Search Results: "cts"

17 April 2017

Ross Gammon: My March 2017 Activities

March was a busy month, so this monthly report is a little late. I worked two weekends, and I was planning my Easter holiday, so there wasn t a lot of spare time. Debian
  • Updated Dominate to the latest version and uploaded to experimental (due to the Debian Stretch release freeze).
  • Uploaded the latest version of abcmidi (also to experimental).
  • Pinged the bugs for reverse dependencies of pygoocanvas and goocanvas with a view to getting them removed from the archive during the Buster cycle.
  • Asked for help on the Ubuntu Studio developers and users mailing lists to test the coming Ubuntu Studio 17.04 release ISO, because I would be away on holiday for most of it.
Ubuntu
  • Worked on ubuntustudio-controls, reverting it back to an earlier revision that Len said was working fine. Unfortunately, when I built and installed it from my ppa, it crashed. Eventually found my mistake with the bzr reversion, fixed it and prepared an upload ready for sponsorship. Submitted a Freeze Exception bug in the hope that the Release Team would accept it even though we had missed the Final Beta.
  • Put a new power supply in an old computer that was kaput, and got it working again. Set up Ubuntu Server 16.04 on it so that I could get a bit more experience with running a server. It won t last very long, because it is a 32 bit machine, and Ubuntu will probably drop support for that architecture eventually. I used two small spare drives to set up RAID 1 & LVM (so that I can add more space to it later). I set up some Samba shares, so that my wife will be able to get at them from her Windows machine. For music streaming, I set up Emby Server. I wold be great to see this packaged for Debian. I uploaded all of my photos and music for Emby to serve around the home (and remotely as well). Set up Obnam to back up the server to an external USB stick (temporarily until I set up something remote). Set LetsEncrypt with the wonderful Certbot program.
  • Did the Release Notes for Ubuntu Studio 17.04 Final Beta. As I was in Brussels for two days, I was not able to do any ISO testing myself.
Other
  • Measured up the new model railway layout and documented it in xtrkcad.
  • Started learning Ansible some more by setting up ssh on all my machines so that I could access them with Ansible and manipulate them using a playbook.
  • Went to the Open Source Days conference just down the road in Copenhagen. Saw some good presentations. Of interest for my previous work in the Debian GIS Team, was a presentation from the Danish Municipalities on how they run projects using Open Source. I noted how their use of Proj 4 and OSGeo. I was also pleased to see a presentation from Ximin Luo on Reproducible Builds, and introduced myself briefly after his talk (during the break).
  • Started looking at creating a Django website to store and publish my One Name Study sources (indexes). Started by creating a library to list some of my recently read Journals. I will eventually need to import all the others I have listed in a cvs spreadsheet that was originally exported from the commercial (Windows only) Custodian software.
Plan status from last month & update for next month Debian For the Debian Stretch release:
  • Keep an eye on the Release Critical bugs list, and see if I can help fix any. In Progress
Generally:
  • Package all the latest upstream versions of my Debian packages, and upload them to Experimental to keep them out of the way of the Stretch release. In Progress
  • Begin working again on all the new stuff I want packaged in Debian.
Ubuntu
  • Start working on an Ubuntu Studio package tracker website so that we can keep an eye on the status of the packages we are interested in. Started
  • Start testing & bug triaging Ubuntu Studio packages. In progress
  • Test Len s work on ubuntustudio-controls Done
  • Do the Ubuntu Studio Zesty 17.04 Final Beta release. Done
  • Sort out the Blueprints for the coming Ubuntu Studio 17.10 release cycle.
Other
  • Give JMRI a good try out and look at what it would take to package it. In progress
  • Also look at OpenPLC for simulating the relay logic of real railway interlockings (i.e. a little bit of the day job at home involving free software fun!). In progress

16 April 2017

Shirish Agarwal: single person cult-based political parties

Summer heat

Summer heat

I would like to start with sharing is the mercury has been shot in recent times to record temperatures. For instance, Pune has been recording temperatures between 41 and 43 degrees consistently. The result of that has been a massive reduction in volunteer activity on my part as well as some reduction in work activity. The body wants and needs to conserve energy. Even my mobile phone s lithium-ion battery becomes too hot and I have to turn it off in the crucial time from 12 17:00 hrs after which the weather cools down a bit. I am curious to know if I m the only one or there are others like me. I have seen quite a few construction, re-construction and renovation projects taking quite a hit by this incredible heat wave. If it isn t climate change then I don t know what is. And this is not limited to Pune but the whole of Western Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and quite a few parts of North India too. In Pune we are expecting it to hit 45 degrees pretty soon. And I don t see this ending anytime soon, at least till July when the rains comes and we have some relief from this weather. Balasaheb Thackeray, Founder Shiv Sena Balasaheb Thakre/Thackeray founded the Shiv Sena in/around 1966. While he was cartoonist by trade, most of his cartoons were anti-migrant in nature. The target was the urban, unemployed Marathi youth based mostly in Mumbai and the suburbs. The Shiv Sena vandalized properties run by South Indian businessman, Gujaratis. The Shiv Sena and Balasaheb Thackeray were also responsible in part due to the massive closure of cloth mills in South Mumbai. While the workers struggled to make ends meet, some whose wife and children died, fell into prostitution, drugs or whatever they could to make ends meet while the party and more important Mr. Balasahab Thackeray prospered. In spite of the many threats, there are and were many South Indians who prospered inspite of Shiv Sena s threats. Gujaratis on the other hand went back to Gujarat and now Surat rivals Mumbai. Another decade or so and Surat and not Mumbai would be the financial capital of India, the way Gujaratis are working towards it. Then in the 90 s people from U.P. and Bihar came in search of livelihood, again the same rhetoric and even attacks were done against people from U.P. and Bihar. The only thing that was missing for all these people is a domicile certificate which you can get only after living 15 years in Mumbai. The only thing that they and other political parties have been successful is murdering journalists. I m sad to report that Maharashtra, my home state has a very bad report card in preventing such murders. And it s both the State and the Centre who have to share the blame equally. Come to 2017 and Shiv Sena doesn t have a leg to stand on. Balasaheb Thackeray is no more, his son didn t inherit Balasaheb s fiery character and the nephew has now another outfit called Maha Navnirman Sena. Also, all those who were one-time outsiders are now residents of Mumbai (with the domicile certificate) and hence registered voters. There is another angle to it as well, Marathas for far too long thought that people they will elect from their community will do something from their community just like auto rickshaw drivers thought that educated unemployed youth from their community would be better than the agents who rip them off whenever they have some work in the local R.T.O. (Road Transport Office) . Similar to auto rickshaw drivers, the Marathas realized that none of the leaders whom they elected would ever do the work. This is why when last year there were huge Maratha rallies all over the state (peaceful demonstrations all around though). I just shared Pune as am most concerned with my city although similar rallies were held in Mumbai (Khargar), Nagpur, Solapur among other places that I know of. But as shown on youtube there was no central leadership (a.k.a. leaders) and still they were the most disciplined lot. While the Marathas may say one thing, in part they are also culprits of their own past. My interactions with few Marathas was that they are still smitten by what happened in the second and the third Anglo-Maratha War . It is sad because I do see them adding lot of value provided they keep a cool head as I have seen some do. Business or service is the game only for cooler heads. Things came to a head though about couple of weeks back when Mr. Ravindra Gaikwad, a Shiv Sena M.P. assaulted some elderly Air India Staff. While things have cooled down since then, it only belittles both the person and the party. If anything, Air India can be accused of being to gentleman like in the whole case. The only crime of its own making is it has been looted since the beginning by Indian MP s and their relatives with over-staffing and old age of the planes and being over-priced in an extremely price sensitive market. It doesn t have any low-cost options but all of that is another story altogether. Converse to this, the current Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi and Malcolm Turnbull enjoyed the ride of the Delhi Metro. In Politics as well as in life, symbolism scores big. That showed where Mr. Modi s priorities lie and where Mr. Gaikwad s. In the end, the writing seems to be on the wall for not just the Shiv Sena but I would say all single-personality based parties. They need to widen both their political scope and activities and have prominent personalities with strong leadership taking the country along rather than being petty-minded.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #17th century, #Air India, #anti-migrant policy, #Indian Summer, #Maratha, #Maratha History, #Me Maratha, #Me Maratha rallies, #planet-debian

15 April 2017

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp now used by 1000 CRAN packages

800 Rcpp packages Moments ago Rcpp passed a big milestone as there are now 1000 packages on CRAN depending on it (as measured by Depends, Imports and LinkingTo, but excluding Suggests). The graph is on the left depicts the growth of Rcpp usage over time. One easy way to compute such reverse dependency counts is the tools::dependsOnPkgs() function that was just mentioned in yesterday's R^4 blog post. Another way is to use the reverse_dependencies_with_maintainers() function from this helper scripts file on CRAN. Lastly, devtools has a function revdep() but it has the wrong default parameters as it includes Suggests: which you'd have to override to get the count I use here (it currently gets 1012 in this wider measure). Rcpp cleared 300 packages in November 2014. It passed 400 packages in June 2015 (when I only tweeted about it), 500 packages in late October 2015, 600 packages last March, 700 packages last July, 800 packages last October and 900 packages early January. The chart extends to the very beginning via manually compiled data from CRANberries and checked with crandb. The next part uses manually saved entries. The core (and by far largest) part of the data set was generated semi-automatically via a short script appending updates to a small file-based backend. A list of packages using Rcpp is kept on this page. Also displayed in the graph is the relative proportion of CRAN packages using Rcpp. The four per-cent hurdle was cleared just before useR! 2014 where I showed a similar graph (as two distinct graphs) in my invited talk. We passed five percent in December of 2014, six percent July of 2015, seven percent just before Christmas 2015, eight percent last summer, and nine percent mid-December 2016. Ten percent is next; we may get there during the summer. 1000 user packages is a really large number. This puts a whole lot of responsibility on us in the Rcpp team as we continue to keep Rcpp as performant and reliable as it has been. And with that a very big Thank You! to all users and contributors of Rcpp for help, suggestions, bug reports, documentation or, of course, code.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Gunnar Wolf: On Dmitry Bogatov and empowering privacy-protecting tools

There is a thorny topic we have been discussing in nonpublic channels (say, the debian-private mailing list... It is impossible to call it a private list if it has close to a thousand subscribers, but it sometimes deals with sensitive material) for the last week. We have finally confirmation that we can bring this topic out to the open, and I expect several Debian people to talk about this. Besides, this information is now repeated all over the public Internet, so I'm not revealing anything sensitive. Oh, and there is a statement regarding Dmitry Bogatov published by the Tor project But I'll get to Tor soon. One week ago, the 25-year old mathematician and Debian Maintainer Dmitry Bogatov was arrested, accused of organizing riots and calling for terrorist activities. Every evidence so far points to the fact that Dmitry is not guilty of what he is charged of He was filmed at different places at the times where the calls for terrorism happened. It seems that Dmitry was arrested because he runs a Tor exit node. I don't know the current situation in Russia, nor his political leanings But I do know what a Tor exit node looks like. I even had one at home for a short while. What is Tor? It is a network overlay, meant for people to hide where they come from or who they are. Why? There are many reasons Uninformed people will talk about the evil wrongdoers (starting the list of course with the drug sellers or child porn distributors). People who have taken their time to understand what this is about will rather talk about people for whom free speech is not a given; journalists, political activists, whistleblowers. And also, about regular people Many among us have taken the habit of doing some of our Web surfing using Tor (probably via the very fine and interesting TAILS distribution The Amnesiac Incognito Live System), just to increase the entropy, and just because we can, because we want to preserve the freedom to be anonymous before it's taken away from us. There are many types of nodes in Tor; most of them are just regular users or bridges that forward traffic, helping Tor's anonymization. Exit nodes, where packets leave the Tor network and enter the regular Internet, are much scarcer Partly because they can be quite problematic to people hosting them. But, yes, Tor needs more exit nodes, not just for bandwidth sake, but because the more exit nodes there are, the harder it is for a hostile third party to monitor a sizable number of them for activity (and break the anonymization). I am coincidentially starting a project with a group of students of my Faculty (we want to breathe life again into LIDSOL - Laboratorio de Investigaci n y Desarrollo de Software Libre). As we are just starting, they are documenting some technical and social aspects of the need for privacy and how Tor works; I expect them to publish their findings in El Nigromante soon (which means... what? ), but definitively, part of what we want to do is to set up a Tor exit node at the university Well documented and with enough academic justification to avoid our network operation area ordering us to shut it down. Lets see what happens :) Anyway, all in all Dmitry is in for a heavy time. He has been detained pre-trial at least until June, and he faces quite serious charges. He has done a lot of good, specialized work for the whole world to benefit. So, given I cannot do more, I'm just speaking my mind here in this space. [Update] Dmitry's case has been covered in LWN. There is also a statement concerning the arrest of Dmitry Bogatov by the Debian project. This case is also covered at The Register.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: #5: Easy package information

