Reproducible builds ecosystem at FOSDEM Last years FOSDEM featured one talk about Reproducible Builds, while this year there will be four at least: On Saturday, there will Reproducible and Customizable Deployments with GNU Guix by Ludovic Court s which which I definitly will be attending! And on Sunday there will three talks and I plan to attend them all: a rather general one about the Reproducible ecosystem by myself, followed by ElectroBSD - Getting a reproducible BSD out of the door by Fabian Keil and finally Reproducible builds in FreeBSD packages by Baptiste Daroussin. The FOSDEM organizers also reached out to me for an interview with me about all this reproducible stuff. I hope you'll like my answers as I enjoyed the questions But there are many more interesting talks (hundreds they say) and so I'd appreciate if you could share your pointers and explainations, whether here on planet, or on IRC or IRL!

Since moving to Japan, I got more and more interested in history, especially the recent history of the 20th century. The book I just finished, Ian Buruma (Wiki, home page) Wages of Guilt Memories of War in Germany and Japan (Independent, NYRB), has been a revelation for me. As an Austrian living in Japan, I am experiencing the discrepancy between these two countries with respect to their treatment of war legacy practically daily, and many of my blog entries revolve around the topic of Japanese non-reconciliation.

Willy Brandt went down on his knees in the Warsaw ghetto, after a functioning democracy had been established in the Federal Republic of Germany, not before. But Japan, shielded from the evil world, has grown into an Oskar Matzerath: opportunistic, stunted, and haunted by demons, which it tries to ignore by burying them in the sand, like Oskar s drum.
Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt, Clearing Up the Ruins

The comparison of Germany and Japan with respect to their recent history as laid out in Buruma s book throws a spotlight on various aspects of the psychology of German and Japanese population, while at the same time not falling into the easy trap of explaining everything with difference in the guilt culture. A book of great depth and broad insights everyone having even the slightest interest in these topics should read.

This difference between (West) German and Japanese textbooks is not just a matter of detail; it shows a gap in perception.
Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt, Romance of the Ruins

Only thinking about giving a halfway full account of this book is something impossible for me. The sheer amount of information, both on the German and Japanese side, is impressive. His incredible background (studies of Chinese literature and Japanese movie!) and long years as journalist, editor, etc, enriches the book with facets normally not available: In particular his knowledge of both the German and Japanese movie history, and the reflection of history in movies, were complete new aspects for me (see my recent post (in Japanese)). The book is comprised of four parts: The first with the chapters War Against the West and Romance of the Ruins; the second with the chapters Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Nanking; the third with History on Trial, Textbook Resistance, and Memorials, Museums, and Monuments; and the last part with A Normal Country, Two Normal Towns, and Clearing Up the Ruins. Let us look at the chapters in turn:

• War Against the West
  This chapter sets the stage in two parts, Bonn and Tokyo, by comparing the reaction in these countries to the Iraq war. The German Betroffenheit (To be betroffen implies a sense of guilt, a sense of shame, or even embarrassment.) as the core of German post-war politics, literature, and media is introduced. On the Japanese side the difficult and diverse situation and attitudes towards the Iraq (and other) wars, as well as the necessary bits of post-war history and development of the Japanese constitution.

  What is so convenient in the cases of Germany and Japan is that pacifism happens to be a high-minded way to dull the pain of historical guilt. Or, conversely, if one wallows in it, pacifism turns national guilt into a virtue, almost a mark of superiority, when compared to the complacency of other nations.

• Romance of the Ruins
  This chapter focuses on the war and immediate post-war period with references to the specific literature and movies emerging out of the circumstances of destroyed countries who have lost the war.

  Hitler s doom and the emperor s speech, the end of one symbol and the odd continuity of another. Whatever their symbolic differences, both would be associated forever with ruins ruined cities, ruined people, ruined ideals.

• Auschwitz
  The psychological construction of war memorials in both Germanies, which focuses on the religious aspects, is discussed, followed by an excursion through post-war German literature and the long-term ignorance of anything related to the Holocaust.

  Here the past had fossilized into something monumental or, as Adorno would have put it, museal.

• Hiroshima Paralleling the previous chapter, Hiroshima introduces the simplistic and reduced focus of the Hiroshima memorials, mostly ignoring the foreign victims, many of them being Koreans forced to work in Japan, and concentrating on the Japanese martyrdom. Focusing on the atomic bomb event everything else is removed from the field of view.

  The problem with this quasi-religious view of history is that it makes it hard to discuss past events in anything but nonsecular terms. Visions of absolute evil are unique, and they are beyond human explanation or even comprehension. To explain is hubristic and amoral. If this is true of Auschwitz, it is even more true of Hiroshima. The irony is that while there can be no justification for Auschwitz unless one believes in Hitler s murderous ideology, the case for Hiroshima is at least open to debate. The A-bomb might have saved lives; it might have shortened the war. But such arguments are incompatible with the Hiroshima spirit.

• Nanking
  The history and aftermath, as well as the attempts of rejection and refutation of the Nanking massacre are described. The Tokyo Trials and their critique by governmental scholars are touched, as well as bit of fresh air blowing through the Japanese society after the death of Hirohito, which lead to the publication of the records of Nanking by Azuma Shiro .

  Yet the question remains whether the raping and killing of thousands of women, and the massacre of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of other unarmed people, in the course of six weeks, can still be called extreme conduct in the heat of battle. The question is pertinent, particularly when such extreme violence is justified by an ideology which teaches the aggressors that killing an inferior race is in accordance with the will of their divine emperor.

• History on Trial
  One of the central chapters in my opinion. It discusses and compares the two post-war trials: The Nurnberg trials in Germany and the Tokyo trials in Japan. In both cases the juridical value is questioned, focusing on the winner-looser situation of post-war times.

  The Nuremberg trials were to be a history lesson, then, as well as a symbolic punishment of the German people a moral history lesson cloaked in all the ceremonial trappings of due legal process. They were the closest that man, or at least the men belonging to the victorious powers, could come to dispensing divine justice.

  Also, the differences in war trials in East and West Germany is compared. The East Germany Waldheimer trials, as well as the thorough purge of Nazis from East German jurisdiction and politics, which was in stark contrast to both West German s very restricted trials, as well as Japan s absolute non-purge of criminals.

  As long as the emperor lived, Japanese would have trouble being honest about the past. For he had been formally responsible for everything, and by holding him responsible for nothing, everybody was absolved, except, of course, for a number of military and civilian scapegoats, Officers and Outlaws, who fell victim to victors justice.

• Textbook Resistance This chapter compares the representation of war and post-war times in the textbooks in West and East Germany and Japan. The interesting case of Ienaga Saburo and the year-long trials (1965-1993) around his history textbook are recounted. The ministry of education had forced a redaction of his history textbook to conform with the revisionist view onto history, deleting most passages that are critical of the Japanese position during the first half of the 20th century. This was one of the very few cases in Japanese post-war history where someone stood up against this revisionist view.

  The judges and some of the counsel for the ministry sat back with their eyes closed, in deep concentration, or fast asleep. Perhaps they were bored, because they had heard it all before. Perhaps they thought it was a pointless exercise, since they knew already how the case would end. But it was not a pointless exercise. For Ienaga Saburo had kept alive a vital debate for twenty-seven years. One cussed schoolteacher and several hundred supporters at the courthouse might not seem much, but it was enough to show that, this time, someone was fighting back.

• Memorials, Museums, and Monuments
  This chapter returns to war memorials: The change of meaning from post WW-1, which were memorials, to post WW-2 ones which became warning monuments, indicating the shift of attention and evaluation of war history in Germany. In contrast to this, Japan s quasi non-existence of war museums till the late 90ies, as well as the existence of the Yasukuni shrine honoring and celebrating besides other several A-class war criminals as deities.

  The tragedy is not just that the suicide pilots died young. Soldiers (and civilians) do that in wars everywhere. What is so awful about the memory of their deaths is the cloying sentimentality that was meant to justify their self-immolation. There is no reason to suppose they didn t believe in the patriotic gush about cherry blossoms and sacrifice, no matter how conventional it was at the time. Which was exactly the point: they were made to rejoice in their own death. It was the exploitation of their youthful idealism that made it such a wicked enterprise. And this point is still completely missed at the Peace Museum today.

