The phrase "Root of Trust" turns up at various points in discussions about verified boot and measured boot, and to a first approximation nobody is able to give you a coherent explanation of what it means[1]. The Trusted Computing Group has a fairly wordy definition, but (a) it's a lot of words and (b) I don't like it, so instead I'm going to start by defining a root of trust as "A thing that has to be trustworthy for anything else on your computer to be trustworthy".

(An aside: when I say "trustworthy", it is very easy to interpret this in a cynical manner and assume that "trust" means "trusted by someone I do not necessarily trust to act in my best interest". I want to be absolutely clear that when I say "trustworthy" I mean "trusted by the owner of the computer", and that as far as I'm concerned selling devices that do not allow the owner to define what's trusted is an extremely bad thing in the general case)

Let's take an example. In verified boot, a cryptographic signature of a component is verified before it's allowed to boot. A straightforward implementation of a verified boot implementation has the firmware verify the signature on the bootloader or kernel before executing it. In this scenario, the firmware is the root of trust - it's the first thing that makes a determination about whether something should be allowed to run or not[2]. As long as the firmware behaves correctly, and as long as there aren't any vulnerabilities in our boot chain, we know that we booted an OS that was signed with a key we trust.

But what guarantees that the firmware behaves correctly? What if someone replaces our firmware with firmware that trusts different keys, or hot-patches the OS as it's booting it? We can't just ask the firmware whether it's trustworthy - trustworthy firmware will say yes, but the thing about malicious firmware is that it can just lie to us (either directly, or by modifying the OS components it boots to lie instead). This is probably not sufficiently trustworthy!

Ok, so let's have the firmware be verified before it's executed. On Intel this is "Boot Guard", on AMD this is "Platform Secure Boot", everywhere else it's just "Secure Boot". Code on the CPU (either in ROM or signed with a key controlled by the CPU vendor) verifies the firmware[3] before executing it. Now the CPU itself is the root of trust, and, well, that seems reasonable - we have to place trust in the CPU, otherwise we can't actually do computing. We can now say with a reasonable degree of confidence (again, in the absence of vulnerabilities) that we booted an OS that we trusted. Hurrah!

Except. How do we know that the CPU actually did that verification? CPUs are generally manufactured without verification being enabled - different system vendors use different signing keys, so those keys can't be installed in the CPU at CPU manufacture time, and vendors need to do code development without signing everything so you can't require that keys be installed before a CPU will work. So, out of the box, a new CPU will boot anything without doing verification[4], and development units will frequently have no verification.

As a device owner, how do you tell whether or not your CPU has this verification enabled? Well, you could ask the CPU, but if you're doing that on a device that booted a compromised OS then maybe it's just hotpatching your OS so when you do that you just get RET_TRUST_ME_BRO even if the CPU is desperately waving its arms around trying to warn you it's a trap. This is, unfortunately, a problem that's basically impossible to solve using verified boot alone - if any component in the chain fails to enforce verification, the trust you're placing in the chain is misplaced and you are going to have a bad day.

So how do we solve it? The answer is that we can't simply ask the OS, we need a mechanism to query the root of trust itself. There's a few ways to do that, but fundamentally they depend on the ability of the root of trust to provide proof of what happened. This requires that the root of trust be able to sign (or cause to be signed) an "attestation" of the system state, a cryptographically verifiable representation of the security-critical configuration and code. The most common form of this is called "measured boot" or "trusted boot", and involves generating a "measurement" of each boot component or configuration (generally a cryptographic hash of it), and storing that measurement somewhere. The important thing is that it must not be possible for the running OS (or any pre-OS component) to arbitrarily modify these measurements, since otherwise a compromised environment could simply go back and rewrite history. One frequently used solution to this is to segregate the storage of the measurements (and the attestation of them) into a separate hardware component that can't be directly manipulated by the OS, such as a Trusted Platform Module. Each part of the boot chain measures relevant security configuration and the next component before executing it and sends that measurement to the TPM, and later the TPM can provide a signed attestation of the measurements it was given. So, an SoC that implements verified boot should create a measurement telling us whether verification is enabled - and, critically, should also create a measurement if it isn't. This is important because failing to measure the disabled state leaves us with the same problem as before; someone can replace the mutable firmware code with code that creates a fake measurement asserting that verified boot was enabled, and if we trust that we're going to have a bad time.

(Of course, simply measuring the fact that verified boot was enabled isn't enough - what if someone replaces the CPU with one that has verified boot enabled, but trusts keys under their control? We also need to measure the keys that were used in order to ensure that the device trusted only the keys we expected, otherwise again we're going to have a bad time)

So, an effective root of trust needs to:

1) Create a measurement of its verified boot policy before running any mutable code
2) Include the trusted signing key in that measurement
3) Actually perform that verification before executing any mutable code

and from then on we're in the hands of the verified code actually being trustworthy, and it's probably written in C so that's almost certainly false, but let's not try to solve every problem today.

Does anything do this today? As far as I can tell, Intel's Boot Guard implementation does. Based on publicly available documentation I can't find any evidence that AMD's Platform Secure Boot does (it does the verification, but it doesn't measure the policy beforehand, so it seems spoofable), but I could be wrong there. I haven't found any general purpose non-x86 parts that do, but this is in the realm of things that SoC vendors seem to believe is some sort of value-add that can only be documented under NDAs, so please do prove me wrong. And then there are add-on solutions like Titan, where we delegate the initial measurement and validation to a separate piece of hardware that measures the firmware as the CPU reads it, rather than requiring that the CPU do it.

But, overall, the situation isn't great. On many platforms there's simply no way to prove that you booted the code you expected to boot. People have designed elaborate security implementations that can be bypassed in a number of ways.

[1] In this respect it is extremely similar to "Zero Trust"
[2] This is a bit of an oversimplification - once we get into dynamic roots of trust like Intel's TXT this story gets more complicated, but let's stick to the simple case today
[3] I'm kind of using "firmware" in an x86ish manner here, so for embedded devices just think of "firmware" as "the first code executed out of flash and signed by someone other than the SoC vendor"
[4] In the Intel case this isn't strictly true, since the keys are stored in the motherboard chipset rather than the CPU, and so taking a board with Boot Guard enabled and swapping out the CPU won't disable Boot Guard because the CPU reads the configuration from the chipset. But many mobile Intel parts have the chipset in the same package as the CPU, so in theory swapping out that entire package would disable Boot Guard. I am not good enough at soldering to demonstrate that.

comments

PLIO I have been looking for an image viewer that can view images via modification date by default. The newer, the better. Alas, most of the image viewers do not do that. Even feh somehow fails. What I need is default listing of images as thumbnails by modification date. I put it up on Unix Stackexchange couple of years ago. Somebody shared ristretto but that just gives listing and doesn t give the way I want it. To be more illustrative, maybe this may serve as a guide to what I mean.

There is an RFP for it. While playing with it, I also discovered another benefit of the viewer, a sort of side-benefit, it tells you if any images have gone corrupt or whatever and you get that info. on the CLI so you can try viewing that image with the path using another viewer or viewers before deleting them. One of the issues is there doesn t seem to be a magnify option by default. While the documentation says use the ^ key to maximize it, it doesn t maximize. Took me a while to find it as that isn t a key that I use most of the time. Ironically, that is the key used on the mobile quite a bit. Anyways, so that needs to be fixed. Sadly, it doesn t have creation date or modification date sort, although the documentation does say it does (at least the modification date) but it doesn t show at my end. I also got Warning: UNKNOWN command detected! but that doesn t tell me enough as to what the issue is. Hopefully the developer will fix the issues and it will become part of Debian as many such projects are. Compiling was dead easy even with gcc-12 once I got freeimage-dev.

Mum s first death anniversary I do not know where the year went by or how. The day went in a sort of suspended animation. The only thing I did was eat and sleep that day, didn t feel like doing anything. Old memories, even dreams of fighting with her only to realize in the dream itself it s fake, she isn t there anymore Something that can never be fixed

Debconf Kochi I should have shared it few days ago but somehow slipped my mind. While it s too late for most people to ask for bursary for Debconf Kochi, if you are anywhere near Kochi in the month of September between the dates. September 3 to September 17 nearby Infopark, Kochi you could walk in and talk to people. This would be for people who either have an interest in free software, FOSS or Debian specific. For those who may not know, while Debian is a Linux Distribution having ports to other kernels as well as well as hardware. While I may not be able to provide the list of all the various flavors as well as hardware, can say it is quite a bit. For e.g. there is a port to RISC-V that was done few years back (2018). Why that is needed will be shared below. There is always something new to look forward in a Debconf.