Welcome to the fifth post in the recklessly rambling R rants series, or R4 for short. The third post showed an easy way to follow R development by monitoring (curated) changes on the NEWS file for the development version r-devel. As a concrete example, I mentioned that it has shown a nice new function (tools::CRAN_package_db()) coming up in R 3.4.0. Today we will build on that. Consider the following short snippet:
library(data.table)
getPkgInfo <- function()  
    if (exists("tools::CRAN_package_db"))  
        dat <- tools::CRAN_package_db()
      else  
        tf <- tempfile()
        download.file("https://cloud.r-project.org/src/contrib/PACKAGES.rds", tf, quiet=TRUE)
        dat <- readRDS(tf)              # r-devel can now readRDS off a URL too
     
    dat <- as.data.frame(dat)
    setDT(dat)
    dat
 
It defines a simple function getPkgInfo() as a wrapper around said new function from R 3.4.0, ie tools::CRAN_package_db(), and a fallback alternative using a tempfile (in the automagically cleaned R temp directory) and an explicit download and read of the underlying RDS file. As an aside, just this week the r-devel NEWS told us that such readRDS() operations can now read directly from URL connection. Very nice---as RDS is a fantastic file format when you are working in R. Anyway, back to the RDS file! The snippet above returns a data.table object with as many rows as there are packages on CRAN, and basically all their (parsed !!) DESCRIPTION info and then some. A gold mine! Consider this to see how many package have a dependency (in the sense of Depends, Imports or LinkingTo, but not Suggests because Suggests != Depends) on Rcpp:
R> dat <- getPkgInfo()
R> rcppRevDepInd <- as.integer(tools::dependsOnPkgs("Rcpp", recursive=FALSE, installed=dat))
R> length(rcppRevDepInd)
[1] 998
R>
So exciting---we will hit 1000 within days! But let's do some more analysis:
R> dat[ rcppRevDepInd, RcppRevDep := TRUE]  # set to TRUE for given set
R> dat[ RcppRevDep==TRUE, 1:2]
           Package Version
  1:      ABCoptim  0.14.0
  2: AbsFilterGSEA     1.5
  3:           acc   1.3.3
  4: accelerometry   2.2.5
  5:      acebayes   1.3.4
 ---                      
994:        yakmoR   0.1.1
995:  yCrypticRNAs  0.99.2
996:         yuima   1.5.9
997:           zic     0.9
998:       ziphsmm   1.0.4
R>
Here we index the reverse dependency using the vector we had just computed, and then that new variable to subset the data.table object. Given the aforementioned parsed information from all the DESCRIPTION files, we can learn more:
R> ## likely false entries
R> dat[ RcppRevDep==TRUE, ][NeedsCompilation!="yes", c(1:2,4)]
            Package Version                                                                         Depends
 1:         baitmet   1.0.0                                                           Rcpp, erah (>= 1.0.5)
 2:           bea.R   1.0.1                                                        R (>= 3.2.1), data.table
 3:            brms   1.6.0                     R (>= 3.2.0), Rcpp (>= 0.12.0), ggplot2 (>= 2.0.0), methods
 4: classifierplots   1.3.3                             R (>= 3.1), ggplot2 (>= 2.2), data.table (>= 1.10),
 5:           ctsem   2.3.1                                           R (>= 3.2.0), OpenMx (>= 2.3.0), Rcpp
 6:        DeLorean   1.2.4                                                  R (>= 3.0.2), Rcpp (>= 0.12.0)
 7:            erah   1.0.5                                                               R (>= 2.10), Rcpp
 8:             GxM     1.1                                                                              NA
 9:             hmi   0.6.3                                                                    R (>= 3.0.0)
10:        humarray     1.1 R (>= 3.2), NCmisc (>= 1.1.4), IRanges (>= 1.22.10),\nGenomicRanges (>= 1.16.4)
11:         iNextPD   0.3.2                                                                    R (>= 3.1.2)
12:          joinXL   1.0.1                                                                    R (>= 3.3.1)
13:            mafs   0.0.2                                                                              NA
14:            mlxR   3.1.0                                                           R (>= 3.0.1), ggplot2
15:    RmixmodCombi     1.0              R(>= 3.0.2), Rmixmod(>= 2.0.1), Rcpp(>= 0.8.0), methods,\ngraphics
16:             rrr   1.0.0                                                                    R (>= 3.2.0)
17:        UncerIn2     2.0                          R (>= 3.0.0), sp, RandomFields, automap, fields, gstat
R> 
There are a full seventeen packages which claim to depend on Rcpp while not having any compiled code of their own. That is likely false---but I keep them in my counts, however relunctantly. A CRAN-declared Depends: is a Depends:, after all. Another nice thing to look at is the total number of package that declare that they need compilation:
R> ## number of packages with compiled code
R> dat[ , .(N=.N), by=NeedsCompilation]
   NeedsCompilation    N
1:               no 7625
2:              yes 2832
3:               No    1
R>
Isn't that awesome? It is 2832 out of (currently) 10458, or about 27.1%. Just over one in four. Now the 998 for Rcpp look even better as they are about 35% of all such packages. In order words, a little over one third of all packages with compiled code (which may be legacy C, Fortran or C++) use Rcpp. Wow. Before closing, one shoutout to Dirk Schumacher whose thankr which I made the center of the last post is now on CRAN. As a mighty fine and slim micropackage without external dependencies. Neat.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

14 April 2017

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.7.800.2.0

armadillo image A new RcppArmadillo version 0.7.800.2.0 is now on CRAN. Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language--and is widely used by (currently) 318 other packages on CRAN -- an increase of 20 just since the last CRAN release of 0.7.600.1.0 in December! Changes in this release relative to the previous CRAN release are as follows:

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.7.800.2.0 (2017-04-12)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 7.800.2 (Rogue State Redux)
    • The Armadillo license changed to Apache License 2.0
  • The DESCRIPTION file now mentions the Apache License 2.0, as well as the former MPL2 license used for earlier releases.
  • A new file init.c was added with calls to R_registerRoutines() and R_useDynamicSymbols()
  • Symbol registration is enabled in useDynLib
  • The fastLm example was updated

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

13 April 2017

Antoine Beaupr : New approaches to network fast paths

With the speed of network hardware now reaching 100 Gbps and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks going in the Tbps range, Linux kernel developers are scrambling to optimize key network paths in the kernel to keep up. Many efforts are actually geared toward getting traffic out of the costly Linux TCP stack. We have already covered the XDP (eXpress Data Path) patch set, but two new ideas surfaced during the Netconf and Netdev conferences held in Toronto and Montreal in early April 2017. One is a patch set called af_packet, which aims at extracting raw packets from the kernel as fast as possible; the other is the idea of implementing in-kernel layer-7 proxying. There are also user-space network stacks like Netmap, DPDK, or Snabb (which we previously covered). This article aims at clarifying what all those components do and to provide a short status update for the tools we have already covered. We will focus on in-kernel solutions for now. Indeed, user-space tools have a fundamental limitation: if they need to re-inject packets onto the network, they must again pay the expensive cost of crossing the kernel barrier. User-space performance is effectively bounded by that fundamental design. So we'll focus on kernel solutions here. We will start from the lowest part of the stack, the af_packet patch set, and work our way up the stack all the way up to layer-7 and in-kernel proxying.

af_packet v4 John Fastabend presented a new version of a patch set that was first published in January regarding the af_packet protocol family, which is currently used by tcpdump to extract packets from network interfaces. The goal of this change is to allow zero-copy transfers between user-space applications and the NIC (network interface card) transmit and receive ring buffers. Such optimizations are useful for telecommunications companies, which may use it for deep packet inspection or running exotic protocols in user space. Another use case is running a high-performance intrusion detection system that needs to watch large traffic streams in realtime to catch certain types of attacks. Fastabend presented his work during the Netdev network-performance workshop, but also brought the patch set up for discussion during Netconf. There, he said he could achieve line-rate extraction (and injection) of packets, with packet rates as high as 30Mpps. This performance gain is possible because user-space pages are directly DMA-mapped to the NIC, which is also a security concern. The other downside of this approach is that a complete pair of ring buffers needs to be dedicated for this purpose; whereas before packets were copied to user space, now they are memory-mapped, so the user-space side needs to process those packets quickly otherwise they are simply dropped. Furthermore, it's an "all or nothing" approach; while NIC-level classifiers could be used to steer part of the traffic to a specific queue, once traffic hits that queue, it is only accessible through the af_packet interface and not the rest of the regular stack. If done correctly, however, this could actually improve the way user-space stacks access those packets, providing projects like DPDK a safer way to share pages with the NIC, because it is well defined and kernel-controlled. According to Jesper Dangaard Brouer (during review of this article):
This proposal will be a safer way to share raw packet data between user space and kernel space than what DPDK is doing, [by providing] a cleaner separation as we keep driver code in the kernel where it belongs.
During the Netdev network-performance workshop, Fastabend asked if there was a better data structure to use for such a purpose. The goal here is to provide a consistent interface to user space regardless of the driver or hardware used to extract packets from the wire. af_packet currently defines its own packet format that abstracts away the NIC-specific details, but there are other possible formats. For example, someone in the audience proposed the virtio packet format. Alexei Starovoitov rejected this idea because af_packet is a kernel-specific facility while virtio has its own separate specification with its own requirements. The next step for af_packet is the posting of the new "v4" patch set, although Miller warned that this wouldn't get merged until proper XDP support lands in the Intel drivers. The concern, of course, is that the kernel would have multiple incomplete bypass solutions available at once. Hopefully, Fastabend will present the (by then) merged patch set at the next Netdev conference in November.

