BSD Now - Episodes Tagged with “Static”

85: PIE in the Sky

JT Pennington — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 08:00:00 -0400

This time on the show, we'll be talking with Pascal Stumpf about static PIE in the upcoming OpenBSD release. He'll tell us what types of attacks it prevents, and why it's such a big deal. We've also got answers to questions from you in the audience and all this week's news, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

Solaris' networking future is with OpenBSD

A curious patch from someone with an Oracle email address was recently sent in to one of the OpenBSD mailing lists
It was revealed that future releases of Solaris are going to drop their IPFilter firewall entirely, in favor of a port of the current version of PF
For anyone unfamiliar with the history of PF, it was actually made as a replacement for IPFilter in OpenBSD, due to some licensing issues
What's more, Solaris was the original development platform for IPFilter, so the fact that it would be replaced in its own home is pretty interesting
This blog post goes through some of the backstory of the two firewalls
PF is in a lot of places - other BSDs, Mac OS X and iOS - but there are plenty of other OpenBSD-developed technologies end up ported to other projects too
"Many of the world's largest corporations and government agencies are heavy Solaris users, meaning that even if you're neither an OpenBSD user or a Solaris user, your kit is likely interacting intensely with both kinds, and with Solaris moving to OpenBSD's PF for their filtering needs, we will all be benefiting even more from the OpenBSD project's emphasis on correctness, quality and security"
You're welcome, Oracle ***

BAFUG discussion videos

The Bay Area FreeBSD users group has been uploading some videos from their recent meetings
Sean Bruno gave a recap of his experiences at EuroBSDCon last year, including the devsummit and some proposed ideas from it (as well as their current status)
Craig Rodrigues also gave a talk about Kyua and the FreeBSD testing framework
Lastly, Kip Macy gave a talk titled "network stack changes, user-level FreeBSD"
The main two subjects there are some network stack changes, and how to get more people contributing, but there's also open discussion about a variety of FreeBSD topics
If you're close to the Bay Area in California, be sure to check out their group and attend a meeting sometime ***

More than just a makefile

If you're not a BSD user just yet, you might be wondering how the various ports and pkgsrc systems compare to the binary way of doing things on Linux
This blog entry talks about the ports system in OpenBSD, but a lot of the concepts apply to all the ports systems across the BSDs
As it turns out, the ports system really isn't that different from a binary package manager - they are what's used to create binary packages, after all
The author goes through what makefiles do, customizing which options software is compiled with, patching source code to build and getting those patches back upstream
After that, he shows you how to get your new port tested, if you're interesting in doing some porting yourself, and getting involved with the rest of the community
This post is very long and there's a lot more to it, so check it out (and more discussion on Hacker News) ***

Securing your home fences

Hopefully all our listeners have realized that trusting your network(s) to a consumer router is a bad idea by now
We hear from a lot of users who want to set up some kind of BSD-based firewall, but don't hear back from them after they've done it.. until now
In this post, someone goes through the process of setting up a home firewall using OPNsense on a PCEngines APU board
He notes that you have a lot of options software-wise, including vanilla FreeBSD, OpenBSD or even Linux, but decided to go with OPNsense because of the easy interface and configuration
The post covers all the hardware you'll need, getting the OS installed to a flash drive or SD card and going through the whole process
Finally, he goes through setting up the firewall with the graphical interface, applying updates and finishing everything up
If you don't have any experience using a serial console, this guide also has some good info for beginners about those (which also applies to regular FreeBSD)
We love super-detailed guides like this, so everyone should write more and send them to us immediately ***

Interview - Pascal Stumpf - pascal@openbsd.org

Static PIE in OpenBSD

News Roundup

LLVM's new libFuzzer

We've discussed fuzzing on the show a number of times, albeit mostly with the American Fuzzy Lop utility
It looks like LLVM is going to have their own fuzzing tool too now
The Clang and LLVM guys are no strangers to this type of code testing, but decided to "close the loop" and start fuzzing parts of LLVM (including Clang) using LLVM itself
With Clang being the default in both FreeBSD and Bitrig, and with the other BSDs considering the switch, this could make for some good bug hunting across all the projects in the future ***

HardenedBSD upgrades secadm

The HardenedBSD guys have released a new version of their secadm tool, with the showcase feature being integriforce support
We covered both the secadm tool and integriforce in previous episodes, but the short version is that it's a way to prevent files from being altered (even as root)
Their integriforce feature itself has also gotten a couple improvements: shared objects are now checked too, instead of just binaries, and it uses more caching to speed up the whole process now ***

RAID5 returns to OpenBSD

OpenBSD's softraid subsystem, somewhat similar to FreeBSD's GEOM, has had experimental RAID5 support for a while
However, it was exactly that - experimental - and required a recompile to enable
With some work from recent hackathons, the final piece was added to enable resuming partial array rebuilds
Now it's on by default, and there's a call for testing being put out, so grab a snapshot and put the code through its paces
The bioctl softraid command also now supports DUIDs during pseudo-device detachment, possibly paving the way for the installer to drop the "do you want to enable DUIDs?" question entirely ***

pkgng 1.5.0 released

Going back to what we talked about last week, the final version of pkgng 1.5.0 is out
The "provides" and "requires" support is finally in a regular release
A new "-r" switch will allow for direct installation to a chroot or alternate root directory
Memory usage should be much better now, and some general code speed-ups were added
This version also introduces support for Mac OS X, NetBSD and EdgeBSD - it'll be interesting to see if anything comes of that
Many more bugs were fixed, so check the mailing list announcement for the rest (and plenty new bugs were added, according to bapt) ***

p2k15 hackathon reports

There was another OpenBSD hackathon that just finished up in the UK - this time it was mainly for ports work
As usual, the developers sent in reports of some of the things they got done at the event
Landry Breuil, both an upstream Mozilla developer and an OpenBSD developer, wrote in about the work he did on the Firefox port (specifically WebRTC) and some others, as well as reviewing lots of patches that were ready to commit
Stefan Sperling wrote in, detailing his work with wireless chipsets, specifically when the vendor doesn't provide any hardware documentation, as well as updating some of the games in ports
Ken Westerback also sent in a report, but decided to be a rebel and not work on ports at all - he got a lot of GPT-related work done, and also reviewed the RAID5 support we talked about earlier ***