Pressure Cooker and Potatoes This was asked to me in the last Debconf (2016) by few people. So as people are coming to India, it probably is a good time to sort of reignite the topic :). So a Pressure Cooker boils your veggies and whatnot while still preserving the nutrients. While there are quite a number of brands I would suggest either Prestige or Hawkins, I have had good experience with both. There are also some new pressure cookers that have come that are somewhat in the design of the Thai Wok. So if that is something that you are either comfortable with or looking for, you could look at that. One of the things that you have to be sort of aware of and be most particular is the pressure safety valve. Just putting up pressure cooker safety valve in your favorite search-engine should show you different makes and whatnot. While they are relatively cheap, you need to see it is not cracked, used or whatever. The other thing is the Pressure Cooker whistle as well. The easiest thing to cook are mashed potatoes in a pressure cooker. A pressure Cooker comes in Litres, from 1 Ltr. to 20 Ltr. The larger ones are obviously for hotels or whatnot. General rule of using Pressure cooker is have water 1/4th, whatever vegetable or non-veg you want to boil 1/2 and let the remaining part for the steam. Now the easiest thing to do is have wash the potatoes and put 1/4th water of the pressure cooker. Then put 1/2 or less or little bit more of the veggies, in this instance just Potatoes. You can put salt to or that can be done later. The taste will be different. Also, there are various salts so won t really go into it as spices is a rabbit hole. Anyways, after making sure that there is enough space for the steam to be built, Put the handle on the cooker and basically wait for 5-10 minutes for the pressure to be built. You will hear a whistling sound, wait for around 5 minutes or a bit more (depends on many factors, kind of potatoes, weather etc.) and then just let it cool off naturally. After 5-10 minutes or a bit more, the pressure will be off. Your mashed potatoes are ready for either consumption or for further processing. I am assuming gas, induction cooking will have its own temperature, have no idea about it, hence not sharing that. Pressure Cooker, first put on the heaviest settings, once it starts to whistle, put it on medium for 5-10 minutes and then let it cool off. The first time I had tried that, I burned the cooker. You understand things via trial and error.

Poha recipe This is a nice low-cost healthy and fulfilling breakfast called Poha that can be made anytime and requires at the most 10-15 minutes to prepare with minimal fuss. The main ingredient is Poha or flattened rice. So how is it prepared. I won t go into the details of quantity as that is upto how hungry people are. There are various kinds of flattened rice available in the market, what you are looking for is called thick Poha or zhad Poha (in Marathi). The first step is the trickiest. What do you want to do is put water on Poha but not to let it be soggy. There is an accessory similar to tea filter but forgot the name, it basically drains all the extra moisture and you want Poha to be a bit fluffy and not soggy. The Poha should breathe for about 5 minutes before being cooked. To cook, use a heavy bottomed skillet, put some oil in it, depends on what oil you like, again lot of variations, you can use ground nut or whatever oil you prefer. Then use single mustard seeds to check temperature of the oil. Once the mustard seeds starts to pop, it means it s ready for things. So put mustard seeds in, finely chopped onion, finely chopped coriander leaves, a little bit of lemon juice, if you want potatoes, then potatoes too. Be aware that Potatoes will soak oil like anything, so if you are going to have potatoes than the oil should be a bit more. Some people love curry leaves, others don t. I like them quite a bit, it gives a slightly different taste. So the order is

1. Oil
2. Mustard seeds (1-2 teaspoon)
3. Curry leaves 5-10
4. Onion (2-3 medium onions finely chopped, onion can also be used as garnish.)
5. Potatoes (2-3 medium ones, mashed)
6. Small green chillies or 1-2 Red chillies (if you want)
7. Coriander Leaves (one bunch finely chopped)
8. Peanuts (half a glass)

Make sure that you are stirring them quite a bit. On a good warm skillet, this should hardly take 5 minutes. Once the onions are slighly brown, you are ready to put Poha in. So put the poha, add turmeric, salt, and sugar. Again depends on number of people. If I made for myself and mum, usually did 1 teaspoon of salt, not even one fourth of turmeric, just a hint, it is for the color, 1 to 2 teapoons of sugar and mix them all well at medium flame. Poha used to be two or three glasses. If you don t want potato, you can fry them a bit separately and garnish with it, along with coriander, coconut and whatnot. In Kerala, there is possibility that people might have it one day or all days. It serves as a snack at anytime, breakfast, lunch, tea time or even dinner if people don t want to be heavy. The first few times I did, I did manage to do everything wrong. So, if things go wrong, let it be. After a while, you will find your own place. And again, this is just one way, I m sure this can be made as elaborate a meal as you want. This is just something you can do if you don t want noodles or are bored with it. The timing is similar. While I don t claim to be an expert in cooking in anyway or form, if people have questions feel free to ask. If you are single or two people, 2 Ltr. Pressure cooker is enough for most Indians, Westerners may take a slightly bit larger Pressure Cooker, maybe a 3 Ltr. one may be good for you. Happy Cooking and Experimenting I have had the pleasure to have Poha in many ways. One of my favorite ones is when people have actually put tadka on top of Poha. You do everything else but in a slight reverse order. The tadka has all the spices mixed and is concentrated and is put on top of Poha and then mixed. Done right, it tastes out of this world. For those who might not have had the Indian culinary experience, most of which is actually borrowed from the Mughals, you are in for a treat. One of the other things I would suggest to people is to ask people where there can get five types of rice. This is a specialty of South India and a sort of street food. I know where you can get it Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai but not in Kerala, although am dead sure there is, just somehow have missed it. If asked, am sure the Kerala team should be able to guide. That s all for now, feeling hungry, having dinner as have been sharing about cooking.

RISC-V There has been lot of conversations about how India could be in the microprocesor spacee. The x86 and x86-64 is all tied up in Intel and AMD so that s a no go area. Let me elaborate a bit why I say that. While most of the people know that IBM was the first producers of transistors as well as microprocessors. Coincidentally, AMD and Intel story are similar in some aspects but not in others. For a long time Intel was a market leader and by hook or crook it remained a market leader. One of the more interesting companies in the 1980s was Cyrix which sold lot of low-end microprocessors. A lot of that technology also went into Via which became a sort of spiritual successor of Cyrix. It is because of Cyrix and Via that Intel was forced to launch the Celeron model of microprocessors.

Lawsuits, European Regulation For those who have been there in the 1990s may have heard the term Wintel that basically meant Microsoft Windows and Intel and they had a sort of monopoly power. While the Americans were sorta ok with it, the Europeans were not and time and time again they forced both Microsoft as well as Intel to provide alternatives. The pushback from the regulators was so great that Intel funded AMD to remain solvent for few years. The successes that we see today from AMD is Lisa Su s but there is a whole lot of history as well as bad blood between the two companies. Lot of lawsuits and whatnot. Lot of cross-licensing agreements between them as well. So for any new country it would need lot of cash just for licensing all the patents there are and it s just not feasible for any newcomer to come in this market as they would have to fork the cash for the design apart from manufacturing fab.

ARM Most of the mobiles today sport an ARM processor. At one time it meant Advanced RISC Machines but now goes by Arm Ltd. Arm itself licenses its designs and while there are lot of customers, you are depending on ARM and they can change any of the conditions anytime they want. You are also hoping that ARM does not steal your design or do anything else with it. And while people trust ARM, it is still a risk if you are a company.

RISC and Shakti There is not much to say about RISC other than this article at Register. While India does have large ambitions, executing it is far trickier than most people believe as well as complex and highly capital intensive. The RISC way could be a game-changer provided India moves deftly ahead. FWIW, Debian did a RISC port in 2018. From what I can tell, you can install it on a VM/QEMU and do stuff. And while RISC has its own niches, you never know what happens next.One can speculate a lot and there is certainly a lot of momentum behind RISC. From what little experience I have had, where India has failed time and time again, whether in software or hardware is support. Support is the key, unless that is not fixed, it will remain a dream On a slightly sad note, Foxconn is withdrawing from the joint venture it had with Vedanta.

As a follow up to Wayland [1]: A difficult problem with Linux desktop systems (which includes phones and tablets) is restricting application access so that applications can t mess with each other s data or configuration but also allowing them to share data as needed. This has been mostly solved for Android but that involved giving up all legacy Linux apps. I think that we need to get phones capable of running a full desktop environment and having Android level security on phone apps and regular desktop apps. My interest in this is phones running Debian and derivatives such as PureOS. But everything I describe in this post should work equally well for all full featured Linux distributions for phones such as Arch, Gentoo, etc and phone based derivatives of those such as Manjaro. It may be slightly less applicable to distributions such as Alpine Linux and it s phone derivative PostmarketOS, I would appreciate comments from contributors to PostmarketOS or Alpine Linux about this. I ve investigated some of the ways of solving these problems. Many of the ways of doing this involves namespaces. The LWN articles about namespaces are a good background to some of these technologies [2]. The LCA keynote lecture Containers aka crazy user space fun by Jess Frazelle has a good summary of some of the technology [3]. One part that I found particularly interesting was the bit about recognising the container access needed at compile time. This can also be part of recognising bad application design at compile time, it s quite common for security systems to flag bad security design in programs. Firejail To sandbox applications you need to have some method of restricting what they do, this means some combination of namespaces and similar features. Here s an article on sandboxing with firejail [4]. Firejail uses namespaces, seccomp-bpf, and capabilities to restrict programs. It allows bind mounts if run as root and if not run as root it can restrict file access by name and access to networking, system calls, and other features. It has a convenient learning mode that generates policy for you, so if you have a certain restricted set of tasks that an application is to perform you can run it once and then force it to do only the same operations in future. I recommend that everyone who is still reading at this point try out firejail. Here s an example of what you can do:

# create a profile
firejail --build=xterm.profile xterm
# now this run can only do what the previous run did
firejail --profile=xterm.profile xterm