XDP updates Higher up in the networking stack sits XDP. The af_packet feature differs from XDP in that it does not perform any sort of analysis or mangling of packets; its objective is purely to get the data into and out of the kernel as fast as possible, completely bypassing the regular kernel networking stack. XDP also sits before the networking stack except that, according to Brouer, it is "focused on cooperating with the existing network stack infrastructure, and on use-cases where the packet doesn't necessarily need to leave kernel space (like routing and bridging, or skipping complex code-paths)." XDP has evolved quite a bit since we last covered it in LWN. It seems that most of the controversy surrounding the introduction of XDP in the Linux kernel has died down in public discussions, under the leadership of David Miller, who heralded XDP as the right solution for a long-term architecture in the kernel. He presented XDP as a fast, flexible, and safe solution. Indeed, one of the controversies surrounding XDP was the question of the inherent security challenges with introducing user-provided programs directly into the Linux kernel to mangle packets at such a low level. Miller argued that whatever protections are expected for user-space programs also apply to XDP programs, comparing the virtual memory protections to the eBPF (extended BPF) verifier applied to XDP programs. Those programs are actually eBPF that have an interesting set of restrictions:
  • they have a limited size
  • they cannot jump backward (and thus cannot loop), so they execute in predictable time
  • they do only static allocation, so they are also limited in memory
XDP is not a one-size-fits-all solution: netfilter, the TC traffic shaper, and other normal Linux utilities still have their place. There is, however, a clear use case for a solution like XDP in the kernel. For example, Facebook and Cloudflare have both started testing XDP and, in Facebook's case, deploying XDP in production. Martin Kafai Lau, from Facebook, presented the tool set the company is using to construct a DDoS-resilience solution and a level-4 load balancer (L4LB), which got a ten-times performance improvement over the previous IPVS-based solution. Facebook rolled out its own user-space solution called "Droplet" to detect hostile traffic and deploy blocking rules in the form of eBPF programs loaded in XDP. Lau demonstrated the way Facebook deploys a three-part chained eBPF program: the first part allows debugging and dumping of packets, the second is Droplet itself, which drops undesirable traffic, and the last segment is the load balancer, which mangles the packets to tweak their destination according to internal rules. Droplet can drop DDoS attacks at line rate while keeping the architecture flexible, which were two key design requirements. Gilberto Bertin, from Cloudflare, presented a similar approach: Cloudflare has a tool that processes sFlow data generated from iptables in order to generate cBPF (classic BPF) mitigation rules that are then deployed on edge routers. Those rules are created with a tool called bpfgen, part of Cloudflare's BSD-licensed bpftools suite. For example, it could create a cBPF bytecode blob that would match DNS queries to any example.com domain with something like:
    bpfgen dns *.example.com
Originally, Cloudflare would deploy those rules to plain iptables firewalls with the xt_bpf module, but this led to performance issues. It then deployed a proprietary user-space solution based on Solarflare hardware, but this has the performance limitations of user-space applications getting packets back onto the wire involves the cost of re-injecting packets back into the kernel. This is why Cloudflare is experimenting with XDP, which was partly developed in response to the company's problems, to deploy those BPF programs. A concern that Bertin identified was the lack of visibility into dropped packets. Cloudflare currently samples some of the dropped traffic to analyze attacks; this is not currently possible with XDP unless you pass the packets down the stack, which is expensive. Miller agreed that the lack of monitoring for XDP programs is a large issue that needs to be resolved, and suggested creating a way to mark packets for extraction to allow analysis. Cloudflare is currently in a testing phase with XDP and it is unclear if its whole XDP tool chain will be publicly available. While those two companies are starting to use XDP as-is, there is more work needed to complete the XDP project. As mentioned above and in our previous coverage, massive statistics extraction is still limited in the Linux kernel and introspection is difficult. Furthermore, while the existing actions (XDP_DROP and XDP_TX, see the documentation for more information) are well implemented and used, another action may be introduced, called XDP_REDIRECT, which would allow redirecting packets to different network interfaces. Such an action could also be used to accelerate bridges as packets could be "switched" based on the MAC address table. XDP also requires network driver support, which is currently limited. For example, the Intel drivers still do not support XDP, although that should come pretty soon. Miller, in his Netdev keynote, focused on XDP and presented it as the standard solution that is safe, fast, and usable. He identified the next steps of XDP development to be the addition of debugging mechanisms, better sampling tools for statistics and analysis, and user-space consistency. Miller foresees a future for XDP similar to the popularization of the Arduino chips: a simple set of tools that anyone, not just developers, can use. He gave the example of an Arduino tutorial that he followed where he could just look up a part number and get easy-to-use instructions on how to program it. Similar components should be available for XDP. For this purpose, the conference saw the creation of a new mailing list called xdp-newbies where people can learn how to create XDP build environments and how to write XDP programs.

In-kernel layer-7 proxying The third approach that struck me as innovative is the idea of doing layer-7 (application) proxying directly in the kernel. This comes from the idea that, traditionally, we build firewalls to segregate traffic and apply controls, but as most services move to HTTP, those policies become ineffective. Thomas Graf, presented this idea during Netconf using a Star Wars allegory: what if the Death Star were a server with an API? You would have endpoints like /dock or /comms that would allow you to dock a ship or communicate with the Death Star. Those API endpoints should obviously be public, but then there is this /exhaust-port endpoint that should never be publicly available. In order for a firewall to protect such a system, it must be able to inspect traffic at a higher level than the traditional address-port pairs. Graf presented a design where the kernel would create an in-kernel socket that would negotiate TCP connections on behalf of user space and then be able to apply arbitrary eBPF rules in the kernel. Graf's design of in-kernel proxying In this scenario, instead of doing the traditional transfer from Netfilter's TPROXY to user space, the kernel directly decapsulates the HTTP traffic and passes it to BPF rules that can make decisions without doing expensive context switches or memory copies in the case of simply wanting to refuse traffic (e.g. issue an HTTP 403 error). This, of course, requires the inclusion of kTLS to process HTTPS connections. HTTP2 support may also prove problematic, as it multiplexes connections and is harder to decapsulate. This design was described as a "pure pre-accept() hook". Starovoitov also compared the design to the kernel connection multiplexer (KCM). Tom Herbert, KCM's author, agreed that it could be extended to support this, but would require some extensions in user space to provide an interface between regular socket-based applications and the KCM layer. In any case, if the application does TLS (and lots of them do), kTLS gets tricky because it breaks the end-to-end nature of TLS, in effect becoming a man in the middle between the client and the application. Eric Dumazet argued that HA-Proxy already does things like this: it uses splice() to avoid copying too much data around, but it still does a context switch to hand over processing to user space, something that could be fixed in the general case. Another similar project that was presented at Netdev is the Tempesta firewall and reverse-proxy. The speaker, Alex Krizhanovsky, explained the Tempesta developers have taken one person month to port the mbed TLS stack to the Linux kernel to allow an in-kernel TLS handshake. Tempesta also implements rate limiting, cookies, and JavaScript challenges to mitigate DDoS attacks. The argument behind the project is that "it's easier to move TLS to the kernel than it is to move the TCP/IP stack to user space". Graf explained that he is familiar with Krizhanovsky's work and he is hoping to collaborate. In effect, the design Graf is working on would serve as a foundation for Krizhanovsky's in-kernel HTTP server (kHTTP). In a private email, Graf explained that:
The main differences in the implementation are currently that we foresee to use BPF for protocol parsing to avoid having to implement every single application protocol natively in the kernel. Tempesta likely sees this less of an issue as they are probably only targeting HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 and to some [extent] JavaScript.
Neither project is really ready for production yet. There didn't seem to be any significant pushback from key network developers against the idea, which surprised some people, so it is likely we will see more and more layer-7 intelligence move into the kernel sooner rather than later.

Conclusion All of this work aims at replacing a rag-tag bunch of proprietary solutions that recently came up to bypass the Linux kernel TCP/IP stack and improve performance for firewalls, proxies, and other key edge network elements. The idea is that, unless the kernel improves its performance, or at least provides a way to bypass its more complex code paths, people will work around it. With this set of solutions in place, engineers will now be able to use standard APIs to hook high-performance systems into the Linux kernel.
The author would like to thank the Netdev and Netconf organizers for travel assistance, Thomas Graf for a review of the in-kernel proxying section of this article, and Jesper Dangaard Brouer for review of the af_packet and XDP sections. Note: this article first appeared in the Linux Weekly News.

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: Weblate 2.13.1

Weblate 2.13.1 has been released quickly after 2.13. It fixes few minor issues and possible upgrade problem. Full list of changes: If you are upgrading from older version, please follow our upgrading instructions. You can find more information about Weblate on https://weblate.org, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Weblate is also being used on https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, OsmAnd, Aptoide, FreedomBox, Weblate itself and many other projects. Should you be looking for hosting of translations for your project, I'm happy to host them for you or help with setting it up on your infrastructure. Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far! The roadmap for next release is just being prepared, you can influence this by expressing support for individual issues either by comments or by providing bounty for them.

Filed under: Debian English SUSE Weblate 0 comments

12 April 2017

Vincent Bernat: Proper isolation of a Linux bridge

TL;DR: when configuring a Linux bridge, use the following commands to enforce isolation:
# bridge vlan del dev br0 vid 1 self
# echo 1 > /sys/class/net/br0/bridge/vlan_filtering

A network bridge (also commonly called a switch ) brings several Ethernet segments together. It is a common element in most infrastructures. Linux provides its own implementation. A typical use of a Linux bridge is shown below. The hypervisor is running three virtual hosts. Each virtual host is attached to the br0 bridge (represented by the horizontal segment). The hypervisor has two physical network interfaces: Typical use of Linux bridging with virtual machines The main expectation of such a setup is that while the virtual hosts should be able to use resources from the public network, they should not be able to access resources from the infrastructure network (including resources hosted on the hypervisor itself, like a SSH server). In other words, we expect a total isolation between the green domain and the purple one. That s not the case. From any virtual host:
# ip route add 192.168.14.3/32 dev eth0
# ping -c 3 192.168.14.3
PING 192.168.14.3 (192.168.14.3) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.14.3: icmp_seq=1 ttl=59 time=0.644 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.14.3: icmp_seq=2 ttl=59 time=0.829 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.14.3: icmp_seq=3 ttl=59 time=0.894 ms
--- 192.168.14.3 ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2033ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.644/0.789/0.894/0.105 ms

Why? There are two main factors of this behavior:
  1. A bridge can accept IP traffic. This is a useful feature if you want Linux to act as a bridge and provide some IP services to bridge users (a DHCP relay or a default gateway). This is usually done by configuring the IP address on the bridge device: ip addr add 192.0.2.2/25 dev br0.
  2. An interface doesn t need an IP address to process incoming IP traffic. Additionally, by default, Linux accepts to answer ARP requests independently from the incoming interface.

Bridge processing After turning an incoming Ethernet frame into a socket buffer, the network driver transfers the buffer to the netif_receive_skb() function. The following actions are executed:
  1. copy the frame to any registered global or per-device taps (e.g. tcpdump),
  2. evaluate the ingress policy (configured with tc),
  3. hand over the frame to the device-specific receive handler, if any,
  4. hand over the frame to a global or device-specific protocol handler (e.g. IPv4, ARP, IPv6).
For a bridged interface, the kernel has configured a device-specific receive handler, br_handle_frame(). This function won t allow any additional processing in the context of the incoming interface, except for STP and LLDP frames or if brouting is enabled1. Therefore, the protocol handlers are never executed in this case. After a few additional checks, Linux will decide if the frame has to be locally delivered:
  • the entry for the target MAC in the FDB is marked for local delivery, or
  • the target MAC is a broadcast or a multicast address.
In this case, the frame is passed to the br_pass_frame_up() function. A VLAN-related check is optionally performed. The socket buffer is attached to the bridge interface (br0) instead of the physical interface (eth0), is evaluated by Netfilter and sent back to netif_receive_skb(). It will go through the four steps a second time.

IPv4 processing When a device doesn t have a protocol-independent receive handler, a protocol-specific handler will be used:
# cat /proc/net/ptype
Type Device      Function
0800          ip_rcv
0011          llc_rcv [llc]
0004          llc_rcv [llc]
0806          arp_rcv
86dd          ipv6_rcv
Therefore, if the Ethernet type of the incoming frame is 0x800, the socket buffer is handled by ip_rcv(). Among other things, the three following steps will happen:
  • If the frame destination address is not the MAC address of the incoming interface, not a multicast one and not a broadcast one, the frame is dropped ( not for us ).
  • Netfilter gets a chance to evaluate the packet (in a PREROUTING chain).
  • The routing subsystem will decide the destination of the packet in ip_route_input_slow(): is it a local packet, should it be forwarded, should it be dropped, should it be encapsulated? Notably, the reverse-path filtering is done during this evaluation in fib_validate_source().
Reverse-path filtering (also known as uRPF, or unicast reverse-path forwarding, RFC 3704) enables Linux to reject traffic on interfaces which it should never have originated: the source address is looked up in the routing tables and if the outgoing interface is different from the current incoming one, the packet is rejected.