• A Normal Country This chapter discusses the slow normalization of post-war situation after the 90ies, and all the hurdles that needed to be overcome: In the case of Germany the speech of Philipp Jenninger, then president of the Bundestag, is recounted. 50 years after the Kristallnacht he tried to give a speech of historicization , only to be find himself shunned and expelled due to the lack of Betroffenheit.

  It was not an ignoble enterprise, but he should have recognized that Historisierung, even forty-three years after the war, was still a highly risky business. For a normal society, a society not haunted by ghosts, cannot be achieved by normalizing history, or by waving cross and garlic. More the other way around: when society has become sufficiently open and free to look back, from the point of view neither of the victim nor of the criminal, but of the critic, only then will the ghosts be laid to rest.

  On the Japanese side the case of Motoshima Hitoshi , who dared to question Hirohito:

  Forty-three years have passed since the end of the war, and I think we have had enough chance to reflect on the nature of that war. From reading various accounts from abroad and having been a soldier myself, involved in military education, I do believe that the emperor bore responsibility for the war.

  which led to hitherto unseen of demonstration of extreme-right-wing groups issuing death treats that lead to a failed assassination of Motoshima, all under the completely complacent Japanese police and politics letting the right-wingers play their game.

  By breaking a Japanese taboo, Motoshima struck a blow for a more open, more normal political society, and very nearly lost his life. Jenninger, I like to think, wanted to strike a blow for the same, but failed, and lost his job. Perhaps he wasn t up to the task. Or perhaps even West Germany was not yet normal enough to hear his message.

• Two Normal Towns This chapter focuses on two rare cases of civil courage and political commitment: Anja Rosmus, who stepped forth as school child to rewrite the history of Passau. She unveiled the truth about deep involvement into the NS crimes of many inhabitants of Passau, a fact that was up to then covered up and purged from knowledge. She, too, received many death threads, including nailing a killed cat onto her door. The response of the head of the tourist office in Passau, Gottfried Dominik, speaks about the very peculiar attitude:

  I asked him again about the local camp and the small hidden memorial. Dominik showed signs of distress. It was difficult, he admitted, very difficult. I know what you mean. But let me give you my personal opinion. When you have a crippled arm, you don t really want to show it around. It was a low point in our history, back then. But it was only twelve years in thousands of years of history. And so people tend to hide it, just as a person with a crippled arm is not likely to wear a short-sleeved shirt.

  A similar incident is recounted on the Japanese side, the Hanaoka incident (detailed article) and its unveiling by Nozoe Kenji, where 800 Chinese slave workers, after escaping from a forced-work camp for the Kajima Corporation, where rabbit-hunted down and slaughtered. He, too, got death threats, and was virtually expelled from his home area because he dared to publish his findings.

  I think it is this basic distrust, this refusal to be told what to think by authorities, this cussed insistence on asking questions, on hearing the truth, that binds together Nozoe, Rosmus, and others like them. There are not many such people in Japan, or anywhere else for that matter. And I suspect they are not much liked wherever they live.

• Clearing Up the Ruins The last chapter tries to round up all the previous chapters, and look into the most recent history and near future. While not completely pessimistic with respect to Japan, the final chapter leaves clear statements on the current state of Japanese society and politics:

  The state was run by virtually the same bureaucracy that ran the Japanese empire, and the electoral system was rigged to help the same corrupt conservative party to stay in power for almost forty years. This arrangement suited the United States, as well as Japanese bureaucrats, LDP politicians, and the large industrial combines, for it ensured that Japan remained a rich and stable ally against Communism. But it also helped to stifle public debate and stopped the Japanese from growing up politically.

  His description of current Japanese society, written in 1995, is still hauntingly true in 2016:

  There is something intensely irritating about the infantilism of postwar Japanese culture: the ubiquitous chirping voices of women pretending to be girls; the Disneylandish architecture of Japanese main streets, where everything is reduced to a sugary cuteness; the screeching television talents rolling about and carrying on like kindergarten clowns; the armies of blue-suited salarymen straphanging on the subway trains, reading boys comics, the maudlin love for old school songs and cuddly mama-sans.

The boook somehow left me with a bleak impression of Japanese post-war times as well as Japanese future. Having read other books about the political ignorance in Japan (Norma Field s In the realm of a dying emperor, or the Chibana history), Buruma s characterization of Japanese politics is striking. He couldn t foresee the recent changes in legislation pushed through by the Abe government actually breaking the constitution, or the rewriting of history currently going on with respect to comfort women and Nanking. But reading his statement about Article Nine of the constitution and looking at the changes in political attitude, I am scared about where Japan is heading to:

The Nanking Massacre, for leftists and many liberals too, is the main symbol of Japanese militarism, supported by the imperial (and imperialist) cult. Which is why it is a keystone of postwar pacifism. Article Nine of the constitution is necessary to avoid another Nanking Massacre. The nationalist right takes the opposite view. To restore the true identity of Japan, the emperor must be reinstated as a religious head of state, and Article Nine must be revised to make Japan a legitimate military power again. For this reason, the Nanking Massacre, or any other example of extreme Japanese aggression, has to be ignored, softened, or denied.
Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt, Nanking

While there are signs of resistance in the streets of Japan (Okinawa and the Hanako bay, the demonstrations against secrecy law and reversion of the constitution), we are still to see a change influenced by the people in a country ruled and distributed by oligarchs. I don t think there will be another Nanking Massacre in the near future, but Buruma s books shows that we are heading back to a nationalistic regime similar to pre-war times, just covered with a democratic veil to distract critics.

---

I close with several other quotes from the book that caught my attention: In the preface and introduction:

[ ] mainstream conservatives made a deliberate attempt to distract people s attention from war and politics by concentrating on economic growth.

The curious thing was that much of what attracted Japanese to Germany before the war Prussian authoritarianism, romantic nationalism, pseudo-scientific racialism had lingered in Japan while becoming distinctly unfashionable in Germany.

In Romance of the Ruins:

The point of all this is that Ikeda s promise of riches was the final stage of what came to be known as the reverse course, the turn away from a leftist, pacifist, neutral Japan a Japan that would never again be involved in any wars, that would resist any form of imperialism, that had, in short, turned its back for good on its bloody past. The Double Your Incomes policy was a deliberate ploy to draw public attention away from constitutional issues.

In Hiroshima:

The citizens of Hiroshima were indeed victims, primarily of their own military rulers. But when a local group of peace activists petitioned the city of Hiroshima in 1987 to incorporate the history of Japanese aggression into the Peace Memorial Museum, the request was turned down. The petition for an Aggressors Corner was prompted by junior high school students from Osaka, who had embarrassed Peace Museum officials by asking for an explanation about Japanese responsibility for the war.

The history of the war, or indeed any history, is indeed not what the Hiroshima spirit is about. This is why Auschwitz is the only comparison that is officially condoned. Anything else is too controversial, too much part of the flow of history .

In Nanking, by the governmental pseudo-historian Tanaka:

Unlike in Europe or China, writes Tanaka, you won t find one instance of planned, systematic murder in the entire history of Japan. This is because the Japanese have a different sense of values from the Chinese or the Westerners.

In History on Trial:

In 1950, Becker wrote that few things have done more to hinder true historical self-knowledge in Germany than the war crimes trials. He stuck to this belief. Becker must be taken seriously, for he is not a right-wing apologist for the Nazi past, but an eminent liberal.

There never were any Japanese war crimes trials, nor is there a Japanese Ludwigsburg. This is partly because there was no exact equivalent of the Holocaust. Even though the behavior of Japanese troops was often barbarous, and the psychological consequences of State Shinto and emperor worship were frequently as hysterical as Nazism, Japanese atrocities were part of a military campaign, not a planned genocide of a people that included the country s own citizens. And besides, those aspects of the war that were most revolting and furthest removed from actual combat, such as the medical experiments on human guinea pigs (known as logs ) carried out by Unit 731 in Manchuria, were passed over during the Tokyo trial. The knowledge compiled by the doctors of Unit 731 of freezing experiments, injection of deadly diseases, vivisections, among other things was considered so valuable by the Americans in 1945 that the doctors responsible were allowed to go free in exchange for their data.

Some Japanese have suggested that they should have conducted their own war crimes trials. The historian Hata Ikuhiko thought the Japanese leaders should have been tried according to existing Japanese laws, either in military or in civil courts. The Japanese judges, he believed, might well have been more severe than the Allied tribunal in Tokyo. And the consequences would have been healthier. If found guilty, the spirits of the defendants would not have ended up being enshrined at Yasukuni. The Tokyo trial, he said, purified the crimes of the accused and turned them into martyrs. If they had been tried in domestic courts, there is a good chance the real criminals would have been flushed out.