Note that firejail is SETUID root so can potentially reduce system security and it has had security issues in the past. In spite of that it can be good for allowing a trusted user to run programs with less access to the system. Also it is a good way to start learning about such things. I don t think it s a good solution for what I want to do. But I won t rule out the possibility of using it at some future time for special situations. Bubblewrap I tried out firejail with the browser Epiphany (Debian package epiphany-browser) on my Librem5, but that didn t work as Epiphany uses /usr/bin/bwrap (bubblewrap) for it s internal sandboxing (here is an informative blog post about the history of bubblewrap AKA xdg-app-helper which was developed as part of flatpak [5]). The Epiphany bubblewrap sandbox is similar to the situation with Chrome/Chromium which have internal sandboxing that s incompatible with firejail. The firejail man page notes that it s not compatible with Snap, Flatpack, and similar technologies. One issue this raises is that we can t have a namespace based sandboxing system applied to all desktop apps with no extra configuration as some desktop apps won t work with it. Bubblewrap requires setting kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=1 to run as non-root (IE provide the normal and expected functionality) which potentially reduces system security. Here is an example of a past kernel bug that was exploitable by creating a user namespace with CAP_SYS_ADMIN [6]. But it s the default in recent Debian kernels which means that the issues have been reviewed and determined to be a reasonable trade-off and also means that many programs will use the feature and break if it s disabled. Here is an example of how to use Bubblewrap on Debian, after installing the bubblewrap run the following command. Note that the new-session option (to prevent injecting characters in the keyboard buffer with TIOCSTI) makes the session mostly unusable for a shell.

bwrap --ro-bind /usr /usr --symlink usr/lib64 /lib64 --symlink usr/lib /lib --proc /proc --dev /dev --unshare-pid --die-with-parent bash

Here is an example of using Bubblewrap to sandbox the game Warzone2100 running with Wayland/Vulkan graphics and Pulseaudio sound.

bwrap --bind $HOME/.local/share/warzone2100 $HOME/.local/share/warzone2100 --bind /run/user/$UID/pulse /run/user/$UID/pulse --bind /run/user/$UID/wayland-0 /run/user/$UID/wayland-0 --bind /run/user/$UID/wayland-0.lock /run/user/$UID/wayland-0.lock --ro-bind /usr /usr --symlink usr/bin /bin --symlink usr/lib64 /lib64 --symlink usr/lib /lib --proc /proc --dev /dev --unshare-pid --dev-bind /dev/dri /dev/dri --ro-bind $HOME/.pulse $HOME/.pulse --ro-bind $XAUTHORITY $XAUTHORITY --ro-bind /sys /sys --new-session --die-with-parent warzone2100

Here is an example of using Bubblewrap to sandbox the Debian bug reporting tool reportbug

bwrap --bind /tmp /tmp --ro-bind /etc /etc --ro-bind /usr /usr --ro-bind /var/lib/dpkg /var/lib/dpkg --symlink usr/sbin /sbin --symlink usr/bin /bin --symlink usr/lib64 /lib64 --symlink usr/lib /lib --symlink /usr/lib32 /lib32 --symlink /usr/libx32 /libx32 --proc /proc --dev /dev --die-with-parent --unshare-ipc --unshare-pid reportbug

Here is an example shell script to wrap the build process for Debian packages. This needs to run with unshare-user and specifying the UID as 0 because fakeroot doesn t work in the container, I haven t worked out why but doing it through the container is a better method anyway. This script shares read-write the parent of the current directory as the Debian build process creates packages and metadata files in the parent directory. This will prevent the automatic signing scripts which is a feature not a bug, so after building packages you have to sign the .changes file with debsign. One thing I just learned is that the Debian build system Sbuild can use chroots for building packages for similar benefits [7]. Some people believe that sbuild is the correct way of doing it regardless of the chroot issue. I think it s too heavy-weight for most of my Debian package building, but even if I had been convinced I d still share the information about how to use bwrap as Debian is about giving users choice.

#!/bin/bash
set -e
BUILDDIR=$(realpath $(pwd)/..)
exec bwrap --bind /tmp /tmp --bind $BUILDDIR $BUILDDIR --ro-bind /etc /etc --ro-bind /usr /usr --ro-bind /var/lib/dpkg /var/lib/dpkg --symlink usr/bin /bin --symlink usr/lib64 /lib64 --symlink usr/lib /lib --proc /proc --dev /dev --die-with-parent --unshare-user --unshare-ipc --unshare-net --unshare-pid --new-session --uid 0 --gid 0 $@

Here is an informative blog post about using Bubblewrap with Seccomp (BPF) [8]. In a future post I ll write about how to get this sort of thing going but I ll just leave the URL here for people who want to do it on their own. The source for the flatpak-run program is the only example I could find of using Seccomp with Bubblewrap [9]. A lot of that code is worth copying for application sandboxing, maybe the entire program. Unshare The unshare command from the util-linux package has a large portion of the Bubblewrap functionality. The things that it doesn t do like creating a new session can be done by other utilities. Here is an example of creating a container with unshare and then using cgroups with it [10]. systemd --user Recent distributions have systemd support for running a user session, the Arch Linux Wiki has a good description of how this works [11]. The units for a user are .service files stored in /usr/lib/systemd/user/ (distribution provided), ~/.local/share/systemd/user/ (user installed applications in debian a link to ~/.config/systemd/user/), ~/.config/systemd/user/ (for manual user config), and /etc/systemd/user/ (local sysadmin provided) Here are some example commands for manipulating this:

# show units running for the current user
systemctl --user
# show status of one unit
systemctl --user status kmail.service
# add an environment variable to the list for all user units
systemctl --user import-environment XAUTHORITY
# start a user unit
systemctl --user start kmail.service
# analyse security for all units for the current user
systemd-analyze --user security
# analyse security for one unit
systemd-analyze --user security kmail.service

Here is a test kmail.service file I wrote to see what could be done for kmail, I don t think that kmail is the app most needing to be restricted it is in more need of being protected from other apps but it still makes a good test case. This service file took it from the default risk score of 9.8 (UNSAFE) to 6.3 (MEDIUM) even though I was getting the error code=exited, status=218/CAPABILITIES when I tried anything that used capabilities (apparently due to systemd having some issue talking to the kernel).

[Unit]
Description=kmail
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/kmail
# can not limit capabilities (code=exited, status=218/CAPABILITIES)
#CapabilityBoundingSet=~CAP_SYS_TIME CAP_SYS_PACCT CAP_KILL CAP_WAKE_ALARM CAP_DAC_OVERRIDE CAP_DAC_READ_SEARCH CAP_FOWNER CAP_IPC_OWNER CAP_LINUX_IMMUTABLE CAP_IPC_LOCK CAP_SYS_MODULE CAP_SYS_TTY_CONFIG CAP_SYS_BOOT CAP_SYS_CHROOT CAP_BLOCK_SUSPEND CAP_LEASE CAP_MKNOD CAP_CHOWN CAP_FSETID CAP_SETFCAP CAP_SETGID CAP_SETUID CAP_SETPCAP CAP_SYS_RAWIO CAP_SYS_PTRACE CAP_SYS_NICE CAP_SYS_RESOURCE CAP_NET_ADMIN CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE CAP_NET_BROADCAST CAP_NET_RAW CAP_SYS_ADMIN CAP_SYSLOG
# also 218 for ProtectKernelModules PrivateDevices ProtectKernelLogs ProtectClock
# MemoryDenyWriteExecute stops it displaying message content (bad)
# needs @resources and @mount to startup
# needs @privileged to display message content
SystemCallFilter=~@cpu-emulation @debug @raw-io @reboot @swap @obsolete
SystemCallArchitectures=native
UMask=077
NoNewPrivileges=true
ProtectControlGroups=true
PrivateMounts=false
RestrictNamespaces=~user pid net uts mnt cgroup ipc
RestrictSUIDSGID=true
ProtectHostname=true
LockPersonality=true
ProtectKernelTunables=true
RestrictAddressFamilies=~AF_PACKET
RestrictRealtime=true
ProtectSystem=strict
ProtectProc=invisible
PrivateUsers=true
[Install]

When I tried to use the TemporaryFileSystem=%h directive (to make the home directory a tmpfs the most basic step in restricting what a regular user application can do) I got the error (code=exited, status=226/NAMESPACE) . So I don t think the systemd user setup competes with bubblewrap for restricting user processes. But if anyone else can start where I left off and go further then that will be interesting. Systemd-run The following shell script runs firefox as a dynamic user via systemd-run, running this asks for the root password and any mechanism for allowing that sort of thing opens potential security holes. So at this time while it s an interesting feature I don t think it is suitable for running regular applications on a phone or Linux desktop.