Feedback/Questions

Mailing List Gold

70: Daemons in the North

JT Pennington — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 08:00:00 -0500

It's our last episode of 2014, and we'll be chatting with Dan Langille about the upcoming BSDCan conference. We'll find out what's planned and what sorts of presentations they're looking for. As usual, answers to viewer-submitted questions and all the week's news, coming up on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

OpenBSD PIE enhancements

ASLR and PIE are great security features that OpenBSD has had enabled by default for a long time, in both the base system and ports, but they have one inherent problem
They only work with dynamic libraries and binaries, so if you have any static binaries, they don't get the same treatment
For example, the default shells (and many other things in /bin and /sbin) are statically linked
In the case of the static ones, you can always predict the memory layout, which is very bad and sort of defeats the whole purpose
With this and a few related commits, OpenBSD fixes this by introducing static self-relocation
More and more CPU architectures are being tested and getting support too; this isn't just for amd64 and i386 - VAX users can rest easy
It'll be available in 5.7 in May, or you can use a -current snapshot if you want to get a slice of the action now ***

FreeBSD foundation semi-annual newsletter

The FreeBSD foundation publishes a huge newsletter twice a year, detailing their funded projects and some community activities
As always, it starts with a letter from the president of the foundation - this time it's about encouraging students and new developers to get involved
The article also has a fundraising update with a list of sponsored projects, and they note that the donations meter has changed from dollars to number of donors (since they exceeded the goal already)
You can read summaries of all the BSD conferences of 2014 and see a list of upcoming ones next year too
There are also sections about the FreeBSD Journal's progress, a new staff member and a testimonial from NetApp
It's a very long report, so dedicate some time to read all the way through it
This year was pretty great for BSD: both the FreeBSD and OpenBSD foundations exceeded their goals and the NetBSD foundation came really close too
As we go into 2015, consider donating to whichever BSD you use, it really can make a difference ***

Modernizing OpenSSH fingerprints

When you connect to a server for the first time, you'll get what's called a fingerprint of the host's public key - this is used to verify that you're actually talking to the same server you intended to
Up until now, the key fingerprints have been an MD5 hash, displayed as hex
This can be problematic, especially for larger key types like RSA that give lots of wiggle room for collisions, as an attacker could generate a fake host key that gives the same MD5 string as the one you wanted to connect to
This new change replaces the default MD5 and hex with a base64-encoded SHA256 fingerprint
You can add a "FingerprintHash" line in your ssh_config to force using only the new type
There's also a new option to require users to authenticate with more than one public key, so you can really lock down login access to your servers - also useful if you're not 100% confident in any single key type
The new options should be in the upcoming 6.8 release ***

Interview - Dan Langille - info@bsdcan.org / @bsdcan

Plans for the BSDCan 2015 conference

News Roundup

Introducing ntimed, a new NTP daemon

As we've mentioned before in our tutorials, there are two main daemons for the Network Time Protocol - ISC's NTPd and OpenBSD's OpenNTPD
With all the recent security problems with ISC's NTPd, Poul-Henning Kamp has been working on a third NTP daemon
It's called "ntimed" and you can try out a preview version of it right now - it's in FreeBSD ports or on Github
PHK also has a few blog entries about the project, including status updates ***

OpenBSD-maintained projects list

There was recently a read on the misc mailing list asking about different projects started by OpenBSD developers
The initial list had marks for which software had portable versions to other operating systems (OpenSSH being the most popular example)
A developer compiled a new list from all of the replies to that thread into a nice organized webpage
Most people are only familiar with things like OpenSSH, OpenSMTPD, OpenNTPD and more recently LibreSSL, but there are quite a lot more
This page also serves as a good history lesson for BSD in general: FreeBSD and others have ported some things over, while a couple OpenBSD tools were born from forks of FreeBSD tools (mergemaster, pkg tools, portscout) ***

Monitoring network traffic with FreeBSD

If you've ever been curious about monitoring network traffic on your FreeBSD boxes, this forum post may be exactly the thing for you
It'll show you how to combine the Netflow, NfDump and NfSen suite of tools to get some pretty detailed network stats (and of course put them into a fancy webpage)
This is especially useful for finding out what was going on at a certain point in time, for example if you had a traffic spike ***

Trapping spammers with spamd

This is a blog post about OpenBSD's spamd - a spam email deferral daemon - and how to use it for your mail
It gives some background on the greylisting approach to spam, rather than just a typical host blacklist
"Greylisting is a method of defending e-mail users against spam. A mail transfer agent (MTA) using greylisting will "temporarily reject" any email from a sender it does not recognize. If the sender re-attempts mail delivery at a later time, the sender may be allowed to continue the mail delivery conversation."
The post also shows how to combine it with PF and other tools for a pretty fancy mail setup
You can find spamd in the OpenBSD base system, or use it with FreeBSD or NetBSD via ports and pkgsrc
You might also want to go back and listen to BSDTalk episode 68, where Will talks to Bob Beck about spamd ***