ARP processing When the Ethernet type of the incoming frame is 0x806, the socket buffer is handled by arp_rcv().
  • Like for IPv4, if the frame is not for us, it is dropped.
  • If the incoming device has the NOARP flag, the frame is dropped.
  • Netfilter gets a chance to evaluate the packet (configuration is done with arptables).
  • For an ARP request, the values of arp_ignore and arp_filter may trigger a drop of the packet.

IPv6 processing When the Ethernet type of the incoming frame is 0x86dd, the socket buffer is handled by ipv6_rcv().
  • Like for IPv4, if the frame is not for us, it is dropped.
  • If IPv6 is disabled on the interface, the packet is dropped.
  • Netfilter gets a chance to evaluate the packet (in a PREROUTING chain).
  • The routing subsystem will decide the destination of the packet. However, unlike IPv4, there is no reverse-path filtering2.

Workarounds There are various methods to fix the situation. We can completely ignore the bridged interfaces: as long as they are attached to the bridge, they cannot process any upper layer protocol (IPv4, IPv6, ARP). Therefore, we can focus on filtering incoming traffic from br0. It should be noted that for IPv4, IPv6 and ARP protocols, the MAC address check can be circumvented by using the broadcast MAC address.

Protocol-independent workarounds The four following fixes will indistinctly drop IPv4, ARP and IPv6 packets.

Using VLAN-aware bridge Linux 3.9 introduced the ability to use VLAN filtering on bridge ports. This can be used to prevent any local traffic:
# echo 1 > /sys/class/net/br0/bridge/vlan_filtering
# bridge vlan del dev br0 vid 1 self
# bridge vlan show
port    vlan ids
eth0     1 PVID Egress Untagged
eth2     1 PVID Egress Untagged
eth3     1 PVID Egress Untagged
eth4     1 PVID Egress Untagged
br0     None
This is the most efficient method since the frame is dropped directly in br_pass_frame_up().

Using ingress policy It s also possible to drop the bridged frame early after it has been re-delivered to netif_receive_skb() by br_pass_frame_up(). The ingress policy of an interface is evaluated before any handler. Therefore, the following commands will ensure no local delivery (the source interface of the packet is the bridge interface) happens:
# tc qdisc add dev br0 handle ffff: ingress
# tc filter add dev br0 parent ffff: u32 match u8 0 0 action drop
In my opinion, this is the second most efficient method.

Using ebtables Just before re-delivering the frame to netif_receive_skb(), Netfilter gets a chance to issue a decision. It s easy to configure it to drop the frame:
# ebtables -A INPUT --logical-in br0 -j DROP
However, to the best of my knowledge, this part of Netfilter is known to be inefficient.

Using namespaces Isolation can also be obtained by moving all the bridged interfaces into a dedicated network namespace and configure the bridge inside this namespace:
# ip netns add bridge0
# ip link set netns bridge0 eth0
# ip link set netns bridge0 eth2
# ip link set netns bridge0 eth3
# ip link set netns bridge0 eth4
# ip link del dev br0
# ip netns exec bridge0 brctl addbr br0
# for i in 0 2 3 4; do
>    ip netns exec bridge0 brctl addif br0 eth$i
>    ip netns exec bridge0 ip link set up dev eth$i
> done
# ip netns exec bridge0 ip link set up dev br0
The frame will still wander a bit inside the IP stack, wasting some CPU cycles and increasing the possible attack surface. But ultimately, it will be dropped.

Protocol-dependent workarounds Unless you require multiple layers of security, if one of the previous workarounds is already applied, there is no need to apply one of the protocol-dependent fix below. It s still interesting to know them because it is not uncommon to already have them in place.

ARP The easiest way to disable ARP processing on a bridge is to set the NOARP flag on the device. The ARP packet will be dropped as the very first step of the ARP handler.
# ip link set arp off dev br0
# ip l l dev br0
8: br0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,NOARP,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state UP mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 50:54:33:00:00:04 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
arptables can also drop the packet quite early:
# arptables -A INPUT -i br0 -j DROP
Another way is to set arp_ignore to 2 for the given interface. The kernel will only answer to ARP requests whose target IP address is configured on the incoming interface. Since the bridge interface doesn t have any IP address, no ARP requests will be answered.
# sysctl -qw net.ipv4.conf.br0.arp_ignore=2
Disabling ARP processing is not a sufficient workaround for IPv4. A user can still insert the appropriate entry in its neighbor cache:
# ip neigh replace 192.168.14.3 lladdr 50:54:33:00:00:04 dev eth0
# ping -c 1 192.168.14.3
PING 192.168.14.3 (192.168.14.3) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.14.3: icmp_seq=1 ttl=49 time=1.30 ms
--- 192.168.14.3 ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 1.309/1.309/1.309/0.000 ms
As the check on the target MAC address is quite loose, they don t even need to guess the MAC address:
# ip neigh replace 192.168.14.3 lladdr ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff dev eth0
# ping -c 1 192.168.14.3
PING 192.168.14.3 (192.168.14.3) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.14.3: icmp_seq=1 ttl=49 time=1.12 ms
--- 192.168.14.3 ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 1.129/1.129/1.129/0.000 ms

IPv4 The earliest place to drop an IPv4 packet is with Netfilter3:
# iptables -t raw -I PREROUTING -i br0 -j DROP
If Netfilter is disabled, another possibility is to enable strict reverse-path filtering for the interface. In this case, since there is no IP address configured on the interface, the packet will be dropped during the route lookup:
# sysctl -qw net.ipv4.conf.br0.rp_filter=1
Another option is the use of a dedicated routing rule. Compared to the reverse-path filtering option, the packet will be dropped a bit earlier, still during the route lookup.
# ip rule add iif br0 blackhole

IPv6 Linux provides a way to completely disable IPv6 on a given interface. The packet will be dropped as the very first step of the IPv6 handler:
# sysctl -qw net.ipv6.conf.br0.disable_ipv6=1
Like for IPv4, it s possible to use Netfilter or a dedicated routing rule.

About the example In the above example, the virtual host get ICMP replies because they are routed through the infrastructure network to Internet (e.g. the hypervisor has a default gateway which also acts as a NAT router to Internet). This may not be the case. If you want to check if you are vulnerable despite not getting an ICMP reply, look at the guest neighbor table to check if you got an ARP reply from the host:
# ip route add 192.168.14.3/32 dev eth0
# ip neigh show dev eth0
192.168.14.3 lladdr 50:54:33:00:00:04 REACHABLE
If you didn t get a reply, you could still have issues with IP processing. Add a static neighbor entry before checking the next step:
# ip neigh replace 192.168.14.3 lladdr ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff dev eth0
To check if IP processing is enabled, check the bridge host s network statistics:
# netstat -s   grep "ICMP messages"
    15 ICMP messages received
    15 ICMP messages sent
    0 ICMP messages failed
If the counters are increasing, it is processing incoming IP packets. One-way communication still allows a lot of bad things, like DoS attacks. Additionally, if the hypervisor happens to also act as a router, the reach is extended to the whole infrastructure network, potentially exposing weak devices (e.g. PDU) exposing an SNMP agent. If one-way communication is all that s needed, the attacker can also spoof its source IP address, bypassing IP-based authentication.

  1. A frame can be forcibly routed (L3) instead of bridged (L2) by brouting the packet. This action can be triggered using ebtables.
  2. For IPv6, reverse-path filtering needs to be implemented with Netfilter, using the rpfilter match.
  3. If the br_netfilter module is loaded, net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ipatbles sysctl has to be set to 0. Otherwise, you also need to use the physdev match to not drop IPv4 packets going through the bridge.

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: Weblate 2.13

Weblate 2.13 has been released today pretty much on the schedule. The most important change being more fine grained access control and some smaller UI improvements. There are other new features and bug fixes as well. Full list of changes: If you are upgrading from older version, please follow our upgrading instructions. You can find more information about Weblate on https://weblate.org, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Weblate is also being used on https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, OsmAnd, Aptoide, FreedomBox, Weblate itself and many other projects. Should you be looking for hosting of translations for your project, I'm happy to host them for you or help with setting it up on your infrastructure. Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far! The roadmap for next release is just being prepared, you can influence this by expressing support for individual issues either by comments or by providing bounty for them.

Filed under: Debian English Gammu phpMyAdmin SUSE Weblate 0 comments

11 April 2017

Antoine Beaupr : A report from Netconf: Day 1

As is becoming traditional, two times a year the kernel networking community meets in a two-stage conference: an invite-only, informal, two-day plenary session called Netconf, held in Toronto this year, and a more conventional one-track conference open to the public called Netdev. I was invited to cover both conferences this year, given that Netdev was in Montreal (my hometown), and was happy to meet the crew of developers that maintain the network stack of the Linux kernel. This article covers the first day of the conference which consisted of around 25 Linux developers meeting under the direction of David Miller, the kernel's networking subsystem maintainer. Netconf has no formal sessions; although some people presented slides, interruptions are frequent (indeed, encouraged) and the focus is on hashing out issues that are blocked on the mailing list and getting suggestions, ideas, solutions, and feedback from their peers.

Removing ndo_select_queue() One of the first discussions that elicited a significant debate was the ndo_select_queue() function, a key component of the Linux polling system that determines when and how to send packets on a network interface (see netdev_pick_tx and friends). The general question was whether the use of ndo_select_queue() in drivers is a good idea. Alexander Duyck explained that Intel people were considering using ndo_select_queue() for receive/transmit queue matching. Intel drivers do not currently use the hook provided by the Linux kernel and it turns out no one is happy with ndo_select_queue(): the heuristics it uses don't really please anyone. The consensus (including from Duyck himself) seemed to be that it should just not be used anymore, or at least not used for that specific purpose. The discussion turned toward the wireless network stack, which uses it extensively, but for other purposes. Johannes Berg explained that the wireless stack uses ndo_select_queue() for traffic classification, for example to get voice traffic through even if the best-effort queue is backed up. The wireless stack could stop using it by doing flow control completely inside the wireless stack, which already uses the fq_codel flow-control mechanism for other purposes, so porting away from ndo_select_queue() seems possible there. The problem then becomes how to update all the drivers to change that behavior, which would be a lot of work. Still, it seems people are moving away from a generic ndo_select_queue() interface to stack-specific or even driver-specific (in the case of Intel) queue management interfaces.

refcount_t followup There was a followup discussion on the integration of the refcount_t type into the network stack, which we covered recently. This type is meant to be an in-kernel defense against exploits based on overflowing or underflowing an object's reference count. The consensus seems to be that having refcount_t used for debugging is acceptable, but it cannot be enabled by default. An issue that was identified is that the networking developers are fairly sure that introducing refcount_t would have a severe impact on performance, but they do not have benchmarks to prove it, something Miller identified as a problem that needs to be worked on. Miller then expressed some openness to the idea of having it as a kernel configuration option. A similar discussion happened, on the second day, regarding the KASan memory error detector which was covered when it was introduced in 2014. Eric Dumazet warned that there could be a lot of issues that cannot be detected by KASan because of the way the network stack often bypasses regular memory-allocation routines for performance reasons. He also noted that this can sometimes mean the stack may go over the regular 10% memory limit (the tcp_mem parameter, described in the tcp(7) man page) for certain operations, especially when rebuilding out of order packets with lots of parallel TCP connections. Therefore it was proposed that these special memory recycling tricks could be optionally disabled, at run or compile-time, to instrument proper memory tracking. Dumazet argued this was a situation similar to refcount_t in that we need a way to disable high performance to make the network stack easier to debug with KAsan. The problem with optional parameters is that they are often disabled in production or even by default, which, in turn, means that critical bugs cannot actually be found because the code paths are not tested. When I asked Dumazet about this, he explained that Google performs integration testing of new kernels before putting them in production, and those toggles could be enabled there to find and fix those bugs. But he agreed that certain code paths are then not tested until the code gets deployed in production. So it seems the status quo remains: security folks wants to improve the reliability of the kernel, but the network folks can't afford the performance cost. Yet it was clear in the discussions that the team cares about security issues and wants those issues to be fixed; the impact of some of the solutions is just too big.