#!/bin/bash
# systemd-run Firefox with DynamicUser and home directory.
#
# Run as a non-root user.
# Or, run as root and change $USER below.
SANDBOX_MINIMAL=(
    --property=DynamicUser=1
    --property=StateDirectory=openstreetmap
    # --property=RootDirectory=/debian_sid
)
SANDBOX_X11=(
    # Sharing Xorg always defeats security, regardless of any sandboxing tech,
    # but the config is almost ready for Wayland, and there's Xephyr.
#    --property=LoadCredential=.ICEauthority:/home/$USER/.ICEauthority
    --property=LoadCredential=.Xauthority:/home/$USER/.Xauthority
    --property=Environment=DISPLAY=:0
)
SANDBOX_FIREFOX=(
    # hardware-accelerated rendering
    --property=BindPaths=/dev/dri
    # webcam
    # --property=SupplementaryGroups=video
)
systemd-run  \
    "$ SANDBOX_MINIMAL[@] "  "$ SANDBOX_X11[@] " "$ SANDBOX_FIREFOX[@] " \
    bash -c '
        export XAUTHORITY="$CREDENTIALS_DIRECTORY"/.Xauthority
        export ICEAUTHORITY="$CREDENTIALS_DIRECTORY"/.ICEauthority
        export HOME="$STATE_DIRECTORY"/home
        firefox --no-remote about:blank
    '

Qubes OS Here is an interesting demo video of QubesOS [12] which shows how it uses multiple VMs to separate different uses. Here is an informative LCA presentation about Qubes which shows how it asks the user about communication between VMs and access to hardware [13]. I recommend that everyone who hasn t seen Qubes in operation watch the first video and everyone who isn t familiar with the computer science behind it watch the second video. Qubes appears to be a free software equivalent to NetTop as far as I can tell without ever being able to use NetTop. I don t think Qubes is a good match for my needs in general use and it definitely isn t a good option for phones (VMs use excessive CPU on phones). But it s methods for controlling access have some ideas that are worth copying. File Access XDG Desktop Portal One core issue for running sandboxed applications is to allow them to access files permitted by the user but no other files. There are two main parts to this problem, the easier one is to have each application have it s own private configuration directory which can be addressed by bind mounts, MAC systems, running each application under a different UID or GID, and many other ways. The hard part of file access is to allow the application to access random files that the user wishes. For example I want my email program, IM program, and web browser to be able to save files and also to be able to send arbitrary files via email, IM, and upload to web sites. But I don t want one of those programs to be able to access all the files from the others if it s compromised. So only giving programs access to arbitrary files when the user chooses such a file makes sense. There is a package xdg-desktop-portal which provides a dbus interface for opening files etc for a sandboxed application [14]. This portal has backends for KDE, GNOME, and Wayland among others which allow the user to choose which file or files the application may access. Chrome/Chromium is one well known program that uses the xdg-desktop-portal and does it s own sandboxing. To use xdg-desktop-portal an application must be modified to use that interface instead of opening files directly, so getting this going with all Internet facing applications will take some work. But the documentation notes that the portal API gives a consistent user interface for operations such as opening files so it can provide benefits even without a sandboxed environment. This technology was developed for Flatpak and is now also used for Snap. It also has a range of APIs for accessing other services [15]. Flatpak Flatpack is a system for distributing containerised versions of applications with some effort made to improve security. Their development of bubblewrap and xdg-desktop-portal is really good work. However the idea of having software packaged with all libraries it needs isn t a good one, here s a blog post covering some of the issues [16]. The web site flatkill.org has been registered to complain about some Flatpak problems [17]. They have some good points about the approach that Flatpak project developers have taken towards some issues. They also make some points about the people who package software not keeping up to date with security fixes and not determining a good security policy for their pak. But this doesn t preclude usefully using parts of the technology for real security benefits. If parts of Flatpak like Bubblewrap and xdg-portal are used with good security policies on programs that are well packaged for a distribution then these issues would be solved. The Flatpak app author s documentation about package requirements [18] has an overview of security features that is quite reasonable. If most paks follow that then it probably isn t too bad. I reviewed the manifests of a few of the recent paks and they seemed to have good settings. In the amount of time I was prepared to spend investigating this I couldn t find evidence to support the Flatkill claim about Flatpaks granting obviously inappropriate permissions. But the fact that the people who run Flathub decided to put a graph of installs over time on the main page for each pak while making the security settings only available by clicking the Manifest github link, clicking on a JSON or YAML file, and then searching for the right section in that shows where their priorities lie. The finish-args section of the Flatpak manifest (the section that describes the access to the system) seems reasonably capable and not difficult for users to specify as well as being in common use. It seems like it will be easy enough to take some code from Flatpak for converting the finish-args into Bubblewrap parameters and then use the manifest files from Flathub as a starting point for writing application security policy for Debian packages. Snap Snap is developed by Canonical and seems like their version of Flatpak with some Docker features for managing versions, the Getting Started document is worth reading [19]. They have Connections between different snaps and the system where a snap registers a plug that connects to a socket which can be exposed by the system (EG the camera socket) or another snap. The local admin can connect and disconnect them. The connections design reminds me of the Android security model with permitting access to various devices. The KDE Neon extension [20] has been written to add Snap support to KDE. Snap seems quite usable if you have an ecosystem of programs using it which Canonical has developed. But it has all the overheads of loopback mounts etc that you don t want on a mobile device and has the security issues of libraries included in snaps not being updated. A quick inspection of an Ubuntu 22.04 system I run (latest stable release) has Firefox 114.0.2-1 installed which includes libgcrypt.so.20.2.5 which is apparently libgcrypt 1.8.5 and there are CVEs relating to libgcrypt versions before 1.9.4 and 1.8.x versions before 1.8.8 which were published in 2021 and updated in 2022. Further investigation showed that libgcrypt came from the gnome-3-38-2004 snap (good that it doesn t require all shared objects to be in the same snap, but that it has old versions in dependencies). The gnome-3-38-2004 snap is the latest version so anyone using the Snap of Firefox seems to have no choice but to have what appears to be insecure libraries. The strict mode means that the Snap in question has no system access other than through interfaces [21]. SE Linux and Apparmor The Librem5 has Apparmor running by default. I looked into writing Apparmor policy to prevent Epiphany from accessing all files under the home directory, but that would be a lot of work. Also at least one person has given up on maintaining an Epiphany profile for Apparmor because it changes often and it s sandbox doesn t work well with Apparmor [22]. This was not a surprise to me at all, SE Linux policy has the same issues as Apparmor in this regard. The Ubuntu Security Team Application Confinement document [23] is worth reading. They have some good plans for using AppArmor as part of solving some of these problems. I plan to use SE Linux for that. Slightly Related Things One thing for the future is some sort of secure boot technology, the LCA lecture Becoming a tyrant: Implementing secure boot in embedded devices [24] has some ideas for the future. The Betrusted project seems really interesting, see Bunnie s lecture about how to create a phone size security device with custom OS [25]. The Betrusted project web page is worth reading too [26]. It would be ironic to have a phone as your main PC that is the same size as your security device, but that seems to be the logical solution to several computing problems. Whonix is a Linux distribution that has one VM for doing Tor stuff and another VM for all other programs which is only allowed to have network access via the Tor VM [27]. Xpra does for X programs what screen/tmux do for text mode programs [28]. It allows isolating X programs from each other in ways that are difficult to impossible with a regular X session. In an ideal situation we could probably get the benefits we need with just using Wayland, but if there are legacy apps that only have X support this could help. Conclusion I think that currently the best option for confining desktop apps is Bubblewrap on Wayland. Maybe with a modified version of Flatpak-run to run it and with app modifications to use the xdg-portal interfaces as much as possible. That should be efficient enough in storage space, storage IO performance, memory use, and CPU use to run on phones while giving some significant benefits. Things to investigate are how much code from Flatpak to use, how to most efficiently do the configuration (maybe the Flatpak way because it s known and seems effective), how to test this (and have regression tests), and what default settings to use. Also BPF is a big thing to investigate.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/03/25/wayland/
• [2] https://lwn.net/Articles/531114/
• [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mzbIOtcIaQ
• [4] https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/sandbox.html
• [5] https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2018/06/20/flatpak-a-history/
• [6] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2022-0185
• [7] https://wiki.debian.org/sbuild
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/yf95crkq
• [9] https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/blob/main/common/flatpak-run.c
• [10] https://tinyurl.com/26gwmrw3
• [11] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/systemd/User
• [12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPAvoFsvSbg
• [13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3chZTdBgRSE
• [14] https://snapcraft.io/docs/xdg-desktop-portals
• [15] https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/
• [16] https://blog.brixit.nl/developers-are-lazy-thus-flatpak/
• [17] https://flatkill.org/
• [18] https://docs.flathub.org/docs/for-app-authors/requirements
• [19] https://snapcraft.io/docs/getting-started
• [20] https://snapcraft.io/docs/kde-neon-extension
• [21] https://snapcraft.io/docs/choosing-a-security-model
• [22] https://github.com/krathalan/apparmor-profiles/blob/master/README.md
• [23] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/Specifications/ApplicationConfinement
• [24] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS2sk3P1_Cc
• [25] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pIr3Q7gqNI&t=2559s
• [26] https://betrusted.io/
• [27] https://www.whonix.org/
• [28] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xpra

