Linux Security
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Security updates for Wednesday
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PTI Support To Address Meltdown Nearing The Finish Line For x86 32-bit Linux
While Page Table Isolation (PTI/KPTI) has been available since the Meltdown CPU vulnerability was disclosed at the start of the year, that's been for x86_64 Linux while the x86 32-bit support has remained a work-in-progress and only relatively recently has come together.
Joerg Roedel sent out the eighth version of the x86-32 PTI patches today, which address feedback following a good round of review. This latest page table isolation work for x86 32-bit address more developer feedback and tidies up some of the code.
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Linux To Better Protect Entropy Sent In From User-Space
Fedora has begun utilizing a user-space jitter entropy daemon for feeding entropy to the kernel at boot time in case not enough is available for the kernel's random needs. But with that approach not being from a true hardware random number generator, a patch worked out by veteran Linux kernel developer Ted Ts'o will mix in RdRand entropy.
Fedora has resorted to a user-space jitter entropy daemon to workaround slow boot times on a sub-set of systems/VMs when using recent kernels. A change was made to the kernel earlier this year for addressing CVE-2018-1108, which is about a weakness in the kernel's random seed data whereby early processes in the boot sequence could not have random enough data. But the fix dramatically slows down systems booting by waiting until sufficient entropy is available. This is problematic particularly for VMs where virtio-rng is not present. For some users, they can't get the system(s) booted on affected kernels unless tapping on keyboard keys enough times for generating sufficient entropy.
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Linux 4.17.8
I'm announcing the release of the 4.17.8 kernel.
This is to fix the i386 issue that was in the 4.17.7 release. All should be fine now.
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SPECTRE Variant 1 scanning tool
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When your software is used way after you EOL it.
One of my first jobs was working on a satellite project called ALEXIS at Los Alamos National Laboratory and had been part of a Congressional plan to explore making space missions faster and cheaper. This meant the project was a mix-mash of whatever computer systems were available at the time. Satellite tracking was planned on I think a Macintosh SE, the main uploads and capture were a combination of off the shelf hardware and a Sparc 10. Other analysis was done on spare Digital and SGI Irix systems. It was here I really learned a lot about system administration as each of those systems had their own 'quirks' and ways of doing things.
I worked on this for about a year as a Graduate Research Assistant, and learned a lot about how many projects in science and industrial controls get 'frozen' in place way longer than anyone writing the software expects. This is because at a certain point the device becomes cheaper to keep running than replace or even updating. So when I was watching this USGS video this morning,
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