Lightweight wireless management packet access Berg explained that some users need to have high-performance access to certain management frames in the wireless stack and wondered how to best expose those to user space. The wireless stack already allows users to clone a network interface in "monitor" mode, but this has a big performance cost, as the radiotap header needs to be constructed from scratch and the packet header needs to be copied. As wireless improves and the bandwidth rises to gigabit levels, this can become significant bottleneck for packet sniffers or reporting software that need to know precisely what's going on over the air outside of the regular access point client operation. It seems the proper way to do this is with an eBPF program. As Miller summarized, just add another API call that allows loading a BPF program into the kernel and then those users can use a BPF filtering point to get the statistics they need. This will require an extra hook in the wireless stack, but it seems like this is the way that will be taken to implement this feature.

VLAN 0 inconsistencies Hannes Frederic Sowa brought up the seemingly innocuous question of "how do we handle VLAN 0?" In theory, VLAN 0 means "no VLAN". But the Linux kernel currently handles this differently depending on whether the VLAN module is loaded and whether a VLAN 0 interface was created. Sometimes the VLAN tag is stripped, sometimes not. It turns out the semantics of this were accidentally changed last time there was a change here and this was originally working but is now broken. Sowa therefore got the go-ahead to fix this to make the behavior consistent again.

Loopy fun Then it came the turn of Jamal Hadi Salim, the maintainer of the kernel's traffic-control (tc) subsystem. The first issue he brought up is a problem in the tc REDIRECT action that can create infinite loops within the kernel. The problem can be easily alleviated when loops are created on the same interface: checks can be added that just drop packets coming from the same device and rate-limit logging to avoid a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. The more serious problem occurs when a packet is forwarded from (say) interface eth0 to eth1 which then promptly redirects it from eth1 back to eth0. Obviously, this kind of problem can only be created by a user with root access so, at first glance, those issues don't seem that serious: admins can shoot themselves in the foot, so what? But things become a little more serious when you consider the container case, where an untrusted user has root access inside a container and should have constrained resource limitations. Such a loop could allow this user to deploy an effective DoS attack against a whole group of containers running on the same machine. Even worse, this endless loop could possibly turn into a deadlock in certain scenarios, as the kernel could try to transmit the packet on the same device it originated from and block, progressively filling the queues and eventually completely breaking network access. Florian Westphal argued that a container can already create DoS conditions, for example by doing a ping flood. According to Salim, this whole problem was created when two bits used for tracking such packets were reclaimed from the skb structure used to represent packets in the kernel. Those bits were a simple TTL (time to live) field that was incremented on each loop and dropped after a pre-determined limit was reached, breaking infinite loops. Salim asked everyone if this should be fixed or if we should just forget about this issue and move on. Miller proposed to keep a one-behind state for the packet, fixing the simplest case (two interfaces). The general case, however, would requite a bitmap of all the interfaces to be scanned, which would impose a large overhead. Miller said an attempt to fix this should somehow be made. The root of the problem is that the network maintainers are trying to reduce the size of the skb structure, because it's used in many critical paths of the network stack. Salim's position is that, without the TTL fields, there is no way to fix the general case here, and this constitutes a security issue. So either the bits need to be brought back, or we need to live with the inherent DoS threat.

Dumping large statistics sets Another issue Salim brought up was the question of how to export large statistics sets from the kernel. It turns out that some use cases may end up dumping a lot of data. Salim mentioned a real-world tc use case that calls for reading six-million entries. The current netlink-based API provides a way to get only 20 entries at a time, which means it takes forever to dump the state of all those policy actions. Salim has a patch that changes the dump size be eight times the NLMSG_GOOD_SIZE, which improves performance by an order of magnitude already, although there are issues with checking the user-space buffer size there. But a more complete solution is needed. What Salim proposed was a way to ask only for the states that changed since the last dump was requested. He has a patch to add a last_access field to the netlink_callback structure used by netlink_dump() to output data; that raised the question of how to actually use that field. Since Salim fetches that data every five seconds, he figured he could just tell the kernel to return all the nodes that changed in that period. But then if the dump takes more than five seconds to complete, the next dump may be missing states that changed during the extra delay. An alternative mechanism would be for the user-space utility to keep the time stamp it requested and use that as a delta for the next dump. It turns out this is a larger problem than just tc. Dumazet mentioned this was an issue with fq_codel classes: he would even like to be able to dump those statistics faster than every five seconds. Roopa Prabhu mentioned that Cumulus also has similar problems dumping stats from bridges, so clearly a more generic solution is needed here. There is, however, a fundamental problem with dumping large statistics sets from the kernel: those statistics are constantly changing while the dump is created and unless versioning or locking mechanisms are used which would slow things down the data returned is bound to be only an approximation of reality. Salim promised to send a set of RFC patches to further discussions regarding this issue, but during the following Netdev conference, Berg published a patch to fix this ten-year-old issue, which brought cheers from the audience.
The author would like to thank the Netconf and Netdev organizers for travel to, and hosting assistance in, Toronto. Many thanks to Berg, Dumazet, Salim, and Sowa for their time taken for a technical review of this article. Note: this article first appeared in the Linux Weekly News.

Antoine Beaupr : A report from Netconf: Day 2

This article covers the second day of the informal Netconf discussions, held on on April 4, 2017. Topics discussed this day included the binding of sockets in VRF, identification of eBPF programs, inconsistencies between IPv4 and IPv6, changes to data-center hardware, and more. (See this article for coverage from the first day of discussions).

How to bind to specific sockets in VRF One of the first presentations was from David Ahern of Cumulus, who presented a few interesting questions for the audience. His first was the problem of binding sockets to a given interface. Right now, there are four different ways this can be done:
  • the old SO_BINDTODEVICE generic socket option (see socket(7))
  • the IP_PKTINFO, IP-specific socket option (see ip(7)), introduced in Linux 2.2
  • the IP_UNICAST_IF flag, introduced in Linux 3.3 for WINE
  • the IPv6 scope ID suffix, part of the IPv6 addressing standard
So there's a problem of having too many ways of doing the same thing, something that cannot really be fixed without breaking ABI compatibility. But even worse, conflicts between those options are not reported by the kernel so it's possible for a user to set up socket flags in a way that certain flags override others and there are no checks made or errors reported. It was agreed that the user should get some notification of conflicting changes here, at least. Furthermore, binding sockets to a specific VRF (Virtual Routing and Forwarding) device is not currently possible, so Ahern asked what the best way to do this would be, considering the many options available. A use case example is a UDP multicast socket that could be bound to a specific interface within a VRF. This is an old problem: Tom Herbert explained that there were previous discussions about making the bind() system call more programmable so that, for example, you could bind() a UDP socket to a discrete list of IP addresses or a subnet. So he identified this issue as a broader problem that should be addressed by making the interfaces more generic. Ahern explained that it is currently possible to bind sockets to the slave device of a VRF even though that should not be allowed. He also raised the question of how the kernel should tell which socket should be selected for incoming packets. Right now, there is a scoring mechanism for UDP sockets, but that cannot be used directly in this more general case. David Miller said that there are already different ways of specifying scope: there is the VRF layer and the namespace ("netns") layer. A long time ago, Miller reluctantly accepted the addition of netns keys everywhere, swallowing the performance cost to gain flexibility. He argued that a new key should not be added and instead existing infrastructure should be reused. Herbert argued this was exactly the reason why this should be simplified: "if we don't answer the question, people will keep on trying this". For example, one can use a VRF to limit listening addresses, but it gets complicated if we need a device for every address. It seems the consensus evolved towards using, IP_UNICAST_IF, added back in 2012, which is accessible for non-root users. It is currently limited to UDP and RAW sockets, but it could be extended for TCP.

XDP and eBPF program identification Ahern then turned to the problem of extracting BPF programs from the kernel. He gave the example of a simple cBPF (classic BPF) filter that checks for ARP packets. If the filter is read back from the kernel, the user gets a blob of binary data, which is hard to interpret. There is an kernel verifier that can show C-like output, but that is also difficult to interpret. Ahern then added annotations to his slide that showed what the original program actually does, which was a good demonstration of why such a feature is needed. Ahern explained that, at least for cBPF, it should be possible to recover the original plaintext, or at least something close to the original program. A first step would be to replace known constants (like 0x806 for ARP). Even with eBPF, it should be possible to improve the output. Alexei Starovoitov, the BPF maintainer, explained that it might make sense to start by returning information about the maps used by an eBPF program. Then more complex data structures could be inspected once we know their type. The first priority is to get simple debugging tools working but, in the long term, the goal is a full decompiler that can reconstruct instructions into a human-readable program. The question that remains is how to return this data. Ahern explained that right now the bpf() system call copies the data to a different file descriptor, but it could just fill in a buffer. Starovoitov argued for a file descriptor; that would allow the kernel to stream everything through the same descriptor instead of having many attach points. Netlink cannot be used for this because of its asynchronous nature. A similar issue regarding the way we identify express data path (XDP) programs (which are also written in BPF) was raised by Daniel Borkmann from Covalent. Miller explained that users will want ways to figure out which XDP program was installed, so XDP needs an introspection mechanism. We currently have SHA-1 identifiers that can be internally used to tell which binary is currently loaded but those are not exposed to user space. Starovoitov mentioned it is now just a boolean that shows if a program is loaded or not. A use case for this, on top of just trying to figure out which BPF program is loaded, is to actually fetch the source code of a BPF program that was deployed in the field for which the source was lost. It is still uncertain that it will be possible to extract an exact copy that could then be recompiled into the same program. Starovoitov added that he needed this in production to do proper reporting.

IPv4/IPv6 equivalency The last issue or set of issues that Ahern brought up was the question of inconsistencies between IPv4 and IPv6. It turns out that, because both protocols were (naturally) implemented separately, there are inconsistencies in how they are handled in the Linux kernel, which affect, among other things, the VRF framework. The first example he gave was the fact that IPv6 addresses added on the loopback interface generate unreachable routes in the main routing table, yet this doesn't happen with IPv4 addresses. Hannes Frederic Sowa explained this was part of the IPv6 specification: there are stronger restrictions on loopback interfaces in IPv6 than IPv4. Ahern explained that VRF loopback interfaces do not implement these restrictions and wanted to know if this was a problem. Another issue is that anycast routes are added to the wrong interface. This is apparently not specific to VRF: this was done "just because Java", and has been there from day one. It seems that the Java Virtual Machine builds its own routing table and assumes this behavior, so changing this would break every JVM out there, which is obviously not acceptable. Finally, Martin Kafai Lau asked if work should be done to merge the IPv4 and IPv6 FIB (forwarding information base) trees. The FIB tree is the data structure that represents routing tables in the Linux kernel. Miller explained that the two trees are not semantically equivalent: while IPv6 does source-address lookup and routing, IPv4 does not. We can't remove the source lookups from IPv6, because "people probably use that". According to Alexander Duyck, adding source tables to IPv4 would degrade performance to the level of IPv6 performance, which was jokingly referred to as an incentive to switch to IPv6. More seriously, Sowa argued that using the same compressed tree IPv4 uses in IPv6 could make sense. People may want to have source routing in IPv4 as well. Miller argued that the kernel is optimized for 32-bit addresses in IPv4, and conceded that it could be scaled to 64-bit subnets, but 128-bit addresses would be much harder. Sowa suggested that they could be limited to 64 bits, as global routes that are announced over BGP usually have such a limit, and more specific routes are usually at discrete prefixes like /65, /127 (for interconnect links) or /128 for (for point-to-point links). He expressed concerns over the reliability of such an implementation so, at this point, it is unlikely that the data structures could be merged. What is more likely is that the code path could be merged and simplified, while keeping the data structures separate.