Last weekend was the bi-annual time to roll the main machine and server to the current Ubuntu release, now at 23.04. It must now have been fifteen or so years that I have used Ubuntu for my desktop / server (for reasons I may write about another time). And of course it all passed swimmingly as usual. [ And a small aside, if I may. Among all these upgrades, one of my favourite piece of tech trivia that may well be too little known remains the dedication of the PostgreSQL maintainers installing the new version, now PostgreSQL 15, seamlessly in parallel with the existing one, in my case PostgreSQL 14, keeping both running (!!) on two neighbouring ports (!!) so that there is no service disruption. So at some point, maybe this weekend, I will run the provided script to dump-and-restore to trigger the database migration at my convenience. Happy PostgreSQL on Debian/Ubuntu user since the late 1990s. It. Just. Works. ] [ Similarly, it is plainly amazeballs how apt orders and runs package updates to service to keep running for a maximum amount of time. This machine acts as e.g. a web server and it was up and running (as were other services) while thousands of package got updated/replaced. It is pretty amazing. Whereas on other platforms people still maintain the do not ever update anything we demonstrably offer the opposite here. Really not too shabby. ] This time, I had one small hickup. Emacs, now at version 28 bringing loads of niceties along, would not load. And the error soon lead to a post on the magit list where its indefatigable author Jonas Bernoulli suggested a rebuild (and hence re-compilation of the elisp files). Which I did, and which allowed a start of VM inside Emacs. So I was happy. But it allowed it only once for each VM package reinstall. Not good, and I remained curious. Some more digging lead to a breakthrough. A post and commit at the Fedora Project indicated that for just VM within Emacs, byte-compilation throws a spanner. Which one can work around by telling Emacs not to compile the files in the VM folder. So I applied that patch to the VM package in a local build et voil we have working VM. The world is clearly better when your email client of 25+ years just works. And feels snappier because everything under Emacs28 feels snappier! So I set this up properly and filed Debian Bug Report #1039105. To which Ian Jackson, the maintainer, replied a few days later nodding that he could reproduce. And that he concurred with the bug report, and was planning to update throughout. And lo and behold this morning s update reveals that this made into an update for the just-released Debian Bookworm. So yay. In all these years of Debian maintainership (somewhere between twentyfive and thirty) this may be my first bug report with patch going straight into a stable release. But of course, true and full credit goes of course to G ran Uddeborg for putting it up first for Fedora. Lovely how Open Source can work together. We really should do more, not less, of that. But I digress Anyway, in sum: If you try to use VM under the lovely Emacs 28, there is a fix, and if you use it with Debian Bookworm the fix should hit your mirrors soons. Ditto, methinks, for the next Ubuntu release. If you use it under Ubuntu now, the package is (elisp) text-only and can be safely installed on a derivative (which we do not enjoy in general but which is fine here). So enjoy! If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

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

For obscure reasons, I have found myself with a phone number registered with Signal but without any device associated with it. This is the I lost my phone section in Signal support, which rather unhelpfully tell you that, literally:

Until you have access to your phone number, there is nothing that can be done with Signal.

To be fair, I guess that sort of makes sense: Signal relies heavily on phone numbers for identity. It's how you register to the service and how you recover after losing your phone number. If you have your PIN ready, you don't even change safety numbers! But my case is different: this phone number was a test number, associated with my tablet, because you can't link multiple Android device to the same phone number. And now that I brilliantly bricked that tablet, I just need to tell people to stop trying to contact me over that thing (which wasn't really working in the first place anyway because I wasn't using the tablet that much, but I digress). So. What do you do? You could follow the above "lost my phone" guide and get a new Android or iOS phone to register on Signal again, but that's pretty dumb: I don't want another phone, I already have one. Lo and behold, signal-cli to the rescue!

Disclaimer: no warranty or liability Before following this guide, make sure you remember the license of this website, which specifically has a Section 5 Disclaimer of Warranties and Limitation of Liability. If you follow this guide literally, you might actually get into trouble. You have been warned. All Cats Are Beautiful.

Installing in Docker Because signal-cli is not packaged in Debian (but really should be), I need to bend over backwards to install it. The installation instructions suggest building from source (what is this, GentooBSD?) or installing binary files (what is this, Debiandows?), that's all so last millennium. I want something fresh and fancy, so I went with the extremely legit Docker registry ran by the not-shady-at-all gitlab.com/packaging group which is suspiciously not owned by any GitLab.com person I know of. This is surely perfectly safe.

(Insert long digression on supply chain security here and how Podman is so much superior to Docker. Feel free to dive deep into how RedHat sold out to the nazis or how this is just me ranting about something I don't understand, again. I'm not going to do all the work for you.)

Anyway. The magic command is:

mkdir .config/signal-cli
podman pull registry.gitlab.com/packaging/signal-cli/signal-cli-jre:latest
# lightly hit computer with magic supply chain verification wand
alias signal-cli="podman run --rm --publish 7583:7583 --volume .config/signal-cli:/var/lib/signal-cli --tmpfs /tmp:exec   registry.gitlab.com/packaging/signal-cli/signal-cli-jre:latest --config /var/lib/signal-cli"

At this point, you have a signal-cli alias that should more or less behave as per upstream documentation. Note that it sets up a network service on port 7583 which is unnecessary because you likely won't be using signal-cli's "daemon mode" here, this is a one-shot thing. But I'll probably be reusing those instructions later on, so I figured it might be a safe addition. Besides, it's what the instructions told me to do so I'm blindly slamming my head in the bash pipe, as trained. Also, you're going to have the signal-cli configuration persist in ~/.config/signal-cli there. Again, totally unnecessary.

Re-registering the number Back to our original plan of canceling our Signal account. The next step is, of course, to register with Signal.

Yes, this is a little counter-intuitive and you'd think there would be a "I want off this boat" button on https://signal.org that would do this for you, but hey, I guess that's only reserved for elite hackers who want to screw people over, I mean close their accounts. Mere mortals don't get access to such beauties. Update: a friend reminded me there used to be such a page at https://signal.org/signal/unregister/ but it's mysteriously gone from the web, but still available on the wayback machine although surely that doesn't work anymore. Untested.

To register an account with signal-cli, you first need to pass a CAPTCHA. Those are the funky images generated by deep neural networks that try to fool humans into thinking other neural networks can't break them, and generally annoy the hell out of people. This will generate a URL that looks like:

signalcaptcha://signal-hcaptcha.$UUID.registration.$THIRTYTWOKILOBYTESOFGARBAGE

Yes, it's a very long URL. Yes, you need the entire thing. The URL is hidden behind the Open Signal link, you can right-click on the link to copy it or, if you want to feel like it's 1988 again, use view-source: or butterflies or something. You will also need the phone number you want to unregister here, obviously. We're going to take a not quite random phone number as an example, +18002677468.

Don't do this at home kids! Use the actual number and don't copy-paste examples from random websites!

So the actual command you need to run now is:

signal-cli -a +18002677468 register --captcha signalcaptcha://signal-hcaptcha.$UUID.registration.$THIRTYTWOKILOBYTESOFGARBAGE

To confirm the registration, Signal will send a text message (SMS) to that phone number with a verification code. (Fun fact: it's actually Twilio relaying that message for Signal and that is... not great.) If you don't have access to SMS on that number, you can try again with the --voice option, which will do the same thing with a actual phone call. I wish it would say "Ok boomer" when it calls, but it doesn't. If you don't have access to either, you're screwed. You may be able to port your phone number to another provider to gain control of the phone number again that said, but at that point it's a whole different ball game. With any luck now you've received the verification code. You use it with:

signal-cli -a +18002677468 verify 131213

If you want to make sure this worked, you can try writing to another not random number at all, it should Just Work:

signal-cli -a +18002677468 send -mtest +18005778477

This is almost without any warning on the other end too, which says something amazing about Signal's usability and something horrible about its security.

Unregistering the number Now we get to the final conclusion, the climax. Can you feel it? I'll try to refrain from further rants, I promise. It's pretty simple and fast, just call:

signal-cli -a +18002677468 unregister

That's it! Your peers will now see an "Invite to Signal" button instead of a text field to send a text message.

Cleanup Optionally, cleanup the mess you left on this computer:

rm -r ~/.config/signal-cli
podman image rm registry.gitlab.com/packaging/signal-cli/signal-cli-jre

Review: Rose/House, by Arkady Martine

Publisher:	Subterranean Press
Copyright:	2023
ISBN:	1-64524-034-7
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	109

Arkady Martine is the author of the wonderful Teixcalaan duology, a political space opera. Rose/House is a standalone science fiction novella in an entirely different subgenre. Basit Deniau was a legendary architect whose trademark was infusing his houses with artificial intelligences. A house AI is common in this future setting, but what Deniau did was another kind of genius. He has been dead for a year when this story opens. The carbon of his body has been compressed into diamond and displayed on a plinth deep inside his final creation. Rose House. Dr. Selene Gisil was his student. It was not a comfortable relationship. She is now the only person permitted entry into Rose House, allowed to examine its interior architecture and the archive of Deniau's work that is stored there. Once per year, she may enter for precisely one week. No one else in the world is permitted to enter, ever. Selene went in the first time she was allowed. She lasted three days before fleeing. There is a law in the United States, the Federal Artificial Intelligence Surveillance Act, that sets some requirements for the behavior of artificial intelligences. One of its requirements is a duty-of-care notification: an artificial intelligence must report the presence of a dead body to the nearest law enforcement agency. Rose House's call to the China Lake Police Precinct to report the presence of a dead body in the sealed house follows the requirements of the law to the letter.

"Cause of death," said Maritza. I'm a piece of architecture, Detective. How should I know how humans are like to die? After that the line went to the dull hang-up tone, and Rose House would not take her return calls. Not even once.