After it was over, the Nippon Times pointed out the flaws of the trial, but added that the Japanese people must ponder over why it is that there has been such a discrepancy between what they thought and what the rest of the world accepted almost as common knowledge. This is at the root of the tragedy which Japan brought upon herself.

Emperor Hirohito was not Hitler; Hitler was no mere Shrine. But the lethal consequences of the emperor-worshipping system of irresponsibilities did emerge during the Tokyo trial. The savagery of Japanese troops was legitimized, if not driven, by an ideology that did not include a Final Solution but was as racialist as Hider s National Socialism. The Japanese were the Asian Herrenvolk, descended from the gods.

Emperor Hirohito, the shadowy figure who changed after the war from navy uniforms to gray suits, was not personally comparable to Hitler, but his psychological role was remarkably similar.

In fact, MacArthur behaved like a traditional Japanese strongman (and was admired for doing so by many Japanese), using the imperial symbol to enhance his own power. As a result, he hurt the chances of a working Japanese democracy and seriously distorted history. For to keep the emperor in place (he could at least have been made to resign), Hirohito s past had to be freed from any blemish; the symbol had to be, so to speak, cleansed from what had been done in its name.

In Memorials, Museums, and Monuments:

If one disregards, for a moment, the differences in style between Shinto and Christianity, the Yasukuni Shrine, with its relics, its sacred ground, its bronze paeans to noble sacrifice, is not so very different from many European memorials after World War I. By and large, World War II memorials in Europe and the United States (though not the Soviet Union) no longer glorify the sacrifice of the fallen soldier. The sacrificial cult and the romantic elevation of war to a higher spiritual plane no longer seemed appropriate after Auschwitz. The Christian knight, bearing the cross of king and country, was not resurrected. But in Japan, where the war was still truly a war (not a Holocaust), and the symbolism still redolent of religious exultation, such shrines as Yasukuni still carry the torch of nineteenth-century nationalism. Hence the image of the nation owing its restoration to the sacrifice of fallen soldiers.

In A Normal Country:

The mayor received a letter from a Shinto priest in which the priest pointed out that it was un-Japanese to demand any more moral responsibility from the emperor than he had already taken. Had the emperor not demonstrated his deep sorrow every year, on the anniversary of Japan s surrender? Besides, he wrote, it was wrong to have spoken about the emperor in such a manner, even as the entire nation was deeply worried about his health. Then he came to the main point: It is a common error among Christians and people with Western inclinations, including so-called intellectuals, to fail to grasp that Western societies and Japanese society are based on fundamentally different religious concepts . . . Forgetting this premise, they attempt to place a Western structure on a Japanese foundation. I think this kind of mistake explains the demand for the emperor to bear full responsibility.

In Two Normal Towns:

The bust of the man caught my attention, but not because it was in any way unusual; such busts of prominent local figures can be seen everywhere in Japan. This one, however, was particularly grandiose. Smiling across the yard, with a look of deep satisfaction over his many achievements, was Hatazawa Kyoichi. His various functions and titles were inscribed below his bust. He had been an important provincial bureaucrat, a pillar of the sumo wrestling establishment, a member of various Olympic committees, and the recipient of some of the highest honors in Japan. The song engraved on the smooth stone was composed in praise of his rich life. There was just one small gap in Hatazawa s life story as related on his monument: the years from 1941 to 1945 were missing. Yet he had not been idle then, for he was the man in charge of labor at the Hanaoka mines.

In Clearing Up the Ruins:

But the question in American minds was understandable: could one trust a nation whose official spokesmen still refused to admit that their country had been responsible for starting a war? In these Japanese evasions there was something of the petulant child, stamping its foot, shouting that it had done nothing wrong, because everybody did it.

Japan seems at times not so much a nation of twelve-year-olds, to repeat General MacArthur s phrase, as a nation of people longing to be twelve-year-olds, or even younger, to be at that golden age when everything was secure and responsibility and conformity were not yet required.

For General MacArthur was right: in 1945, the Japanese people were political children. Until then, they had been forced into a position of complete submission to a state run by authoritarian bureaucrats and military men, and to a religious cult whose high priest was also formally chief of the armed forces and supreme monarch of the empire.

I saw Jew S ss that same year, at a screening for students of the film academy in Berlin. This showing, too, was followed by a discussion. The students, mostly from western Germany, but some from the east, were in their early twenties. They were dressed in the international uniform of jeans, anoraks, and work shirts. The professor was a man in his forties, a 68er named Karsten Witte. He began the discussion by saying that he wanted the students to concentrate on the aesthetics of the film more than the story. To describe the propaganda, he said, would simply be banal: We all know the what, so let s talk about the how. I thought of my fellow students at the film school in Tokyo more than fifteen years before. How many of them knew the what of the Japanese war in Asia.

I m organizing an event at the University of Washington in Seattle that involves a reading, the screening of a documentary film, and a Q&A about Aaron Swartz. The event coincides with the third anniversary of Aaron s death and the release of a new book of Swartz s writing that I contributed to. The event is free and open the public and details are below:

WHEN: Wednesday, January 13 at 6:30-9:30 p.m.

WHERE: Communications Building (CMU) 120, University of Washington

We invite you to celebrate the life and activism efforts of Aaron Swartz, hosted by UW Communication professor Benjamin Mako Hill. The event is next week and will consist of a short book reading, a screening of a documentary about Aaron s life, and a Q&A with Mako who knew Aaron well details are below. No RSVP required; we hope you can join us.

Aaron Swartz was a programming prodigy, entrepreneur, and information activist who contributed to the core Internet protocol RSS and co-founded Reddit, among other groundbreaking work. However, it was his efforts in social justice and political organizing combined with his aggressive approach to promoting increased access to information that entangled him in a two-year legal nightmare that ended with the taking of his own life at the age of 26.

January 11, 2016 marks the third anniversary of his death. Join us two days later for a reading from a new posthumous collection of Swartz s writing published by New Press, a showing of The Internet s Own Boy (a documentary about his life), and a Q&A with UW Communication professor Benjamin Mako Hill a former roommate and friend of Swartz and a contributor to and co-editor of the first section of the new book. If you re not in Seattle, there are events with similar programs being organized in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, New York, and San Francisco. All of these other events will be on Monday January 11 and registration is required for all of them. I will be speaking at the event in San Francisco.

I gave a presentation at 32C3 this week. One of the things I said was "If any of you are doing seriously confidential work on Apple laptops, stop. For the love of god, please stop." I didn't really have time to go into the details of that at the time, but right now I'm sitting on a plane with a ridiculous sinus headache and the pseudoephedrine hasn't kicked in yet so here we go.

The basic premise of my presentation was that it's very difficult to determine whether your system is in a trustworthy state before you start typing your secrets (such as your disk decryption passphrase) into it. If it's easy for an attacker to modify your system such that it's not trustworthy at the point where you type in a password, it's easy for an attacker to obtain your password. So, if you actually care about your disk encryption being resistant to anybody who can get temporary physical possession of your laptop, you care about it being difficult for someone to compromise your early boot process without you noticing.

There's two approaches to this. The first is UEFI Secure Boot. If you cryptographically verify each component of the boot process, it's not possible for a user to compromise the boot process. The second is a measured boot. If you measure each component of the boot process into the TPM, and if you use these measurements to control access to a secret that allows the laptop to prove that it's trustworthy (such as Joanna Rutkowska's Anti Evil Maid or my variant on the theme), an attacker can compromise the boot process but you'll know that they've done so before you start typing.

So, how do current operating systems stack up here?

Windows: Supports UEFI Secure Boot in a meaningful way. Supports measured boot, but provides no mechanism for the system to attest that it hasn't been compromised. Good, but not perfect.

Linux: Supports UEFI Secure Boot[1], but doesn't verify signatures on the initrd[2]. This means that attacks such as Evil Abigail are still possible. Measured boot isn't in a good state, but it's possible to incorporate with a bunch of manual work. Vulnerable out of the box, but can be configured to be better than Windows.

Apple: Ha. Snare talked about attacking the Apple boot process in 2012 - basically everything he described then is still possible. Apple recently hired the people behind Legbacore, so there's hope - but right now all shipping Apple hardware has no firmware support for UEFI Secure Boot and no TPM. This makes it impossible to provide any kind of boot attestation, and there's no real way you can verify that your system hasn't been compromised.