Modules options substitutions The next issue that was raised was from Ji P rko, who asked how to pass configuration options to a driver before the driver is initialized. Some chips require that some settings be sent before the firmware is loaded, which leads to a weird situation where there is a need to address a device before it's actually recognized by the kernel. The question then can be summarized as to how to pass information to a device that doesn't exist yet. The answer seems to be that devlink could do this, as it has access to the full device tree and, therefore, to devices that can be addressed by (say) PCI identifiers. Then a possible devlink command could look something like:
    devlink dev pci/0000:03:00.0 option set foo bar
This idea raised a bunch of extra questions: some devices don't have a one-to-one mapping with the PCI bridge identifiers, for example, meaning that those identifiers cannot be used to access such devices. Another issue is that you may want to send multiple settings in a single transaction, which doesn't fit well in the devlink model. Miller then proposed to let the driver initialize itself to some state and wait for configuration to be sent when necessary. Another way would be to unregister the driver and re-register with the given configuration. Shrijeet Mukherjee explained that right now, Cumulus is doing this using horrible startup script magic by retrying and re-registering, but it would be nice to have a more standard way to do this.

Control over UAPI patches Another issue that came up was the problem of changes in the user-space API (UAPI) which break backward compatibility. P rko said that "we have to be more careful about those changes". The problem is that reviewers are not always available to make detailed reviews of such changes and may not notice API-breaking changes. P rko proposed creating a bot to check if a given patch introduces UAPI changes, changes in structs, or in netlink enums. Miller said he could block merges until discussions happen and that patchwork, which Miller uses to process patches from the mailing list, does some of this. He also pointed out there aren't enough test cases in the first place. Starovoitov argued UAPI isn't special, there are other ways of breaking backward compatibility. He expressed concerns that such a bot could create a false sense that everything is fine while a patch could break compatibility and not be detected. Miller countered that UAPI is special in that "we're stuck with it forever". He then went on to propose that, since there's a maintainer (or more) for each module, he can make sure that each maintainer explicitly approves changes to those modules.

Data-center hardware changes Starovoitov brought up the issue of a new type of hardware that is currently being deployed in data centers called a "multi-host NIC" (network interface card). It's a single NIC that is connected to multiple servers. Facebook, for example, uses this in its Yosemite platform that shoves twelve servers into a 2U rack mount, in three modules. Each module is made of four servers connected to the traditional switch fabric with a single NIC through PCI-Express. Mellanox and and Broadcom also have similar devices. One question is how to manage those devices. Since they are connected through a PCI-Express bus, Linux will see them as a NIC, yet they are also a little like switches, in that they interconnect multiple servers. Furthermore, the kernel security model assumes that a NIC is trusted, and gladly opens its own memory to NICs through DMA; this can become a huge security issue when the NIC is under the control of another server. This can especially become problematic if we consider that there could be TLS hardware offloading in the future with the introduction of in-kernel TLS stacks. The other problem is the question of reliability: since those devices are currently "dumb", they need to be managed just like a regular NIC. If the host managing the card crashes, it could disable a whole set of servers that rely on the same NIC. There could be an election process among the servers, but that complicates significantly what used to be a simple PCI connection. Mukherjee pointed out that the model Cisco uses for this is that the "smart NIC" is a "slave" of the main switch fabric. It's a daughter card, which makes it easier to manage from a network perspective. It is clear that Linux will need a way to represent those devices, probably through the newly introduced switchdev or DSA (distributed switch architecture), but it will be something to keep an eye on as density increases in the data center. There were many more discussions during Netconf, too many to cover here, but in the end, Miller thanked everyone for all the interesting topics as the participants dispersed for a day off to travel to Montreal to attend the following Netdev conference.
The author would like to thank the Netconf and Netdev organizers for travel to, and hosting assistance in, Toronto. Many thanks to Alexei Starovoitov for his time taken for a technical review of this article. Note: this article first appeared in the Linux Weekly News.

10 April 2017

Daniel Pocock: If Alan Turing was born today, would he be a Muslim?

Alan Turing's name and his work are well known to anybody with a theoretical grounding in computer science. Turing developed his theories well before anybody invented file sharing, overclocking or mass surveillance. In fact, Turing was largely working in the absence of any computers at all: the transistor was only invented in 1947 and the microchip, the critical innovation that has made computing both affordable and portable, only came in 1960, four years after Turing's death. To this day, the Turing Test remains a well known challenge in the field of Artificial Intelligence. The most prestigious prize in computing, the A.M. Turing Award from the ACM, equivalent to the Nobel Prize in other fields of endeavour, is named in Turing's honour. (This year's award is another British scientist, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web).
Potentially far more people know of Alan Turing for his groundbreaking work at Bletchley Park and the impact it had on cracking the Nazi's Enigma machines during World War 2, giving the allies an advantage against Hitler. While in his lifetime, Turing exposed the secret communications of the Nazis, in his death, he exposed something manifestly repugnant about his own society. Turing's challenges with his sexuality (or Britain's challenge with it) are just as well documented as his greatest scientific achievements. The 2014 movie The Imitation Game tells Turing's story, bringing together the themes from his professional and personal life. Had Turing chosen to flee British persecution by going abroad, he would be a refugee in the same sense as any person who crossed the seas to reach Europe today to avoid persecution elsewhere. Please prove me wrong In March, I blogged about the problem of racism that plagues Britain today. While some may have felt the tone of the blog was quite strong, I was in no way pleased to find my position affirmed by the events that occurred in the two days after the blog appeared. Two days and two more human beings (both immigrants and both refugees) subjected to abhorrent and unnecessary acts of abuse in Great Britain. Both cases appear to be fuelled directly by the evil that has been oozing out of number 10 Downing Street since they decided to have a referendum on "Brexit". What stands out about these latest crimes is not that they occurred (this type of thing has been going on for months now) but certain contrasts between their circumstances and to a lesser extent, the fact they occurred immediately after Theresa May formalized Britain's departure from the EU. One of the victims was almost beaten to death by a street gang, while the other was abused by men wearing uniforms. One was only a child, while the other is a mature adult who has been in the UK almost three decades, completely assimilated into British life, working and paying taxes. Both were doing nothing out of the ordinary at the time the abuse occurred: one had engaged in a conversation at a bus stop, the other was on a routine visit to a Government office. There is no evidence that either of them had done anything to provoke or invite the abhorrent treatment meted out to them by the followers of Theresa May and Nigel Farage. The first victim, on 30 March, was Stojan Jankovic, a refugee from Yugoslavia who has been in the UK for 26 years. He had a routine meeting at an immigration department office where he was ambushed, thrown in the back of a van and sent to rot in a prison cell by Theresa May's gestapo. On Friday, 31 March, it was Reker Ahmed, a 17 year old Kurdish-Iranian beaten to the brink of death by a crowd in south London. One of the more remarkable facts to emerge about these two cases is that while Stojan Jankovic was basically locked up for no reason at all, the street thugs who the police apprehended for the assault on Ahmed were kept in a cell for less than 48 hours and released again on bail. While the harmless and innocent Jankovic was eventually released after a massive public outcry, he spent more time locked up than that gang of violent criminals who beat Reker Ahmed. In other words, Theresa May and Nigel Farage's Britain has more concern for the liberty of violent criminals than somebody like Jankovic who has been working and paying taxes in the UK since before any of those street thugs were born. A deeper insight into Turing's fate With gay marriage having been legal in the UK for a number of years now, the rainbow flag flying at the Tate and Sir Elton John achieving a knighthood, it becomes difficult for people to relate to the world in which Turing and many other victims were collectively classified by their sexuality, systematically persecuted by the state and ultimately died far sooner than they should have. (Turing was only 41 when he died). In fact, the cruel and brutal forces that ripped Turing apart (and countless other victims too) haven't dissipated at all, they have simply shifted their target. The slanderous comments insinuating that immigrants "steal" jobs or that Islam is about terrorism are eerily reminiscent of suggestions that gay men abduct young boys or work as Soviet spies. None of these lies has any basis in fact, but repeat them often enough in certain types of newspaper and these ideas spread like weeds. In an ironic twist, Turing's groundbreaking work at Bletchley Park was founded on the contributions of Polish mathematicians, their own country having been the first casualty to Hitler, they were also both immigrants and refugees in Britain. Today, under the Theresa May/Nigel Farage leadership, Polish citizens have been subjected to regular vilification by the media and some have even been killed in the street. It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. When you compare these two pieces of propaganda: a 1963 article in the Sunday Mirror advising people "How to spot a possible homo" and a UK Government billboard encouraging people to be on the lookout for people who look different, could you imagine the same type of small-minded and power-hungry tyrants crafting them, singling out a minority so as to keep the public's attention in the wrong place?
Many people have noticed that these latest UK Government posters portray foreigners, Muslims and basically anybody who is not white using a range of characteristics found in anti-semetic propaganda from the Third Reich: Do the people who create such propaganda appear to have any concern whatsoever for the people they hurt? How would Alan Turing have felt when he encountered propaganda like that from the Sunday Mirror? Do posters like these encourage us to judge people by their gifts in science, the arts or sporting prowess or do they encourage us to lump them all together based on their physical appearance? It is a basic expectation of scientific methodology that when you repeat the same experiment, you should get the same result. What type of experiment are Theresa May and Nigel Farage conducting and what type of result would you expect? Playing ping-pong with children If anybody has any doubt that this evil comes from the top, take a moment to contemplate the 3,000 children who were baited with the promise of resettlement from the Calais "jungle" camp into the UK under the Dubs amendment. When French authorities closed the "jungle" in 2016, the children were lured out of the camp and left with nowhere to go as Theresa May and French authorities played ping-pong with them. Given that the UK parliament had already agreed they should be accepted, was there any reason for Theresa May to dig her heels in and make these children suffer? Or was she just trying to prove her credentials as somebody who can bastardize migrants just the way Nigel Farage would do it? How do British politicians really view migrants? Parliamentarian Keith Vaz, former chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee (responsible for security, crime, prostitution and similar things) was exposed with young men from eastern Europe, encouraging them to take drugs before he ordered them "Take your shirt off. I'm going to attack you.". How many British MP's see foreigners this way? Next time you are groped at an airport security checkpoint, remember it was people like Keith Vaz and his committee who oversee those abuses, writing among other things that "The wider introduction of full-body scanners is a welcome development". No need to "take your shirt off" when these machines can look through it as easily as they can look through your children's underwear. According to the World Health Organization, HIV/AIDS kills as many people as the September 11 attacks every single day. Keith Vaz apparently had no concern for the possibility he might spread this disease any further: the media reported he doesn't use any protection in his extra-marital relationships. While Britain's new management continue to round up foreigners like Stojan Jankovic who have done nothing wrong, they chose not to prosecute Keith Vaz for his antics with drugs and prostitution. Who is Britain's next Alan Turing? Britain's next Alan Turing may not be a homosexual. He or she may have been a child turned away by Theresa May's spat with the French at Calais, a migrant bundled into a deportation van by the gestapo (who are just following orders) or perhaps somebody of Muslim appearance who is set upon by thugs in the street who have been energized by Nigel Farage. If you still have any uncertainty about what Brexit really means, this is it. A country that denies itself the opportunity to be great by subjecting itself to be ruled under the "divide and conquer" mantra of the colonial era. Throughout the centuries, Britain has produced some of the most brilliant scientists of their time. Newton, Darwin and Hawking are just some of those who are even more prominent than Turing, household names around the world. One can only wonder what the history books will have to say about Theresa May and Nigel Farage however. Next time you see a British policeman accosting a Muslim, whether it is at an airport, in a shopping centre, keeping Manchester United souvenirs or simply taking a photograph, spare a thought for Alan Turing and the era when homosexuals were their target of choice.