Rose/House has some of the structure of a locked-room mystery. Someone is dead, but no one at the scene can get inside the house to see who. Selene is the only person who can enter, but she was in Turkey at the time of the killing and has an air-tight alibi. How could someone be in the house at all? And how did they die? It also has some of the structure of a police procedural. First one and then the other detective of the tiny local precinct are pulled into the investigation, starting, as one might expect, by calling Selene Gisil. But I'm not sure I would describe this novella as following either of those genres. By the end of the story, we do learn some of the things one might expect to learn from a detective novel, but that never felt like the true thrust of the story. If you want a detailed explanation of what happened, or the pleasure of trying to guess the murderer before the story tells you, this may not be the novella for you. Instead, Martine was aiming for disturbing eeriness. This is not quite horror nothing explicitly horrific happens, although a couple of scenes are disturbing but Rose House is deeply unsettling. The best character of the story is Maritza, the detective initially assigned to the case, who is trying to ignore the weirdness and do her job. The way she approaches that task leads to some fascinating interactions with Rose House that I thought were the best parts of the story. This story was not really my thing, even though I love stories about sentient buildings and there are moments in this story where Rose House is delightfully nonhuman in exactly the way that I enjoy. The story is told in a way that requires the reader to piece together the details of the conclusion themselves, and I prefer more explicit explanation in stories that start with a puzzle. It's also a bit too close to horror for me, specifically in the way that the characters (Selene most notably) have disturbing and oddly intense emotional reactions to environments that are only partly described. But I read this a few weeks ago and I'm still thinking about it, so it clearly is doing something right. If you like horror, or at least half-explained eeriness, it's likely you will enjoy this more than I did. This portrayal of AI is an intriguing one, and I'd enjoy reading more about it in a story focused on character and plot rather than atmosphere. Rating: 6 out of 10

Review: Furious Heaven, by Kate Elliott

Series:	Sun Chronicles #2
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	2023
ISBN:	1-250-86701-0
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	725

Furious Heaven is the middle book of a trilogy and a direct sequel to Unconquerable Sun. Don't start here. I also had some trouble remembering what happened in the previous book (grumble recaps mutter), and there are a lot of threads, so I would try to minimize the time between books unless you have a good memory for plot details. This is installment two of gender-swapped Alexander the Great in space. When we last left Sun and her Companions, Elliott had established the major players in this interstellar balance of power and set off some opening skirmishes, but the real battles were yet to come. Sun was trying to build her reputation and power base while carefully staying on the good side of Queen-Marshal Eirene, her mother and the person credited with saving the Republic of Chaonia from foreign dominance. The best parts of the first book weren't Sun herself but wily Persephone, one of her Companions, whose viewpoint chapters told a more human-level story of finding her place inside a close-knit pre-existing friendship group. Furious Heaven turns that all on its head. The details are spoilers (insofar as a plot closely tracking the life of Alexander the Great can contain spoilers), but the best parts of the second book are the chapters about or around Sun. What I find most impressive about this series so far is Elliott's ability to write Sun as charismatic in a way that I can believe as a reader. That was hit and miss at the start of the series, got better towards the end of Unconquerable Sun, and was wholly effective here. From me, that's high but perhaps unreliable praise; I typically find people others describe as charismatic to be some combination of disturbing, uncomfortable, dangerous, or obviously fake. This is a rare case of intentionally-written fictional charisma that worked for me. Elliott does not do this by toning down Sun's ambition. Sun, even more than her mother, is explicitly trying to gather power and bend the universe (and the people in it) to her will. She treats people as resources, even those she's the closest to, and she's ruthless in pursuit of her goals. But she's also honorable, straightforward, and generous to the people around her. She doesn't lie about her intentions; she follows a strict moral code of her own, keeps her friends' secrets, listens sincerely to their advice, and has the sort of battlefield charisma where she refuses to ask anyone else to take risks she personally wouldn't take. And her use of symbolism and spectacle isn't just superficial; she finds the points of connection between the symbols and her values so that she can sincerely believe in what she's doing. I am fascinated by how Elliott shapes the story around her charisma. Writing an Alexander analogue is difficult; one has to write a tactical genius with the kind of magnetic attraction that enabled him to lead an army across the known world, and make this believable to the reader. Elliott gives Sun good propaganda outlets and makes her astonishingly decisive (and, of course, uses the power of the author to ensure those decisions are good ones), but she also shows how Sun is constantly absorbing information and updating her assumptions to lay the groundwork for those split-second decisions. Sun uses her Companions like a foundation and a recovery platform, leaning on them and relying on them to gather her breath and flesh out her understanding, and then leaping from them towards her next goal. Elliott writes her as thinking just a tiny bit faster than the reader, taking actions I was starting to expect but slightly before I had put together my expectation. It's a subtle but difficult tightrope to walk as the writer, and it was incredibly effective for me. The downside of Furious Heaven is that, despite kicking the action into a much higher gear, this book sprawls. There are five viewpoint characters (Persephone and the Phene Empire character Apama from the first book, plus two new ones), as well as a few interlude chapters from yet more viewpoints. Apama's thread, which felt like a minor subplot of the first book, starts paying off in this book by showing the internal political details of Sun's enemy. That already means the reader has to track two largely separate and important stories. Add on a Persephone side plot about her family and a new plot thread about other political factions and it's a bit too much. Elliott does a good job avoiding reader confusion, but she still loses narrative momentum and reader interest due to the sheer scope. Persephone's thread in particular was a bit disappointing after being the highlight of the previous book. She spends a lot of her emotional energy on tedious and annoying sniping at Jade, which accomplishes little other than making them both seem immature and out of step with the significance of what's going on elsewhere. This is also a middle book of a trilogy, and it shows. It provides a satisfying increase in intensity and gets the true plot of the trilogy well underway, but nothing is resolved and a lot of new questions and plot threads are raised. I had similar problems with Cold Fire, the middle book of the other Kate Elliott trilogy I've read, and this book is 200 pages longer. Elliott loves world-building and huge, complex plots; I have a soft spot for them too, but they mean the story is full of stuff, and it's hard to maintain the same level of reader interest across all the complications and viewpoints. That said, I truly love the world-building. Elliott gives her world historical layers, with multiple levels of lost technology, lost history, and fallen empires, and backs it up with enough set pieces and fragments of invented history that I was enthralled. There are at least five major factions with different histories, cultures, and approaches to technology, and although they all share a history, they interpret that history in fascinatingly different ways. This world feels both lived in and full of important mysteries. Elliott also has a knack for backing the ambitions of her characters with symbolism that defines the shape of that ambition. The title comes from a (translated) verse of an in-universe song called the Hymn of Leaving, which is sung at funerals and is about the flight on generation ships from the now-lost Celestial Empire, the founding myth of this region of space:

Crossing the ocean of stars we leave our home behind us.
We are the spears cast at the furious heaven
And we will burn one by one into ashes
As with the last sparks we vanish.
This memory we carry to our own death which awaits us
And from which none of us will return.
Do not forget. Goodbye forever.

This is not great poetry, but it explains so much about the psychology of the characters. Sun repeatedly describes herself and her allies as spears cast at the furious heaven. Her mother's life mission was to make Chaonia a respected independent power. Hers is much more than that, reaching back into myth for stories of impossible leaps into space, burning brightly against the hostile power of the universe itself. A question about a series like this is why one should want to read about a gender-swapped Alexander the Great in space, rather than just reading about Alexander himself. One good (and sufficient) answer is that both the gender swap and the space parts are inherently interesting. But the other place that Elliott uses the science fiction background is to give Sun motives beyond sheer personal ambition. At a critical moment in the story, just like Alexander, Sun takes a detour to consult an Oracle. Because this is a science fiction novel, it's a great SF set piece involving a mysterious AI. But also because this is a science fiction story, Sun doesn't only ask about her personal ambitions. I won't spoil the exact questions; I think the moment is better not knowing what she'll ask. But they're science fiction questions, reader questions, the kinds of things Elliott has been building curiosity about for a book and a half by the time we reach that scene. Half the fun of reading a good epic space opera is learning the mysteries hidden in the layers of world-building. Aligning the goals of the protagonist with the goals of the reader is a simple storytelling trick, but oh, so effective. Structurally, this is not that great of a book. There's a lot of build-up and only some payoff, and there were several bits I found grating. But I am thoroughly invested in this universe now. The third book can't come soon enough. Followed by Lady Chaos, which is still being written at the time of this review. Rating: 7 out of 10

In my recent post about data archiving to removable media, I laid out the difference between backing up and archiving, and also said I d evaluate git-annex and dar. This post evaluates git-annex. The next will look at dar, and then I ll make a comparison post. What is git-annex? git-annex is a fantastic and versatile program that does well, it s one of those things that can do so much that it s a bit hard to describe. Its homepage says:

git-annex allows managing large files with git, without storing the file contents in git. It can sync, backup, and archive your data, offline and online. Checksums and encryption keep your data safe and secure. Bring the power and distributed nature of git to bear on your large files with git-annex.