Now, to be fair, there's attacks that even Windows and properly configured Linux will still be vulnerable to. Firmware defects that permit modification of System Management Mode code can still be used to circumvent these protections, and the Management Engine is in a position to just do whatever it wants and fuck all of you. But that's really not an excuse to just ignore everything else. Improving the current state of boot security makes it more difficult for adversaries to compromise a system, and if we ever do get to the point of systems which aren't running any hidden proprietary code we'll still need this functionality. It's worth doing, and it's worth doing now.

[1] Well, except Ubuntu's signed bootloader will happily boot unsigned kernels which kind of defeats the entire point of the exercise
[2] Initrds are built on the local machine, so we can't just ship signed images

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As many others, I have been following the launch of Let s Encrypt. Let s Encrypt is a new zero-cost X.509 Certificate Authority that supports the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol. ACME allow you to automate creation and retrieval of HTTPS server certificates. As anyone who has maintained a number of HTTPS servers can attest, this process has unfortunately been manual, error-prone and differ between CAs. On some of my personal domains, such as this blog.josefsson.org, I have been using the CACert authority to sign the HTTPS server certificate. The problem with CACert is that the CACert trust anchors aren t shipped with sufficient many operating systems and web browsers. The user experience is similar to reaching a self-signed server certificate. For organization-internal servers that you don t want to trust external parties for, I continue to believe that running your own CA and distributing it to your users is better than using a public CA (compare my XMPP server certificate setup). But for public servers, availability without prior configuration is more important. Therefor I decided that my public HTTPS servers should use a CA/Browser Forum-approved CA with support for ACME, and as long as Let s Encrypt is trustworthy and zero-cost, they are a good choice. I was in need of a free software ACME client, and set out to research what s out there. Unfortunately, I did not find any web pages that listed the available options and compared them. The Let s Encrypt CA points to the official Let s Encrypt client, written by Jakub Warmuz, James Kasten, Peter Eckersley and several others. The manual contain pointers to two other clients in a seamingly unrelated section. Those clients are letsencrypt-nosudo by Daniel Roesler et al, and simp_le by (again!) Jakub Warmuz. From the letsencrypt.org s client-dev mailing list I also found letsencrypt.sh by Gerhard Heift and LetsEncryptShell by Jan Moj . Is anyone aware of other ACME clients? By comparing these clients, I learned what I did not like in them. I wanted something small so that I can audit it. I want something that doesn t require root access. Preferably, it should be able to run on my laptop, since I wasn t ready to run something on the servers. Generally, it has to be Secure, which implies something about how it approaches private key handling. The letsencrypt official client can do everything, and has plugin for various server software to automate the ACME negotiation. All the cryptographic operations appear to be hidden inside the client, which usually means it is not flexible. I really did not like how it was designed, it looks like your typical monolithic proof-of-concept design. The simp_le client looked much cleaner, and gave me a good feeling. The letsencrypt.sh client is simple and written in /bin/sh shell script, but it appeared a bit too simplistic. The LetsEncryptShell looked decent, but I wanted something more automated. What all of these clients did not have, and that letsencrypt-nosudo client had, was the ability to let me do the private-key operations. All the operations are done interactively on the command-line using OpenSSL. This would allow me to put the ACME user private key, and the HTTPS private key, on a YubiKey, using its PIV applet and techniques similar to what I used to create my SSH host CA. While the HTTPS private key has to be available on the HTTPS server (used to setup TLS connections), I wouldn t want the ACME user private key to be available there. Similarily, I wouldn t want to have the ACME or the HTTPS private key on my laptop. The letsencrypt-nosudo tool is otherwise more rough around the edges than the more cleaner simp_le client. However the private key handling aspect was the deciding matter for me. After fixing some hard-coded limitations on RSA key sizes, getting the cert was as simple as following the letsencrypt-nosudo instructions. I ll follow up with a later post describing how to put the ACME user private key and the HTTPS server certificate private key on a YubiKey and how to use that with letsencrypt-nosudo. So you can now enjoy browsing my blog over HTTPS! Thank you Let s Encrypt!

Building on top of concurrent-output, and some related work Joachim Breitner did earlier, I now have a kind of equivilant to a tiling window manager, except it's managing regions of the console for different parts of a single program. Here's a really silly demo, in an animated gif: Not bad for 23 lines of code, is that? Seems much less tedious to do things this way than using ncurses. Even with its panels, ncurses requires you to think about layout of various things on the screen, and many low-level details. This, by contrast, is compositional, just add another region and a thread to update it, and away it goes. So, here's an apt-like download progress display, in 30 lines of code. Not only does it have regions which are individual lines of the screen, but those can have sub-regions within them as seen here (and so on). And, log-type messages automatically scroll up above the regions. External programs run by createProcessConcurrent will automatically get their output/errors displayed there, too. What I'm working on now is support for multiline regions, which automatically grow/shrink to fit what's placed in them. The hard part, which I'm putting the finishing touches on, is to accurately work out how large a region is before displaying it, in order to lay it out. Requires parsing ANSI codes amoung other things. STM rules There's so much concurrency, with complicated interrelated data being updated by different threads, that I couldn't have possibly built this without Software Transactional Memory. Rather than a nightmare of locks behind locks behind locks, the result is so well behaved that I'm confident that anyone who needs more control over the region layout, or wants to do funky things can dive into to the STM interface and update the data structures, and nothing will ever deadlock or be inconsistent, and as soon as an update completes, it'll display on-screen. An example of how powerful and beuatiful STM is, here's how the main display thread determines when it needs to refresh the display: So, it composes all these STM actions that can wait on various kinds of changes, to get one big action, that waits for all of the above, and builds up a nice sum type to represent what's changed. Another example is that the whole support for sub-regions only involved adding 30 lines of code, all of it using STM, and it worked 100% the first time.

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Available in concurrent-output 1.1.0.

This is the third part in a series of articles about SRE, based on the talk I gave in the Romanian Association for Better Software. If you haven't already, you might want to read part 1 and part 2 first. In this post, I talk about some strategies to avoid drowning SRE people in operational work.

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SREs are not firefighters As I said before, it is very important that there is trust and respect between Dev and Ops. If Ops is seen as just an army of firefighters that will gladly put away fires at any time of the night, there are less incentives to make good software. Conversely, if Dev is shielded from the realities of the production environment, Ops will tend to think of them as delusional and untrustworthy.

Common staffing pool for SRE and SWE The first tool to combat this at Google -and possibly a difficult one to implement in small organisations- is to have single headcount budgets for Dev and Ops. That means that the more SREs you need to support your service, the less developers you have to write it. Combined with this, Google offers the possibility to SREs to move freely between teams, or even to transfer out to SWE. Because of this, a service that is painful to support will see the most senior SREs leaving and will only be able to afford less experienced hires. All this is a strong incentive to write good quality software, to work closely and to listen to the Ops people.

Share 5% of operational work with the SWE team On the other hand, it is necessary that developers see first hand how the service works in production, understand the problems, and share the pain of things failing. To this end, SWEs are expected to take on a small fraction of the operational work from SRE: handling tickets, being on-call, performing deployments, or managing capacity. This results in better communication among the teams and a common understanding of priorities.

Cap operational load at 50% One very uncommon rule from SRE at Google, is that SREs are not supposed to spend more than half of their time on "operational work". SREs are supposed to be spending their time on automation, monitoring, forecasting growth... Not on repeatedly fixing manually issues that stem from bad systems.

Excess operational work overflows to SWE If an SRE team is found to be spending too much time on operational work, that extra load is automatically reassigned to the development team, so SRE can keep doing their non-operational duties. On extreme cases, a service might be deemed too unstable to maintain, and SRE support is completely removed: it means the development team now has to carry pagers and do all the operational work themselves. It is a nuclear option, but the threat of it happening is a strong incentive to keep things sane.