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: New free software projects on Hosted Weblate

Hosted Weblate provides also free hosting for free software projects. Finally I got to processing requests a bit faster, so there are just few new projects. This time, the newly hosted projects include: If you want to support this effort, please donate to Weblate, especially recurring donations are welcome to make this service alive. You can do them on Liberapay or Bountysource.

Filed under: Debian English Weblate 0 comments

9 April 2017

Sam Hartman: When "when" is too hard a question: SQLAlchemy, Python datetime, and ISO8601

A new programmer asked on a work chat room how timezones are handled in databases. He asked if it was a good idea to store things in UTC. The senior programmers all laughed as we told some of our horror stories with timezones. Yes, UTC is great; if only it were that simple.
About a week later I was designing the schema for a blue sky project I'm implementing. I had to confront time in all its Pythonic horror.
Let's start with the datetime.datetime class. Datetime objects optionally include a timezone. If no timezone is present, several methods such as timestamp treat the object as a local time in the system's timezone. The timezone method returns a POSIX timestamp, which is always expressed in UTC, so knowing the input timezone is important. The now method constructs such an object from the current time.
However other methods act differently. The utcnow method constructs a datetime object that has the UTC time, but is not marked with a timezone. So, for example datetime.fromtimestamp(datetime.utcnow().timestamp()) produces the wrong result unless your system timezone happens to have the same offset as UTC.
It's also possible to construct a datetime object that includes a UTC time and is marked as having a UTC time. The utcnow method never does this, but you can pass the UTC timezone into the now method and get that effect. As you'd expect, the timestamp method returns the correct result on such a datetime.
Now enter SQLAlchemy, one of the more popular Python ORMs. Its DATETIME type has an argument that tries to request a column capable of storing a a timezone from the underlying database. You aren't guaranteed to get this though; some databases don't provide that functionality. With PostgreSQL, I do get such a column, although something in SQLAlchemy is not preserving the timezones (although it is correctly adjusting the time). That is, I'll store a UTC time in an object, flush it to my session, and then read back the same time represented in my local timezone (marked as my local timezone). You'd think this would be safe.
Enter SQLite. SQLite makes life hard for people wanting to store time; it seems to want to store things as strings. That's fairly incompatible with storing a timezone and doing any sort of comparisons on dates. SQLAlchemy does not try to store a timezone in SQLite. It just trims any timezone information from the datetime. So, if I do something like
d = datetime.now(timezone.utc)
obj.date_col = d
session.add(obj)
session.flush()
assert obj.date_col == d # fails
assert obj.date_col.timestamp() == d.timestamp() # fails
assert d == obj.date_col.replace(tzinfo = timezone.utc) # finally succeeds

There are some unfortunate consequences of this. If you mark your datetimes with timezone information (even if it is always the same timezone), whether two datetimes representing the same datetime compare equal depends on whether objects have been flushed to the session yet. If you don't mark your objects with timezones, then you may not store timezone information on other databases.
At least if you use only the methods we've discussed so far, you're reasonably safe if you use local time everywhere in your application and don't mark your datetimes with timezones. That's undesirable because as our new programmer correctly surmised, you really should be using UTC. This is particularly true if users of your database might span multiple timezones.
You can use UTC time and not mark your objects as UTC. This will give the wrong data with a database that actually does support timezones, but will sort of work with SQLite. You need to be careful never to convert your datetime objects into POSIX time as you'll get the wrong result.
It turns out that my life was even more complicated because parts of my project serialize data into JSON. For that serialization, I've chosen ISO 8601. You've probably seen that format: '2017-04-09T18:17:27.340410+00:00. Datetime provides the convenient isoformat method to print timestamps in the ISO 8601 format. If the datetime has a timezone indication, it is included in the ISO formatted string. If not, then no timezone indication is included. You know how I mentioned that datetime takes a string without a timezone marker as local time? Yeah, well, that's not what 8601 does: UTC all the way, baby! And at least the parser in the iso8601 module will always include timezone markers. So, if you use datetime to print a timestamp without a timezone marker and then read that back in to construct a new datetime on the deserialization side, then you'll get the wrong time. OK, so mark things with timezones then. Well, if you use local time, then the time you get depends on whether you print the ISO string before or after session flush (before or after SQLAlchemy trims the timezone information as it goes to SQLite).
It turns out that I had the additional complication of one side of my application using SQLite and one side using PostgreSQL. Remember how I mentioned that something between SQLAlchemy and PostgreSQL was recasting my times in local timezone (although keeping the time the same)? Well, consider how that's going to work. I serialize with the timezone marker on the PostgreSQL side. I get a ISO8601 localtime marked with the correct timezone marker. I deserialize on the SQLite side. Before session flush, I get a local time marked as localtime. After session flush, I get a local time with no marking. That's bad. If I further serialize on the SQLite side, I'll get that local time incorrectly marked as UTC. Moreover, all the times being locally generated on the SQLite side are UTC, and as we explored, SQLite really only wants one timezone in play.
I eventually came up with the following approach:

  1. If I find myself manipulating a time without a timezone marking, assert that its timezone is UTC not localtime.

  2. Always use UTC for times coming into the system.

  3. If I'm generating an ISO 8601 time from a datetime that has a timezone marker in a timezone other than UTC, represent that time as a UTC-marked datetime adjusting the time for the change in timezone.


This is way too complicated. I think that both datetime and SQLAlchemy's SQLite time handling have a lot to answer for. I think SQLAlchemy's core time handling may also have some to answer for, but I'm less sure of that.

Michael Stapelberg: manpages.debian.org: what s new since the launch?

On 2017-01-18, I announced that https://manpages.debian.org had been modernized. Let me catch you up on a few things which happened in the meantime: The list above is not complete, but rather a selection of things I found worth pointing out to the larger public. There are still a few things I plan to work on soon, so stay tuned :).

Matthew Garrett: A quick look at the Ikea Tr dfri lighting platform

Ikea recently launched their Tr dfri smart lighting platform in the US. The idea of Ikea plus internet security together at last seems like a pretty terrible one, but having taken a look it's surprisingly competent. Hardware-wise, the device is pretty minimal - it seems to be based on the Cypress[1] WICED IoT platform, with 100MBit ethernet and a Silicon Labs Zigbee chipset. It's running the Express Logic ThreadX RTOS, has no running services on any TCP ports and appears to listen on two single UDP ports. As IoT devices go, it's pleasingly minimal.

That single port seems to be a COAP server running with DTLS and a pre-shared key that's printed on the bottom of the device. When you start the app for the first time it prompts you to scan a QR code that's just a machine-readable version of that key. The Android app has code for using the insecure COAP port rather than the encrypted one, but the device doesn't respond to queries there so it's presumably disabled in release builds. It's also local only, with no cloud support. You can program timers, but they run on the device. The only other service it seems to run is an mdns responder, which responds to the _coap._udp.local query to allow for discovery.

From a security perspective, this is pretty close to ideal. Having no remote APIs means that security is limited to what's exposed locally. The local traffic is all encrypted. You can only authenticate with the device if you have physical access to read the (decently long) key off the bottom. I haven't checked whether the DTLS server is actually well-implemented, but it doesn't seem to respond unless you authenticate first which probably covers off a lot of potential risks. The SoC has wireless support, but it seems to be disabled - there's no antenna on board and no mechanism for configuring it.

However, there's one minor issue. On boot the device grabs the current time from pool.ntp.org (fine) but also hits http://fw.ota.homesmart.ikea.net/feed/version_info.json . That file contains a bunch of links to firmware updates, all of which are also downloaded over http (and not https). The firmware images themselves appear to be signed, but downloading untrusted objects and then parsing them isn't ideal. Realistically, this is only a problem if someone already has enough control over your network to mess with your DNS, and being wired-only makes this pretty unlikely. I'd be surprised if it's ever used as a real avenue of attack.

Overall: as far as design goes, this is one of the most secure IoT-style devices I've looked at. I haven't examined the COAP stack in detail to figure out whether it has any exploitable bugs, but the attack surface is pretty much as minimal as it could be while still retaining any functionality at all. I'm impressed.

[1] Formerly Broadcom

comment count unavailable comments

8 April 2017

Dirk Eddelbuettel: #4: Simpler shoulders()

Welcome to the fourth post in the repulsively random R ramblings series, or R4 for short. My twitter feed was buzzing about a nice (and as yet unpublished, ie not-on-CRAN) package thankr by Dirk Schumacher which compiles a list of packages (ordered by maintainer count) for your current session (or installation or ...) with a view towards saying thank you to those whose packages we rely upon. Very nice indeed. I had a quick look and run it twice ... and had a reaction of ewwww, really? as running it twice gave different results as on the second instance a boatload of tibblyverse packages appeared. Because apparently kids these day can only slice data that has been tidied or something. So I had another quick look ... and put together an alternative version using just base R (as there was only one subfunction that needed reworking):
source(file="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dirkschumacher/thankr/master/R/shoulders.R")
format_pkg_df <- function(df)   # non-tibblyverse variant
    tb <- table(df[,2])
    od <- order(tb, decreasing=TRUE)
    ndf <- data.frame(maint=names(tb)[od], npkgs=as.integer(tb[od]))
    colpkgs <- function(m, df)   paste(df[ df$maintainer == m, "pkg_name"], collapse=",")  
    ndf[, "pkg"] <- sapply(ndf$maint, colpkgs, df)
    ndf
 
A nice side benefit is that the function is now free of external dependencies (besides, of course, base R). Running this in the ESS session I had open gives:
R> shoulders()  ## by Dirk Schumacher, with small modifications
                               maint npkgs                                                                 pkg
1 R Core Team <R-core@r-project.org>     9 compiler,graphics,tools,utils,grDevices,stats,datasets,methods,base
2 Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@debian.org>     4                                  RcppTOML,Rcpp,RApiDatetime,anytime
3  Matt Dowle <mattjdowle@gmail.com>     1                                                          data.table
R> 
and for good measure a screenshot is below:
I think we need a catchy moniker for R work using good old base R. SoberVerse? GrumbyOldFolksR? PlainOldR? Better suggestions welcome. Edit on 2017-04-09: And by now Dirk Schumacher fixed that little bug in thankr which was at the start of this. His shoulders() function is now free of side effects, and thankr is now a clean micropackage free of external depends from any verse, be it tiddly or grumpy. I look forward to seeing it on CRAN soon!

