Michał Górny

The modern packager’s security nightmare

One of the most important tasks of the distribution packager is to ensure that the software shipped to our users is free of security vulnerabilities. While finding and fixing the vulnerable code is usually considered upstream’s responsibility, the packager needs to ensure that all these fixes reach the end users ASAP. With the aid of central package management and dynamic linking, the Linux distributions have pretty much perfected the deployment of security fixes. Ideally, fixing a vulnerable dependency is as simple as patching a single shared library via the distribution’s automated update system.

Of course, this works only if the package in question is actually following good security practices. Over the years, many Linux distributions (at the very least, Debian, Fedora and Gentoo) have been fighting these bad practices with some success. However, today the times have changed. Today, for every 10 packages fixed, a completely new ecosystem emerges with the bad security practices at its central point. Go, Rust and to some extent Python are just a few examples of programming languages that have integrated the bad security practices into the very fabric of their existence, and recreated the same old problems in entirely new ways.

The root issue of bundling dependencies has been discussed many times before. The Gentoo Wiki explains why you should not bundle dependencies, and links to more material about it. I would like to take a bit wider approach, and discuss not only bundling (or vendoring) dependencies but also two closely relevant problems: static linking and pinning dependencies.
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lzip decompression support for xz-utils

As of today, the most common implementation of the LZMA algorithm on open source operating systems is the xz format. However, there are a few others available. Notably, a few packages found in the Gentoo repository use the superior lzip format. Does this mean you may end up having to have separate decompressors for both formats installed? Not necessarily.

Back in 2017, I’ve entertained a curious idea. Since both lzip and xz are both container formats built on top of the original LZMA algorithm, and xz features backwards-compatible support for the earlier container format used by lzma-utils, how hard would it be to implement a decoder for the lzip format as well? Not very hard, it turned out. After all, most of the code was already there — I’ve just had to implement the additional container format. With some kind help of XZ upstream, I’ve done that.

Sadly, the patches have not been merged yet. More than three years have passed now in waiting. Today I’ve rebased them and updated to follow changes in XZ itself. For anyone interested, it can be found on the lzip2 branch of my xz fork. After building xz with my patches, it now happily decompresses .lz files in addition to the regular set. Thanks to a tiny patchset you don’t have to build yet another program to unpack a few distfiles.

Distribution Kernels: module rebuilds, better ZFS support and UEFI executables

The primary goal of the Distribution Kernel project is provide a seamless kernel upgrade experience to Gentoo users. Initially, this meant configuring, building and installing the kernel during the @world upgrade. However, you had to manually rebuild the installed kernel modules (and @module-rebuild is still broken), and sometimes additionally rebuild the initramfs after doing that.

To address this, we have introduced a new dist-kernel USE flag. This flag is automatically added to all ebuilds installing kernel modules. When it is enabled, the linux-mod eclass adds a dependency on virtual/dist-kernel package. This virtual, in turn, is bound to the newest version of dist-kernel installed. As a result, whenever you upgrade your dist-kernel all the module packages will also be rebuilt via slot rebuilds. The manual @module-rebuild should no longer be necessary!

ZFS users have pointed out that after rebuilding sys-fs/zfs-kmod package, they need to rebuild the initramfs for Dracut to include the new module. We have combined the dist-kernel rebuild feature with pkg_postinst() to rebuild the initramfs whenever zfs-kmod is being rebuilt (and the dist-kernel is used). As a result, ZFS should no longer require any manual attention — as long as rebuilds succeed, the new kernel and initramfs should be capable of running on ZFS root once the @world upgrade finishes.

Finally, we have been asked to provide support for uefi=yes Dracut option. When this option is enabled, Dracut combines the EFI stub, kernel and generated initramfs into a single UEFI executable that can be booted directly. The dist-kernels now detect this scenario, and install the generated executable in place of the kernel, so everything works as expected. Note that due to implementation limitations, we also install an empty initramfs as otherwise kernel-install.d scripts would insist on creating another initramfs. Also note that until Dracut is fixed to use correct EFI stub path, you have to set the path manually in /etc/dracut.conf:

uefi_stub=/usr/lib/systemd/boot/efi/linuxx64.efi.stub

OpenSSL, LibreSSL, LibreTLS and all the terminological irony

While we’re discussing the fate of LibreSSL, it’s worth noting how confusing the names of these packages became. I’d like to take this opportunity to provide a short note on what’s what.

First of all, SSL and its successor TLS are protocols used to implement network connection security. For historical reasons, many libraries carry ‘SSL’ in their name (OpenSSL, LibreSSL, PolarSSL) but nowadays they all support TLS.

OpenSSL is the ‘original’ crypto/SSL/TLS library. It is maintained independently of a specific operating system. It provides two main libraries: libcrypto and libssl (that also implements TLS).

LibreSSL is a fork of OpenSSL. It is maintained by OpenBSD as part of its base system. However, the upstream also maintains LibreSSL-portable repository that provides build system and portability glue for using it on other systems. LibreSSL provides partially compatible versions of libcrypto and libssl, and a new libtls library. Both libssl and libtls can be used for TLS support in your applications.

LibreTLS is a lightweight fork of libtls from LibreSSL that builds it against OpenSSL. This makes it possible to build programs written for libtls against OpenSSL+LibreTLS instead of LibreSSL.

So, to summarize. OpenSSL is the original, while LibreSSL is the OpenBSD fork. libtls is the LibreSSL original library, while LibreTLS is its fork for OpenSSL. Makes sense, right? And finally, despite the name, they all implement TLS.

How Debuggers Work: Getting and Setting x86 Registers, Part 2: XSAVE

In the previous part of this article, I have described the basic methods of getting and setting the baseline registers of 32-bit and 64-bit x86 CPUs. I have covered General Purpose Registers, baseline Floating-Point Registers and Debug Registers along with their ptrace(2) interface.

In the second part, I would like to discuss the XSAVE family of instructions. I will describe the different variants of this instruction as well as explain the differences between them and their limitations. Afterwards, I will compare the ptrace(2) API used to access its data on Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD. Other systems such as OpenBSD or DragonFly BSD do not provide requests to retrieve or set extended registers, so the comparison may help them design their own APIs.