepares HPC Module

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