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

7 April 2017

Arturo Borrero Gonz lez: openvpn deployment with Debian Stretch

Debian Openvpn Debian Stretch feels like an excellent release by the Debian project. The final stable release is about to happen in the short term. Among the great things you can do with Debian, you could set up a VPN using the openvpn software. In this blog post I will describe how I ve deployed myself an openvpn server using Debian Stretch, my network environment and my configurations & workflow. Before all, I would like to reference my requisites and the characteristics of what I needed: I agree this is a rather complex scenario and not all the people will face these requirements. The service diagram has this shape: VPN diagram (DIA source file) So, it works like this:
  1. clients connect via internet to our openvpn server, vpn.example.com
  2. the openvpn server validates the connection and the tunnel is established (green)
  3. now the client is virtually inside our network (blue)
  4. the client wants to access some intranet resource, the tunnel traffic is NATed (red)
Our datacenter intranet is using public IPv4 addressing, but the VPN tunnels use private IPv4 addresses. To don t mix public and private address NAT is used. Obviously we don t want to invest public IPv4 addresses in our internal tunnels. We don t have this limitations in IPv6, we could use public IPv6 addresses within the tunnels. But we prefer sticking to a hard dual stack IPv4/IPv6 approach and also use private IPv6 addresses inside the tunnels and also NAT the IPv6 from private to public. This way, there are no differences in how IPv4 and IPv6 network are managed. We follow this approach for the addressing: The NAT runs in the VPN server, since this is kind of a router. We use nftables for this task. As the final win, I will describe how we manage all this configuration using the git version control system. Using git we can track which admin made which change. A git hook will deploy the files from the git repo itself to /etc/ so the services can read them. The VPN server networking configuration is as follows (/etc/network/interfaces file, adjust to your network environments):
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
# main public IPv4 address of vpn.example.com
allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet static
        address x.x.x.4
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        gateway x.x.x.1
# main public IPv6 address of vpn.example.com
iface eth0 inet6 static
        address x:x:x:x::4
        netmask 64
        gateway x:x:x:x::1
# NAT Public IPv4 addresses (used to NAT tunnel of client 1)
auto eth0:11
iface eth0:11 inet static
        address x.x.x.11
        netmask 255.255.255.0
# NAT Public IPv6 addresses (used to NAT tunnel of client 1)
iface eth0:11 inet6 static
        address x:x:x:x::11
        netmask 64
# NAT Public IPv4 addresses (used to NAT tunnel of client 2)
auto eth0:12
iface eth0:12 inet static
        address x.x.x.12
        netmask 255.255.255.0
# NAT Public IPv6 addresses (used to NAT tunnel of client 2)
iface eth0:12 inet6 static
        address x:x:x:x::12
        netmask 64
Thanks to the amazing and tireless work of the Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta (DD), the openvpn package in debian is in very good shape, ready to use. In vpn.example.com, install the required packages:
% sudo aptitude install openvpn openvpn-auth-ldap nftables git sudo
Two git repositories will be used, one for the openvpn configuration and another for nftables (the nftables config is described later):
% sudo mkdir -p /srv/git/vpn.example.com-nft.git
% sudo git init --bare /srv/git/vpn.example.com-nft.git
% sudo mkdir -p /srv/git/vpn.example.com-openvpn.git
% sudo git init --bare /srv/git/vpn.example.com-openvpn.git
% sudo chown -R :git /srv/git/*
% sudo chmod -R g+rw /srv/git/*
The repositories belong to the git group, a system group we create to let systems admins operate the server using git:
% sudo addgroup --system git
% sudo adduser admin1 git
% sudo adduser admin2 git
For the openvpn git repository, we need at least this git hook (file /srv/git/vpn.example.com-openvpn.git/hooks/post-receive with execution permission):
#!/bin/bash
NAME="hooks/post-receive"
OPENVPN_ROOT="/etc/openvpn"
export GIT_WORK_TREE="$OPENVPN_ROOT"
UNAME=$(uname -n)
info()
 
        echo "$ UNAME  $ NAME  $1 ..."
 
info "checkout latest data to $GIT_WORK_TREE"
sudo git checkout -f
info "cleaning untracked files and dirs at $GIT_WORK_TREE"
sudo git clean -f -d
For this hook to work, sudo permissions are required (file /etc/sudoers.d/openvpn-git):
User_Alias      OPERATORS = admin1, admin2
Defaults        env_keep += "GIT_WORK_TREE"
 
OPERATORS       ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/git checkout -f
OPERATORS       ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/git clean -f -d
Please review this sudoers file to match your environment and security requirements. The openvpn package deploys several systemd services:
% dpkg -L openvpn   grep service
/lib/systemd/system/openvpn-client@.service
/lib/systemd/system/openvpn-server@.service
/lib/systemd/system/openvpn.service
/lib/systemd/system/openvpn@.service
We don t need all of them, we can use the simple openvpn.service:
% sudo systemctl edit --full openvpn.service
And put a content like this:
% systemctl cat openvpn.service
# /etc/systemd/system/openvpn.service
[Unit]
Description=OpenVPN server
Documentation=man:openvpn(8)
Documentation=https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/Openvpn23ManPage
Documentation=https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/HOWTO
 
[Service]
PrivateTmp=true
KillMode=mixed
Type=forking
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/openvpn --daemon ovpn --status /run/openvpn/%i.status 10 --cd /etc/openvpn --config /etc/openvpn/server.conf --writepid /run/openvpn/server.pid
PIDFile=/run/openvpn/server.pid
ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID
WorkingDirectory=/etc/openvpn
ProtectSystem=yes
CapabilityBoundingSet=CAP_IPC_LOCK CAP_NET_ADMIN CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE CAP_NET_RAW CAP_SETGID CAP_SETUID CAP_SYS_CHROOT CAP_DAC_READ_SEARCH CAP_AUDIT_WRITE
LimitNPROC=10
DeviceAllow=/dev/null rw
DeviceAllow=/dev/net/tun rw
 
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
We can move on now to configure nftables to perform the NATs. First, it s good to load the NAT configuration at boot time, so you need a service file like this (/etc/systemd/system/nftables.service):
[Unit]
Description=nftables
Documentation=man:nft(8) http://wiki.nftables.org
 
[Service]
Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=yes
StandardInput=null
ProtectSystem=full
ProtectHome=true
WorkingDirectory=/etc/nftables.d
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/nft -f ruleset.nft
ExecReload=/usr/sbin/nft -f ruleset.nft
ExecStop=/usr/sbin/nft flush ruleset
 
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
The nftables git hooks are implemented as described in nftables managed with git. We are interested in the git hooks: (file /srv/git/vpn.example.com-nft.git/hooks/post-receive):
#!/bin/bash
NAME="hooks/post-receive"
NFT_ROOT="/etc/nftables.d"
RULESET="$ NFT_ROOT /ruleset.nft"
export GIT_WORK_TREE="$NFT_ROOT"
UNAME=$(uname -n)
info()
 
        echo "$ UNAME  $ NAME  $1 ..."
 
info "checkout latest data to $GIT_WORK_TREE"
sudo git checkout -f
info "cleaning untracked files and dirs at $GIT_WORK_TREE"
sudo git clean -f -d
info "deploying new ruleset"
set -e
cd $NFT_ROOT && sudo nft -f $RULESET
info "new ruleset deployment was OK"
This hook moves our nftables configuration to /etc/nftables.d and then applies it to the kernel. So a single commit changes the runtime configuration of the server. You could implement some QA using the git hook update, check this file! Remember, git hooks requires exec permissions to work. Of course, you will need again a sudo policy for these nft hooks. Finally, we can start configuring both openvpn and nftables using git. For the VPN you will require the configure the PKI side: server certificates, and the CA signing your client s certificates. You can check openvpn s own documentation about this. Your first commit for openvpn could be the server.conf file:
plugin		/usr/lib/openvpn/openvpn-plugin-auth-pam.so common-auth
mode		server
user		nobody
group		nogroup
port		1194
proto		udp6
daemon
comp-lzo
persist-key
persist-tun
tls-server
cert		/etc/ssl/private/vpn.example.com_pub.crt
key		/etc/ssl/private/vpn.example.com_priv.pem
ca		/etc/ssl/cacert/clients_ca.pem
dh		/etc/ssl/certs/dh2048.pem
cipher		AES-128-CBC
dev		tun
topology	subnet
server		192.168.100.0 255.255.255.0
server-ipv6	fd00:0:1:35::/64
ccd-exclusive
client-config-dir ccd
max-clients	100
inactive	43200
keepalive	10 360
log-append	/var/log/openvpn.log
status		/var/log/openvpn-status.log
status-version	1
verb		4
mute		20
Don t forget the ccd/ directory. This directory contains a file per user using the VPN service. Each file is named after the CN of the client certificate:
# private addresses for client 1
ifconfig-push		192.168.100.11 255.255.255.0
ifconfig-ipv6-push	fd00:0:1::11/64
# routes to the intranet network
push "route-ipv6 x:x:x:x::/64"
push "route x.x.3.128 255.255.255.240"
# private addresses for client 2
ifconfig-push		192.168.100.12 255.255.255.0
ifconfig-ipv6-push	fd00:0:1::12/64
# routes to the intranet network
push "route-ipv6 x:x:x:x::/64"
push "route x.x.3.128 255.255.255.240"
You end with at leats these files in the openvpn git tree:
server.conf
ccd/CN=CLIENT_1
ccd/CN=CLIENT_2
Please note that if you commit a change to ccd/, the changes are read at runtime by openvpn. In the other hand, changes to server.conf require you to restart the openvpn service by hand. Remember, the addressing is like this: Addressing (DIA source file) In the nftables git tree, you should put a ruleset like this (a single file named ruleset.nft is valid):
flush ruleset
table ip nat  
	map mapping_ipv4_snat  
		type ipv4_addr : ipv4_addr
		elements =  	192.168.100.11 : x.x.x.11,
				192.168.100.12 : x.x.x.12  
	 
	map mapping_ipv4_dnat  
		type ipv4_addr : ipv4_addr
		elements =  	x.x.x.11 : 192.168.100.11,
				x.x.x.12 : 192.168.100.12  
	 
	chain prerouting  
		type nat hook prerouting priority -100; policy accept;
		dnat to ip daddr map @mapping_ipv4_dnat
	 
	chain postrouting  
		type nat hook postrouting priority 100; policy accept;
		oifname "eth0" snat to ip saddr map @mapping_ipv4_snat
	 
 
table ip6 nat  
	map mapping_ipv6_snat  
		type ipv6_addr : ipv6_addr
		elements =  	fd00:0:1::11 : x:x:x::11,
				fd00:0:1::12 : x:x:x::12  
	 
	map mapping_ipv6_dnat  
		type ipv6_addr : ipv6_addr
		elements =  	x:x:x::11 : fd00:0:1::11,
				x:x:x::12 : fd00:0:1::12  
	 
	chain prerouting  
		type nat hook prerouting priority -100; policy accept;
		dnat to ip6 daddr map @mapping_ipv6_dnat
	 
	chain postrouting  
		type nat hook postrouting priority 100; policy accept;
		oifname "eth0" snat to ip6 saddr map @mapping_ipv6_snat
	 
 
table inet filter  
	chain forward  
		type filter hook forward priority 0; policy accept;
		# some forwarding filtering policy, if required, for both IPv4 and IPv6
	 
 
Since the server is in fact routing packets between the tunnel and the public network, we require forwarding enabled in sysctl:
net.ipv4.conf.all.forwarding = 1
net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding = 1
Of course, the VPN clients will require a client.conf file which looks like this:
client
remote vpn.example.com 1194
dev tun
proto udp
resolv-retry infinite
comp-lzo
verb 5
nobind
persist-key
persist-tun
user nobody
group nogroup
 
tls-client
ca      /etc/ssl/cacert/server_ca.crt
pkcs12  /home/user/mycertificate.p12
verify-x509-name vpn.example.com name
cipher AES-128-CBC
auth-user-pass
auth-nocache
Workflow for the system admins:
  1. git clone the openvpn repo
  2. modify ccd/ and server.conf
  3. git commit the changes, push to the server
  4. if server.conf was modified, restart openvpn
  5. git clone the nftables repo
  6. modify ruleset
  7. git commit the changes, push to the server
Comments via email welcome!

6 April 2017

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 101 in Stretch cycle

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday March 26 and Saturday April 1 2017: Media coverage Sylvain Beucler wrote a follow-up post Practical basics of reproducible builds 2, which like last weeks article is about his experiences making software build reproducibly. Reproducible work in other projects Colin Watson started writing a patch to make launchpad store .buildinfo files. (It's not yet deployed.) Toolchain development and fixes Ximin Luo continued to work on BUILD_PATH_PREFIX_MAP patches for GCC 6 and dpkg. Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Chris Lamb: Mattia Rizzolo: Reviews of unreproducible packages 49 package reviews have been added, 25 have been updated and 42 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 1 issue type has been updated: Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: diffoscope development diffoscope 81 was uploaded to experimental by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from: reprotest development reprotest development continued in git, including contributions from: buildinfo.debian.net development buildinfo.debian.net development continued in git, including contributions from: reproducible-website development Holger switched reproducible-builds.org and www.reproducible-builds.org to letsencrypt certificates. Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo and Holger Levsen & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

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