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The next post will be less about how to avoid unwanted work and more about the things that SRE actually do, and how these make things better. Comment

Review: The Oathbound, by Mercedes Lackey

Series:	Vows and Honor #1
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	July 1988
ISBN:	0-88677-414-4
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	302

This book warrants a bit of explanation. Before Arrows of the Queen, before Valdemar (at least in terms of publication dates), came Tarma and Kethry short stories. I don't know if they were always intended to be set in the same world as Valdemar; if not, they were quickly included. But they came from another part of the world and a slightly different sub-genre. While the first two Valdemar trilogies were largely coming-of-age fantasy, Tarma and Kethry are itinerant sword-and-sorcery adventures featuring two women with a soul bond: the conventionally attractive, aristocratic mage Kethry, and the celibate, goddess-sworn swordswoman Tarma. Their first story was published, appropriately, in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Swords and Sorceress III. This is the first book about Tarma and Kethry. It's a fix-up novel: shorter stories, bridged and re-edited, and glued together with some additional material. And it does not contain the first Tarma and Kethry story. As mentioned in my earlier Valdemar reviews, this is a re-read, but it's been something like twenty years since I previously read the whole Valdemar corpus (as it was at the time; I'll probably re-read everything I have on hand, but it's grown considerably, and I may not chase down the rest of it). One of the things I'd forgotten is how oddly, from a novel reader's perspective, the Tarma and Kethry stories were collected. Knowing what I know now about publishing, I assume Swords and Sorceress III was still in print at the time The Oathbound was published, or the rights weren't available for some other reason, so their first story had to be omitted. Whatever the reason, The Oathbound starts with a jarring gap that's no less irritating in this re-read than it was originally. Also as is becoming typical for this series, I remembered a lot more world-building and character development than is actually present in at least this first book. In this case, I strongly suspect most of that characterization is in Oathbreakers, which I remember as being more of a coherent single story and less of a fix-up of puzzle and adventure stories with scant time for character growth. I'll be able to test my memory shortly. What we do get is Kethry's reconciliation of her past, a brief look at the Shin'a'in and the depth of Tarma and Kethry's mutual oath (unfortunately told more than shown), the introduction of Warrl (again, a relationship that will grow a great deal more depth later), and then some typical sword and sorcery episodes: a locked room mystery, a caravan guard adventure about which I'll have more to say later, and two rather unpleasant encounters with a demon. The material is bridged enough that it has a vague novel-like shape, but the bones of the underlying short stories are pretty obvious. One can tell this isn't really a novel even without the tell of a narrative recap in later chapters of events that you'd just read earlier in the same book. What we also get is rather a lot of rape, and one episode of seriously unpleasant "justice." A drawback of early Lackey is that her villains are pure evil. My not entirely trustworthy memory tells me that this moderates over time, but early stories tend to feature villains completely devoid of redeeming qualities. In this book alone one gets to choose between the rapist pedophile, the rapist lord, the rapist bandit, and the rapist demon who had been doing extensive research in Jack Chalker novels. You'll notice a theme. Most of the rape happens off camera, but I was still thoroughly sick of it by the end of the book. This was already a cliched motivation tactic when these stories were written. Worse, as with the end of Arrow's Flight, the protagonists don't seem to be above a bit of "turnabout is fair play." When you're dealing with rape as a primary plot motivation, that goes about as badly as you might expect. The final episode here involves a confrontation that Tarma and Kethry brought entirely on themselves through some rather despicable actions, and from which they should have taken a lesson about why civilized societies have criminal justice systems. Unfortunately, despite an ethical priest who is mostly played for mild amusement, no one in the book seems to have drawn that rather obvious conclusion. This, too, I recall as getting better as the series goes along and Lackey matures as a writer, but that only helps marginally with the early books. Some time after the publication of The Oathbound and Oathbreakers, something (presumably the rights situation) changed. Oathblood was published in 1998 and includes not only the first Tarma and Kethry story but also several of the short stories that make up this book, in (I assume) something closer to their original form. That makes The Oathbound somewhat pointless and entirely skippable. I re-read it first because that's how I first approached the series many years ago, and (to be honest) because I'd forgotten how much was reprinted in Oathblood. I'd advise a new reader to skip it entirely, start with the short stories in Oathblood, and then read Oathbreakers before reading the final novella. You'd miss the demon stories, but that's probably for the best. I'm complaining a lot about this book, but that's partly from familiarity. If you can stomach the rape and one stunningly unethical protagonist decision, the stories that make it up are solid and enjoyable, and the dynamic between Tarma and Kethry is always a lot of fun (and gets even better when Warrl is added to the mix). I think my favorite was the locked room mystery. It's significantly spoiled by knowing the ending, and it has little deeper significance, but it's a classic sort unembellished, unapologetic sword-and-sorcery tale that's hard to come by in books. But since it too is reprinted (in a better form) in Oathblood, there's no point in reading it here. Followed by Oathbreakers. Rating: 6 out of 10

Some weeks ago the german low cost hoster 1blu got hacked and there was a bit of fuss later about the TLS certificates issued by 1blu. I think they reissued all of them. Since I knew that some hoster offer to generate the complete cert + key package for the customer I naively assumed that only the lazy and novice customers were the victims of that issue. Today, while helping someone, I learned that 1blu forces you to use the key generated by them for certificates included in a virtual server bundle and probably other bundles. That makes those bundles a lot less attractive since the included certificate is not useful at all. One could of course argue that a virtual server is not trustworthy anyway, but I'd like to believe for now that it's more complicated to extract stuff from all running virtual servers compared to dumping the central database / key repository. Maybe it's time to create a wrapper around openssl that is less opaque to novice users so we can get rid of key generation by a third party one day. In the end it's a disasterous trend that only got started because of usability issues.

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Media coverage Motherboard published an article on the project inspired by the talk at the Chaos Communication 15. Journalists sadly rarely pick their headlines. The sensationalist How Debian Is Trying to Shut Down the CIA got started a few rants here and there. One from OpenBSD developper Ted Unangst lead to a good email contact and some thorough comments. Toolchain fixes

• Emmanuel Bourg uploaded maven-ant-helper/7.11 which improved the reproducibility of the Javadoc by removing the timestamps and using the English locale.
• Thomas Schmitt uploaded libisoburn/1.4.0-2 which adds to the ISO image creator xorriso new flags for -alter_date to avoid update ctimes. Report by Daniel Kahn Gillmor.
• Florian Schlichting uplodaded libmodule-build-perl/0.421400-2 which makes linked file ordering deterministic. Original patch by Niko Tyni.

The modified version of gettext has been removed from the experimental toolchain. Fixing individual package seems a better approach for now. Chris Lamb sent two patches for abi-compliance-checker: one to drop the timestamp from generated HTML reports and another to make umask and timestamps deterministic in the abi tarball. Bugs submitted by Dhole lead to a discussion on the best way to adapt pod2man now that we have SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH specified. There is really a whole class of issues that are currently undiscovered waiting for tests running on a different date. This is likely to should happen soon. Chris Lamb uploaded a new version of debhelper in the reproducible repository, cherry-picking a fix for interactions between ddebs and udebs. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: aspic, django-guardian, erlang-sqlite3, etcd, libnative-platform-java, mingw-ocaml, nose2, oar, obexftp, py3cairo, python-dugong, python-secretstorage, python-setuptools, qct, qdox, recutils, s3ql, wine. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• bochs/2.6-4 by Santiago Vila.
• codec2/0.4-3 by A. Maitland Bottoms.
• coquelicot/0.9.4-1 by Lunar.
• criticalmass/1:1.0.0-3 by Santiago Vila.
• ekg/1:1.9~pre+r2855-3 by Santiago Vila.
• eterm/0.9.6-3 by Santiago Vila.
• fbi/2.10-2 by Moritz Muehlenhoff.
• fsvs/1.2.6-2 by Santiago Vila.
• glhack/1.2-3 by Santiago Vila.
• httraqt/1.4.6-2 by Anton Gladky.
• libapache-authznetldap-perl/0.07-6 by gregor herrmann, original patch by Dhole.
• libkinosearch1-perl/1.01-3 uploaded by Florian Schlichting, original patch by Niko Tyni.
• liblucy-perl/0.3.3-6 uploaded by Florian Schlichting, original patch by Niko Tyni.
• slony1-2/2.2.4-1 by Christoph Berg.
• slrn/1.0.2-3 uploaded by Moritz Muehlenhoff, original patch by Dmitry Bogatov.
• svtplay-dl/0.10.2015.08.24-1 uploaded by Olof Johansson, fixed upstream.
• swh-plugins/0.4.15+1-8 uploaded by Jarom r Mike , original patch by Chris Lamb.
• sysstat/11.1.6-2 uploaded by Robert Luberda, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• uhd/3.9.0-3 by A. Maitland Bottoms.
• volk/1.1-3 by A. Maitland Bottoms.
• yadifa/2.1.3-2 uploaded by Markus Schade, original patch by Santiago Vila.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• dict-jargon/4.4.7-3 uploaded by Ruben Molina, original patch by Dhole.
• ferret-vis/6.9.3-3 uploaded by Alastair McKinstry, original patch by Chris Lamb.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #798366 on lilo by Dmitry Bogatov: remove usage of __TIME__ and __DATE__ macros.
• #798557 on libapache-dbi-perl by Dhole: set date of the manpage to the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #798776 on testdisk by upstream!