I think the particularly interesting features of git-annex aren t actually included in that list. Among the features of git-annex that make it shine for this purpose, its location tracking is key. git-annex can know exactly which device has which file at which version at all times. Combined with its preferred content settings, this lets you very easily say things like:

• I want exactly 1 copy of every file to exist within the set #1 of backup drives. Here s a drive in that set; copy to it whatever needs to be copied to satisfy that requirement.
• Now I have another set of backup drives. Periodically I will swap sets offsite. Copy whatever is needed to this drive in the second set, making sure that there is 1 copy of every file within this set as well, regardless of what s in the first set.
• Here s a directory I want to use to track the status of everything else. I don t want any copies at all here.

git-annex can be set to allow a configurable amount of free space to remain on a device, and it will fill it up with whatever copies are necessary up until it hits that limit. Very convenient! git-annex will store files in a folder structure that mirrors the origin folder structure, in plain files just as they were. This maximizes the ability for a future person to access the content, since it is all viewable without any special tool at all. Of course, for things like optical media, git-annex will essentially be creating what amounts to incrementals. To obtain a consistent copy of the original tree, you would still need to use git-annex to process (export) the archives. git-annex challenges In my prior post, I related some challenges with git-annex. The biggest of them quite poor performance of the directory special remote when dealing with many files has been resolved by Joey, git-annex s author! That dramatically improves the git-annex use scenario here! The fixing commit is in the source tree but not yet in a release. git-annex no doubt may still have performance challenges with repositories in the 100,000+-range, but in that order of magnitude it now looks usable. I m not sure about 1,000,000-file repositories (I haven t tested); there is a page about scalability. A few other more minor challenges remain:

• git-annex doesn t really preserve POSIX attributes; for instance, permissions, symlink destinations, and timestamps are all not preserved. Of these, timestamps are the most important for my particular use case.
• If your data set to archive contains Git repositories itself, these will not be included.

I worked around the timestamp issue by using the mtree-netbsd package in Debian. mtree writes out a summary of files and metadata in a tree, and can restore them. To save: mtree -c -R nlink,uid,gid,mode -p /PATH/TO/REPO -X <(echo './.git') > /tmp/spec And, after restoration, the timestamps can be applied with: mtree -t -U -e < /tmp/spec Walkthrough: initial setup To use git-annex in this way, we have to do some setup. My general approach is this:

• There is a source of data that lives outside git-annex. I'll call this $SOURCEDIR.
• I'm going to name the directories holding my data $REPONAME.
• There will be a "coordination" git-annex repo. It will hold metadata only, and no data. This will let us track where things live. I'll call it $METAREPO.
• There will be drives. For this example, I'll call their mountpoints $DRIVE01 and $DRIVE02. For easy demonstration purposes, I used a ZFS dataset with a refquota set (to observe the size handling), but I could have as easily used a LVM volume, btrfs dataset, loopback filesystem, or USB drive. For optical discs, this would be a staging area or a UDF filesystem.

Let's get started! I've set all these shell variables appropriately for this example, and REPONAME to "testdata". We'll begin by setting up the metadata-only tracking repo.
$ REPONAME=testdata
$ mkdir "$METAREPO"
$ cd "$METAREPO"
$ git init
$ git config annex.thin true
There is a sort of complicated topic of how git-annex stores files in a repo, which varies depending on whether the data for the file is present in a given repo, and whether the file is locked or unlocked. Basically, the options I use here cause git-annex to mostly use hard links instead of symlinks or pointer files, for maximum compatibility with non-POSIX filesystems such as NTFS and UDF, which might be used on these devices. thin is part of that. Let's continue:
$ git annex init 'local hub'
init local hub ok
(recording state in git...)
$ git annex wanted . "include=* and exclude=$REPONAME/*"
wanted . ok
(recording state in git...)
In a bit, we are going to import the source data under the directory named $REPONAME (here, testdata). The wanted command says: in this repository (represented by the bare dot), the files we want are matched by the rule that says eveyrthing except what's under $REPONAME. In other words, we don't want to make an unnecessary copy here. Because I expect to use an mtree file as documented above, and it is not under $REPONAME/, it will be included. Let's just add it and tweak some things.
$ touch mtree
$ git annex add mtree
add mtree
ok
(recording state in git...)
$ git annex sync
git-annex sync will change default behavior to operate on --content in a future version of git-annex. Recommend you explicitly use --no-content (or -g) to prepare for that change. (Or you can configure annex.synccontent)
commit
[main (root-commit) 6044742] git-annex in local hub
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
create mode 120000 mtree
ok
$ ls -l
total 9
lrwxrwxrwx 1 jgoerzen jgoerzen 178 Jun 15 22:31 mtree -> .git/annex/objects/pX/ZJ/...
OK! We've added a file, and it got transformed into a symlink. That's the thing I said we were going to avoid, so:
git annex adjust --unlock-present
adjust
Switched to branch 'adjusted/main(unlockpresent)'
ok
$ ls -l
total 1
-rw-r--r-- 2 jgoerzen jgoerzen 0 Jun 15 22:31 mtree
You'll notice it transformed into a hard link (nlinks=2) file. Great! Now let's import the source data. For that, we'll use the directory special remote.
$ git annex initremote source type=directory directory=$SOURCEDIR importtree=yes \
encryption=none
initremote source ok
(recording state in git...)
$ git annex enableremote source directory=$SOURCEDIR
enableremote source ok
(recording state in git...)
$ git config remote.source.annex-readonly true
$ git config annex.securehashesonly true
$ git config annex.genmetadata true
$ git config annex.diskreserve 100M
$ git config remote.source.annex-tracking-branch main:$REPONAME
OK, so here we created a new remote named "source". We enabled it, and set some configuration. Most notably, that last line causes files from "source" to be imported under $REPONAME/ as we wanted earlier. Now we're ready to scan the source.
$ git annex sync
At this point, you'll see git-annex computing a hash for every file in the source directory. I can verify with du that my metadata-only repo only uses 14MB of disk space, while my source is around 4GB. Now we can see what git-annex thinks about file locations:
$ git-annex whereis less
whereis mtree (1 copy)
8aed01c5-da30-46c0-8357-1e8a94f67ed6 -- local hub [here]
ok
whereis testdata/[redacted] (0 copies)
The following untrusted locations may also have copies:
9e48387e-b096-400a-8555-a3caf5b70a64 -- [source]
failed
... many more lines ...
So remember we said we wanted mtree, but nothing under testdata, under this repo? That's exactly what we got. git-annex knows that the files under testdata can be found under the "source" special remote, but aren't in any git-annex repo -- yet. Now we'll start adding them. Walkthrough: removable drives I've set up two 500MB filesystems to represent removable drives. We'll see how git-annex works with them.
$ cd $DRIVE01
$ df -h .
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
acrypt/no-backup/annexdrive01 500M 1.0M 499M 1% /acrypt/no-backup/annexdrive01
$ git clone $METAREPO
Cloning into 'testdata'...
done.
$ cd $REPONAME
$ git config annex.thin true
$ git annex init "test drive #1"
$ git annex adjust --hide-missing --unlock
adjust
Switched to branch 'adjusted/main(hidemissing-unlocked)'
ok
$ git annex sync
OK, that's the initial setup. Now let's enable the source remote and configure it the same way we did before:
$ git annex enableremote source directory=$SOURCEDIR
enableremote source ok
(recording state in git...)
$ git config remote.source.annex-readonly true
$ git config remote.source.annex-tracking-branch main:$REPONAME
$ git config annex.securehashesonly true
$ git config annex.genmetadata true
$ git config annex.diskreserve 100M
Now, we'll add the drive to a group called "driveset01" and configure what we want on it:
$ git annex group . driveset01
$ git annex wanted . '(not copies=driveset01:1)'
What this does is say: first of all, this drive is in a group named driveset01. Then, this drive wants any files for which there isn't already at least one copy in driveset01. Now let's load up some files!
$ git annex sync --content
As the messages fly by from here, you'll see it mentioning that it got mtree, and then various files from "source" -- until, that is, the filesystem had less than 100MB free, at which point it complained of no space for the rest. Exactly like we wanted! Now, we need to teach $METAREPO about $DRIVE01.
$ cd $METAREPO
$ git remote add drive01 $DRIVE01/$REPONAME
$ git annex sync drive01
git-annex sync will change default behavior to operate on --content in a future version of git-annex. Recommend you explicitly use --no-content (or -g) to prepare for that change. (Or you can configure annex.synccontent)
commit
On branch adjusted/main(unlockpresent)
nothing to commit, working tree clean
ok
merge synced/main (Merging into main...)
Updating d1d9e53..817befc
Fast-forward
(Merging into adjusted branch...)
Updating 7ccc20b..861aa60
Fast-forward
ok
pull drive01
remote: Enumerating objects: 214, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (214/214), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (95/95), done.
remote: Total 110 (delta 6), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (110/110), 13.01 KiB 1.44 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (6/6), completed with 6 local objects.
From /acrypt/no-backup/annexdrive01/testdata
* [new branch] adjusted/main(hidemissing-unlocked) -> drive01/adjusted/main(hidemissing-unlocked)
* [new branch] adjusted/main(unlockpresent) -> drive01/adjusted/main(unlockpresent)
* [new branch] git-annex -> drive01/git-annex
* [new branch] main -> drive01/main
* [new branch] synced/main -> drive01/synced/main
ok
OK! This step is important, because drive01 and drive02 (which we'll set up shortly) won't necessarily be able to reach each other directly, due to not being plugged in simultaneously. Our $METAREPO, however, will know all about where every file is, so that the "wanted" settings can be correctly resolved. Let's see what things look like now:
$ git annex whereis less
whereis mtree (2 copies)
8aed01c5-da30-46c0-8357-1e8a94f67ed6 -- local hub [here]
b46fc85c-c68e-4093-a66e-19dc99a7d5e7 -- test drive #1 [drive01]
ok
whereis testdata/[redacted] (1 copy)
b46fc85c-c68e-4093-a66e-19dc99a7d5e7 -- test drive #1 [drive01] The following untrusted locations may also have copies:
9e48387e-b096-400a-8555-a3caf5b70a64 -- [source]
ok
If I scroll down a bit, I'll see the files past the 400MB mark that didn't make it onto drive01. Let's add another example drive! Walkthrough: Adding a second drive The steps for $DRIVE02 are the same as we did before, just with drive02 instead of drive01, so I'll omit listing it all a second time. Now look at this excerpt from whereis:
whereis testdata/[redacted] (1 copy)
b46fc85c-c68e-4093-a66e-19dc99a7d5e7 -- test drive #1 [drive01] The following untrusted locations may also have copies:
9e48387e-b096-400a-8555-a3caf5b70a64 -- [source]
ok
whereis testdata/[redacted] (1 copy)
c4540343-e3b5-4148-af46-3f612adda506 -- test drive #2 [drive02] The following untrusted locations may also have copies:
9e48387e-b096-400a-8555-a3caf5b70a64 -- [source]
ok
Look at that! Some files on drive01, some on drive02, some neither place. Perfect! Walkthrough: Updates So I've made some changes in the source directory: moved a file, added another, and deleted one. All of these were copied to drive01 above. How do we handle this? First, we update the metadata repo:
$ cd $METAREPO
$ git annex sync
$ git annex dropunused all
OK, this has scanned $SOURCEDIR and noted changes. Let's see what whereis says:
$ git annex whereis less
...
whereis testdata/cp (0 copies)
The following untrusted locations may also have copies:
9e48387e-b096-400a-8555-a3caf5b70a64 -- [source]
failed
whereis testdata/file01-unchanged (1 copy)
b46fc85c-c68e-4093-a66e-19dc99a7d5e7 -- test drive #1 [drive01] The following untrusted locations may also have copies:
9e48387e-b096-400a-8555-a3caf5b70a64 -- [source]
ok
So this looks right. The file I added was a copy of /bin/cp. I moved another file to one named file01-unchanged. Notice that it realized this was a rename and that the data still exists on drive01. Well, let's update drive01.
$ cd $DRIVE01/$REPONAME
$ git annex sync --content
Looking at the testdata/ directory now, I see that file01-unchanged has been renamed, the deleted file is gone, but cp isn't yet here -- probably due to space issues; as it's new, it's undefined whether it or some other file would fill up free space. Let's work along a few more commands.
$ git annex get --auto
$ git annex drop --auto
$ git annex dropunused all
And now, let's make sure metarepo is updated with its state.
$ cd $METAREPO
$ git annex sync
We could do the same for drive02. This is how we would proceed with every update. Walkthrough: Restoration Now, we have bare files at reasonable locations in drive01 and drive02. But, to generate a consistent restore, we need to be able to actually do an export. Otherwise, we may have files with old names, duplicate files, etc. Let's assume that we lost our source and metadata repos and have to restore from scratch. We'll make a new $RESTOREDIR. We'll begin with drive01 since we used it most recently.
$ mv $METAREPO $METAREPO.disabled
$ mv $SOURCEDIR $SOURCEDIR.disabled
$ git clone $DRIVE01/$REPONAME $RESTOREDIR
$ cd $RESTOREDIR
$ git config annex.thin true
$ git annex init "restore"
$ git annex adjust --hide-missing --unlock
Now, we need to connect the drive01 and pull the files from it.
$ git remote add drive01 $DRIVE01/$REPONAME
$ git annex sync --content
Now, repeat with drive02:
$ git remote add drive02 $DRIVE02/$REPONAME
$ git annex sync --content
Now we've got all our content back! Here's what whereis looks like:
whereis testdata/file01-unchanged (3 copies)
3d663d0f-1a69-4943-8eb1-f4fe22dc4349 -- restore [here]
9e48387e-b096-400a-8555-a3caf5b70a64 -- source
b46fc85c-c68e-4093-a66e-19dc99a7d5e7 -- test drive #1 [origin]
ok
...
I was a little surprised that drive01 didn't seem to know what was on drive02. Perhaps that could have been remedied by adding more remotes there? I'm not entirely sure; I'd thought would have been able to do that automatically. Conclusions I think I have demonstrated two things: First, git-annex is indeed an extremely powerful tool. I have only scratched the surface here. The location tracking is a neat feature, and being able to just access the data as plain files if all else fails is nice for future users. Secondly, it is also a complex tool and difficult to get right for this purpose (I think much easier for some other purposes). For someone that doesn't live and breathe git-annex, it can be hard to get right. In fact, I'm not entirely sure I got it right here. Why didn't drive02 know what files were on drive01 and vice-versa? I don't know, and that reflects some kind of misunderstanding on my part about how metadata is synced; perhaps more care needs to be taken in restore, or done in a different order, than I proposed. I initially tried to do a restore by using git annex export to a directory special remote with exporttree=yes, but I couldn't ever get it to actually do anything, and I don't know why. These two cut against each other. On the one hand, the raw accessibility of the data to someone with no computer skills is unmatched. On the other hand, I'm not certain I have the skill to always prepare the discs properly, or to do a proper consistent restore.