reproducible.debian.net The configuration of all remote armhf and amd64 nodes in now finished. The remaining reproducibility tests running on the Jenkins host has been removed. armhf results and graphs are now visible in dashboard. We can now test the whole archive in 2-3 weeks using the current 12 amd64 jobs and 3 months using the current 6 armhf builders. We will be looking at improving the armhf sitation, maybe using more native systems or via arm64. (h01ger) The Jenkins UI is now more responsive since all jobs building packages have been moved to remote hosts. (h01ger) A new job has been added to collect information about build nodes to be included in the variation table. (h01ger) The currently scheduled page has been split for amd64 and armhf. They now give an overview (refreshed every minute, thanks to Chris Lamb) of the packages currently being tested. (h01ger) Several cleanup and bugfixes have been made, especially in the remote building and maintenance scripts. They should now be more robust against network problems. The automatic scheduler is now also run closer to when schroots and pbuilders are updated. (h01ger, mapreri) Package reviews 16 reviews have been removed, 54 added and 55 updated this week. Santiago Vila renamed lc_messages_randomness with the more descriptive different_pot_creation_date_in_gettext_mo_files. New issues added this week: timestamps_in_reports_generated_by_abi_compliance_checker, umask_and_timestamp_variation_in_tgz_generated_by_abi_compliance_checker, and timestamps_added_by_blast2. 23 new FTBFS bugs have been filled by Chris Lamb, and Niko Tyni. Misc. Red Hat developper Mike McLean had a talk at Flock 2015 about reproducible builds in Koji. Slides and video recording are available. Koji is the build infrastructure used by Fedora, Red Hat and other distributions. It already keeps track of the environment used for a given build, so the required changes for handling the environment are smaller than the ones in Debian. Fedora is still missing a team effort to fix non-determinism in the package builds, but it is great to see Fedora moving forward.

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Dmitry Shachnev uploaded sphinx/1.3.1-6 with improved patches from Val Lorentz. Chris Lamb submitted a patch for ibus-table which makes the output of ibus-table-createdb deterministic. Niko Tyni wrote a patch to make libmodule-build-perl linking order deterministic. Santiago Vila has been leading discussions on the best way to fix timestamps coming from Gettext POT files. Packages fixed The following 35 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: apache-log4j2, dctrl-tools, dms, gitit, gnubik, isrcsubmit, mailutils, normaliz, oaklisp, octave-fpl, octave-specfun, octave-vrml, opencolorio, openvdb, pescetti, php-guzzlehttp, proofgeneral, pyblosxom, pyopencl, pyqi, python-expyriment, python-flask-httpauth, python-mzml, python-simpy, python-tidylib, reactive-streams, scmxx, shared-mime-info, sikuli, siproxd, srtp, tachyon, tcltk-defaults, urjtag, velvet. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• binutils-m68hc1x/1:2.18-7 by Santiago Vila.
• boa-constructor/0.6.1-15 by Santiago Vila.
• brian/1.4.1-3 by Yaroslav Halchenko.
• criticalmass/1:1.0.0-3 by Santiago Vila.
• cvs-buildpackage/5.25 by Santiago Vila.
• fcrackzip/1.0-6 uploaded by Adam Borowski, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• filters/2.54 prepared by Joey Hess, fixed by Marius Gavrilescu.
• fsvs/1.2.6-2 by Santiago Vila.
• fte/0.50.2b6-6 by Santiago Vila.
• gcc-mingw-w64/15.7 by Stephen Kitt.
• ircd-hybrid/1:8.2.8+dfsg.1-1 by Dominic Hargreaves.
• leveldb/1.18-3 uploaded by Laszlo Boszormenyi, patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• libavg/1.8.1-2 uploaded by Dimitri John Ledkov, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• lynx-cur/2.8.9dev6-4 uploaded by Axel Beckert, patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• maildir-utils/0.9.12-3 by Norbert Preining
• pd-iemnet/0.2-1 by IOhannes m zm lnig.
• photopc/3.05-8 by Santiago Vila.
• postgresql-plproxy/2.6-1 uploaded by Christoph Berg, report by Dhole.
• prometheus-pushgateway/0.2.0+ds-2 uploaded by Mart n Ferrari, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• shelxle/1.0.740-1 uploaded by Daniel Leidert, fixed upstream.
• sigil/0.8.7+dfsg-2 by Mattia Rizzolo.
• sks-ecc/0.93-5 by Santiago Vila.
• smartlist/3.15-25 by Santiago Vila.
• snd/11.7-4 by Santiago Vila.
• solarwolf/1.5-2.1 by Graham Inggs.
• sphinx/1.3.1-6 uploaded by Dmitry Shachnev, patches by Val Lorentz.
• tla/1.3.5+dfsg1-2 by Santiago Vila.
• zapping/0.10~cvs6-10 by Santiago Vila.

The package is not in yet in unstable, but linux/4.2-1~exp1 is now reproducible! Kudos to Ben Hutchings, and most fixes are already merged upstream. Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• bochs/2.6-3 by Santiago Vila.
• oolite/1.82-1 by Nicolas Boulenguez.
• openjdk-7/7u85-2.6.1-1 uploaded by Matthias Klose, original patch by Emmanuel Bourg.
• python-dtcwt/0.10.1+dfsg1-2 uploaded by Ghislain Antony Vaillant, original patch by Chris Lamb.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #797432 on torus-trooper by Reiner Herrmann: set locale to C when sorting source file list.
• #797437 on flow-tools by Chris Lamb: use pre-defined hostname and date of the latest debian/changelog entry in build string.
• #797505 on cloudprint by Chris Lamb: remove embedded .pyc files.
• #797506 on comix by Chris Lamb: remove embedded .pyc files.
• #797508 on litl by Chris Lamb: remove date from documentation generated with LaTeX.
• #797518 on gyoto by Chris Lamb: set date in documentation generated with LaTeX to the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #797539 on cadabra by Chris Lamb: use date of the latest debian/changelog entry as build time.
• #797543 on xotcl by Chris Lamb: sort source list in Makefile.
• #797579 on ferret-vis by Chris Lamb: use date of the latest debian/changelog entry as build time.
• #797711 on libkinosearch1-perl by Niko Tyni: sort source list in Build.PL.
• #797871 on xbae by Chris Lamb: use date of the latest debian/changelog entry as build time.

reproducible.debian.net Some bugs that prevented packages to build successfully in the remote builders have been fixed. (h01ger) Two more amd64 build jobs have been removed from the Jenkins host in favor of six more on the new remote nodes. (h01ger) The munin graphs currently looks fine, so more amd64 jobs will probably be added in the next week. diffoscope development Version 32 of diffoscope has been released on September 3rd with the following new features:

• A new --fuzzy-threshold option to specify the TLSH score used as cut-off for fuzzy matching. Specifying 0 will disable fuzzy-matching entirely. Suggested by Jakub Wilk.
• A new --new-file option to treat absent files as empty. This make diffoscope a great tool to look at the content of an archive at once by comparing it with a non-existent file (example). Suggested by Jakub Wilk.
• Comparisons of symlinks and devices given on the command line is now possible.
• Default values are displayed in --help.

It also fixes many bugs. Head over to the changelog for the full list. Version 33 was released the day after to fix a bug introduced in the packaging. Documentation update Chris Lamb blessed the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH specification with the version number 1.0 . Lunar documented how the .file assembler directive can help with random filenames in debug symbols. Package reviews 235 reviews have been removed, 84 added and 277 updated this week. 29 new FTBFS bugs were filled by Chris Lamb, Chris West (Faux), Daniel Stender, and Niko Tyni. New issues identified this week: random_order_in_ibus_table_createdb_output, random_order_in_antlr_output, nondetermistic_link_order_in_module_build, and timestamps_in_tex_documents. Misc. Thanks to Dhole and Thomas Vincent, the talk held at DebConf15 now has subtitles! Void Linux started to merge changes to make packages produced by xbps reproducible.

A good amount of the Debian reproducible builds team had the chance to enjoy face-to-face interactions during DebConf15.

Names in red and blue were all present at DebConf15

Hugging people with whom one has been working tirelessly for months gives a lot of warm-fuzzy feelings. Several recorded and hallway discussions paved the way to solve the remaining issues to get reproducible builds part of Debian proper. Both talks from the Debian Project Leader and the release team mentioned the effort as important for the future of Debian. A forty-five minutes talk presented the state of the reproducible builds effort. It was then followed by an hour long roundtable to discuss current blockers regarding dpkg, .buildinfo and their integration in the archive. Toolchain fixes

• Kenneth J. Pronovici uploaded epydoc/3.0.1+dfsg-12 which makes class and modules ordering predictable (#795835) and fixes __repr__ so memory addresses don't appear in docs (#795826). Patches by Val Lorentz.
• Sergei Golovan uploaded erlang/1:18.0-dfsg-2 which adds support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to erlc. Patch by Chris West (Faux) and Chris Lamb.
• Dmitry Shachnev uploaded sphinx/1.3.1-5 which make grammar, inventory, and JavaScript locales generation deterministic. Original patch by Val Lorentz.
• St phane Glondu uploaded ocaml/4.02.3-2 to experimental, making startup files and native packed libraries deterministic. The patch adds deterministic .file to the assembler output.
• Enrico Tassi uploaded lua-ldoc/1.4.3-3 which now pass the -d option to txt2man and add the --date option to override the current date.

Reiner Herrmann submitted a patch to make rdfind sort the processed files before doing any operation. Chris Lamb proposed a new patch for wheel implementing support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH instead of the custom WHEEL_FORCE_TIMESTAMP. akira sent one making man2html SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH aware.

• #796330 on d-shlibs by Reiner Herrmann: sort with LC_ALL set to C.

St phane Glondu reported that dpkg-source would not respect tarball permissions when unpacking under a umask of 002. After hours of iterative testing during the DebConf workshop, Sandro Knau created a test case showing how pdflatex output can be non-deterministic with some PNG files. Packages fixed The following 65 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: alacarte, arbtt, bullet, ccfits, commons-daemon, crack-attack, d-conf, ejabberd-contrib, erlang-bear, erlang-cherly, erlang-cowlib, erlang-folsom, erlang-goldrush, erlang-ibrowse, erlang-jiffy, erlang-lager, erlang-lhttpc, erlang-meck, erlang-p1-cache-tab, erlang-p1-iconv, erlang-p1-logger, erlang-p1-mysql, erlang-p1-pam, erlang-p1-pgsql, erlang-p1-sip, erlang-p1-stringprep, erlang-p1-stun, erlang-p1-tls, erlang-p1-utils, erlang-p1-xml, erlang-p1-yaml, erlang-p1-zlib, erlang-ranch, erlang-redis-client, erlang-uuid, freecontact, givaro, glade, gnome-shell, gupnp, gvfs, htseq, jags, jana, knot, libconfig, libkolab, libmatio, libvsqlitepp, mpmath, octave-zenity, openigtlink, paman, pisa, pynifti, qof, ruby-blankslate, ruby-xml-simple, timingframework, trace-cmd, tsung, wings3d, xdg-user-dirs, xz-utils, zpspell. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• apr/1.5.2-3 by Stefan Fritsch.
• aprx/2.08.svn593+dfsg-2 uploaded by Colin Tuckley, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• blkreplay/1.0-3 uploaded by Andrew Shadura, patch by Dhole.
• cal3d/0.11.0-6 uploaded by Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo, patch by akira.
• cgsi-gsoap/1.3.8-1 by Mattias Ellert.
• eyefiserver/2.4+dfsg-1 by Jean-Michel Vourg re.
• gnujump/1.0.8-3 uploaded by Evgeni Golov, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• hkgerman/1:2-29 by Roland Rosenfeld.
• jove/4.16.0.73-4 by Cord Beermann.
• libevhtp/1.2.10-3 by Vincent Bernat.
• libmkdoc-xml-perl/0.75-4 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Niko Tyni.
• libparse-debianchangelog-perl/1.2.0-6 by Niko Tyni.
• librostlab-blast/1.0.1-5 uploaded by Andreas Tille, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• libxray-absorption-perl/3.0.1-3 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Niko Tyni.
• lua-penlight/1.3.2-2 by Enrico Tassi.
• mosquitto/1.4.3-1 by Roger A. Light.
• nagios-plugins-contrib/15.20150818 by Jan Wagner and Bernd Zeimetz.
• nn/6.7.3-10 uploaded by Cord Beermann, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• pybik/2.1-1 by B. Clausius.
• pyepr/0.9.3-1 uploaded by Antonio Valentino, original patch by Juan Picca.
• python-xlrd/0.9.4-1 by Vincent Bernat.
• transmissionrpc/0.11-2 uploaded by Vincent Bernat, original patch by Juan Picca.
• unoconv/0.7-1.1 sponsored by Vincent Bernat, fix by Dhole.
• vim-latexsuite/20141116.812-1 uploaded by Johann Felix Soden, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• volk/1.0.2-2 by A. Maitland Bottoms.
• xbmc/2:13.2+dfsg1-5 by Balint Reczey.
• xdotool/1:3.20150503.1-2 uploaded by Daniel Kahn Gillmor, initial patch by Chris Lamb.
• xfig/1:3.2.5.c-5 by Roland Rosenfeld.
• xfireworks/1.3-10 uploaded by Yukiharu YABUKI, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• xul-ext-monkeysphere/0.8-2 uploaded by Daniel Kahn Gillmor, original patch by Dhole.

Uploads that might have fixed reproducibility issues:

• brian/1.4.1-3 uploaded by Yaroslav Halchenko, original patch by Juan Picca.
• opennebula/4.12.3+dfsg-1 by Dmitry Smirnov.
• pcsx2/1.3.1-1008-g9f291a6+dfsg-1 by Miguel A. Col n V lez.
• webassets/3:0.11-1 uploaded by Agustin Henze, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• apache2/2.4.16-3 uploaded by Stefan Fritsch, original patch by Jean-Michel Vourg re.
• gerris/20131206+dfsg-6 uploaded by Anton Gladky, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• kodi/15.1+dfsg1-1 by Balint Reczey.
• zshdb/0.05+git20101031-4 uploaded by Iain R. Learmonth, original patch by Chris Lamb.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #795861 on fakeroot by Val Lorentz: set the mtime of all files to the time of the last debian/changelog entry.
• #795870 on fatresize by Chris Lamb: set build date to the time of the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #795945 on projectl by Reiner Herrmann: sort with LC_ALL set to C.
• #795977 on dahdi-tools by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795981 on x11proto-input by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795983 on dbusada by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795984 on postgresql-plproxy by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795985 on xorg by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795987 on pngcheck by Dhole: set the date in the man pages to the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #795997 on python-babel by Val Lorentz: make build timestamp independent from the timezone and remove the name of the build system locale from the documentation.
• #796092 on a7xpg by Reiner Herrmann: sort with LC_ALL set to C.
• #796212 on bittornado by Chris Lamb: remove umask-varying permissions.
• #796251 on liblucy-perl by Niko Tyni: generate lib/Lucy.xs in a deterministic order.
• #796271 on tcsh by Reiner Herrmann: sort with LC_ALL set to C.
• #796275 on hspell by Reiner Herrmann: remove timestamp from aff files generated by mk_he_affix.
• #796324 on fftw3 by Reiner Herrmann: remove date from documentation files.
• #796335 on nasm by Val Lorentz: remove extra timestamps from the build system.
• #796360 on libical by Chris Lamb: removes randomess caused Perl in generated icalderivedvalue.c.
• #796375 on wcd by Dhole: set the date in the man pages to the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #796376 on mapivi by Dhole: set the date in the man pages to the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #796527 on vserver-debiantools by Dhole: set the date in the man pages to the latest debian/changelog entry.

St phane Glondu reported two issues regarding embedded build date in omake and cduce. Aur lien Jarno submitted a fix for the breakage of make-dfsg test suite. As binutils now creates deterministic libraries by default, Aur lien's patch makes use of a wrapper to give the U flag to ar. Reiner Herrmann reported an issue with pound which embeds random dhparams in its code during the build. Better solutions are yet to be found. reproducible.debian.net Package pages on reproducible.debian.net now have a new layout improving readability designed by Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger, and Ulrike. The navigation is now on the left as vertical space is more valuable nowadays. armhf is now enabled on all pages except the dashboard. Actual tests on armhf are expected to start shortly. (Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger) The limit on how many packages people can schedule using the reschedule script on Alioth has been bumped to 200. (h01ger) mod_rewrite is now used instead of JavaScript for the form in the dashboard. (h01ger) Following the rename of the software, debbindiff has mostly been replaced by either diffoscope or differences in generated HTML and IRC notification output. Connections to UDD have been made more robust. (Mattia Rizzolo) diffoscope development diffoscope version 31 was released on August 21^st. This version improves fuzzy-matching by using the tlsh algorithm instead of ssdeep. New command line options are available: --max-diff-input-lines and --max-diff-block-lines to override limits on diff input and output (Reiner Herrmann), --debugger to dump the user into pdb in case of crashes (Mattia Rizzolo). jar archives should now be detected properly (Reiner Herrman). Several general code cleanups were also done by Chris Lamb. strip-nondeterminism development Andrew Ayer released strip-nondeterminism version 0.010-1. Java properties file in jar should now be detected more accurately. A missing dependency spotted by St phane Glondu has been added. Testing directory ordering issues: disorderfs During the reproducible builds workshop at DebConf, participants identified that we were still short of a good way to test variations on filesystem behaviors (e.g. file ordering or disk usage). Andrew Ayer took a couple of hours to create disorderfs. Based on FUSE, disorderfs in an overlay filesystem that will mount the content of a directory at another location. For this first version, it will make the order in which files appear in a directory random. Documentation update Dhole documented how to implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in Python, bash, Makefiles, CMake, and C. Chris Lamb started to convert the wiki page describing SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH into a Freedesktop-like specification in the hope that it will convince more upstream to adopt it. Package reviews 44 reviews have been removed, 192 added and 77 updated this week. New issues identified this week: locale_dependent_order_in_devlibs_depends, randomness_in_ocaml_startup_files, randomness_in_ocaml_packed_libraries, randomness_in_ocaml_custom_executables, undeterministic_symlinking_by_rdfind, random_build_path_by_golang_compiler, and images_in_pdf_generated_by_latex. 117 new FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Chris West (Faux), and Niko Tyni. Misc. Some reproducibility issues might face us very late. Chris Lamb noticed that the test suite for python-pykmip was now failing because its test certificates have expired. Let's hope no packages are hiding a certificate valid for 10 years somewhere in their source! Pictures courtesy and copyright of Debian's own paparazzi: Aigars Mahinovs.

The Evil Maid attack has been discussed for some time - in short, it's the idea that most security mechanisms on your laptop can be subverted if an attacker is able to gain physical access to your system (for instance, by pretending to be the maid in a hotel). Most disk encryption systems will fall prey to the attacker replacing the initial boot code of your system with something that records and then exfiltrates your decryption passphrase the next time you type it, at which point the attacker can simply steal your laptop the next day and get hold of all your data.

There are a couple of ways to protect against this, and they both involve the TPM. Trusted Platform Modules are small cryptographic devices on the system motherboard[1]. They have a bunch of Platform Configuration Registers (PCRs) that are cleared on power cycle but otherwise have slightly strange write semantics - attempting to write a new value to a PCR will append the new value to the existing value, take the SHA-1 of that and then store this SHA-1 in the register. During a normal boot, each stage of the boot process will take a SHA-1 of the next stage of the boot process and push that into the TPM, a process called "measurement". Each component is measured into a separate PCR - PCR0 contains the SHA-1 of the firmware itself, PCR1 contains the SHA-1 of the firmware configuration, PCR2 contains the SHA-1 of any option ROMs, PCR5 contains the SHA-1 of the bootloader and so on.

If any component is modified, the previous component will come up with a different measurement and the PCR value will be different, Because you can't directly modify PCR values[2], this modified code will only be able to set the PCR back to the "correct" value if it's able to generate a sequence of writes that will hash back to that value. SHA-1 isn't yet sufficiently broken for that to be practical, so we can probably ignore that. The neat bit here is that you can then use the TPM to encrypt small quantities of data[3] and ask it to only decrypt that data if the PCR values match. If you change the PCR values (by modifying the firmware, bootloader, kernel and so on), the TPM will refuse to decrypt the material.

Bitlocker uses this to encrypt the disk encryption key with the TPM. If the boot process has been tampered with, the TPM will refuse to hand over the key and your disk remains encrypted. This is an effective technical mechanism for protecting against people taking images of your hard drive, but it does have one fairly significant issue - in the default mode, your disk is decrypted automatically. You can add a password, but the obvious attack is then to modify the boot process such that a fake password prompt is presented and the malware exfiltrates the data. The TPM won't hand over the secret, so the malware flashes up a message saying that the system must be rebooted in order to finish installing updates, removes itself and leaves anyone except the most paranoid of users with the impression that nothing bad just happened. It's an improvement over the state of the art, but it's not a perfect one.

Joanna Rutkowska came up with the idea of Anti Evil Maid. This can take two slightly different forms. In both, a secret phrase is generated and encrypted with the TPM. In the first form, this is then stored on a USB stick. If the user suspects that their system has been tampered with, they boot from the USB stick. If the PCR values are good, the secret will be successfully decrypted and printed on the screen. The user verifies that the secret phrase is correct and reboots, satisfied that their system hasn't been tampered with. The downside to this approach is that most boots will not perform this verification, and so you rely on the user being able to make a reasonable judgement about whether it's necessary on a specific boot.

The second approach is to do this on every boot. The obvious problem here is that in this case an attacker simply boots your system, copies down the secret, modifies your system and simply prints the correct secret. To avoid this, the TPM can have a password set. If the user fails to enter the correct password, the TPM will refuse to decrypt the data. This can be attacked in a similar way to Bitlocker, but can be avoided with sufficient training: if the system reboots without the user seeing the secret, the user must assume that their system has been compromised and that an attacker now has a copy of their TPM password.

This isn't entirely great from a usability perspective. I think I've come up with something slightly nicer, and certainly more Web 2.0[4]. Anti Evil Maid relies on having a static secret because expecting a user to remember a dynamic one is pretty unreasonable. But most security conscious people rely on dynamic secret generation daily - it's the basis of most two factor authentication systems. TOTP is an algorithm that takes a seed, the time of day and some reasonably clever calculations and comes up with (usually) a six digit number. The secret is known by the device that you're authenticating against, and also by some other device that you possess (typically a phone). You type in the value that your phone gives you, the remote site confirms that it's the value it expected and you've just proven that you possess the secret. Because the secret depends on the time of day, someone copying that value won't be able to use it later.

But instead of using your phone to identify yourself to a remote computer, we can use the same technique to ensure that your computer possesses the same secret as your phone. If the PCR states are valid, the computer will be able to decrypt the TOTP secret and calculate the current value. This can then be printed on the screen and the user can compare it against their phone. If the values match, the PCR values are valid. If not, the system has been compromised. Because the value changes over time, merely booting your computer gives your attacker nothing - printing an old value won't fool the user[5]. This allows verification to be a normal part of every boot, without forcing the user to type in an additional password.

I've written a prototype implementation of this and uploaded it here. Do pay attention to the list of limitations - without a bootloader that measures your kernel and initrd, you're still open to compromise. Adding TPM support to grub is on my list of things to do. There are also various potential issues like an attacker being able to use external DMA-capable devices to obtain the secret, especially since most Linux distributions still ship kernels that don't enable the IOMMU by default. And, of course, if your firmware is inherently untrustworthy there's multiple ways it can subvert this all. So treat this very much like a research project rather than something you can depend on right now. There's a fair amount of work to do to turn this into a meaningful improvement in security.

[1] I wrote about them in more detail here, including a discussion of whether they can be used for general purpose DRM (answer: not really)

[2] In theory, anyway. In practice, TPMs are embedded devices running their own firmware, so who knows what bugs they're hiding.

[3] On the order of 128 bytes or so. If you want to encrypt larger things with a TPM, the usual way to do it is to generate an AES key, encrypt your material with that and then encrypt the AES key with the TPM.

[4] Is that even a thing these days? What do we say instead?

[5] Assuming that the user is sufficiently diligent in checking the value, anyway

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