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

/usr-merge, by Helmut Grohne, et al Towards the end of April, the discussion on DEP 17 on debian-devel@l.d.o initiated by Helmut Grohne took off, trying to deal with the fact that while Debian bookworm has a merged /usr, files are still being distributed to / and /usr in Debian binary packages, and moving them currently has some risk of breakage. Most participants of the discussion agreed that files should be moved, and there are several competing design ideas for doing it safely. Most of the time was spent understanding the practical implications of lifting the moratorium and moving all the files from / to /usr in a coordinated effort. With help from Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, Enrico Zini, and Raphael Hertzog, Helmut Grohne performed extensive analysis of the various aspects, including quantitative analysis of the original file move problem, analysis of effects on dpkg-divert, dpkg-statoverride, and update-alternatives, analysis of effects on filesystem bootstrapping tools. Most of the problematic cases spawned plausible workarounds, such as turning Breaks into Conflicts in selected cases or adding protective diversions for the symbolic links that enable aliasing. Towards the end of May, Andreas Beckmann reported a new failure scenario which may cause shared resources to inadvertently disappear, such as directories and even regular files in case of Multi-Arch packages, and our work on analyzing these problems and proposing mitigations is on-going. While the quantitative analysis is funded by Freexian, we wouldn t be here without the extensive feedback and ideas of many voluntary contributors from multiple areas of Debian, which are too many to name here. Thank you.

Preparing for the tox 4 transition, by Stefano Rivera While Debian was in freeze for the bookworm release, tox 4 has landed in Debian experimental, and some packages are starting to require it, upstream. It has some backwards-incompatible behavior that breaks many packages using tox through pybuild. So Stefano had to make some changes to pybuild and to many packages that run build-time tests with tox. The easy bits of this transition are now completed in git / experimental, but a few packages that integrate deeply into tox need upstream work.

Debian Printing, by Thorsten Alteholz Just before the release of Bookworm, lots of QA tools were used to inspect packages. One of these tools found a systemd service file in a wrong directory. So, Thorsten did another upload of package lprint to correct this. Thanks a lot to all the hardworking people who run such tools and file bugs. Thorsten also participated in discussions about the new Common Printing Dialog Backends (CPDB) that will be introduced in Trixie and hopefully can replace the current printing architecture in Forky.

Miscellaneous contributions

• DebConf 23 preparations by Stefano Rivera. Some work on the website, video team planning, accounting, and team documentation.
• Utkarsh Gupta started to prep the work on the bursary team s side for DC23.
• Stefano spun up a website for the Hamburg mini-DebConf so that the video team could have a machine-readable schedule and a place to stream video from the event.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n reviewed and sponsored four python packages of a prospective Debian member.
• Helmut Grohne supported Timo Roehling and Jochen Sprickerhof to improve cross building in 15 ROS packages.
• Helmut Grohne supported Jochen Sprickerhof with diagnosing an e2fsprogs RC bug.
• Helmut Grohne continued to maintain rebootstrap and located an issue with lto in gcc-13.
• Anton Gladky fixed some RC-Bugs and uploaded a new stravalib python library.

A long time ago, before the pandemic, I bought a Librem 5 phone from Purism. I also moved home since then, and sadly my phone was sleeping peacefully in a box in the garage since I moved. When I was in Hamburg last month, I saw how great Mobian and Phosh was coming along, and this inspired me to go dig up the Librem 5 which was about 2 Debian releases behind, and upgrade it to the latest and greatest version. I followed the instruction on the Debian wiki, and after some stumbles, managed to flash it with the latest Mobian image:

It s still a big bulky phone, but Phosh has really come a long way and the phone feels so much more responsive and usable now. It s also the first time I tried out the new GNOME Console app (I hope they consider taking some features from JuiceSSH so that it s easier to run apps like mc and irssi on the phone).

Next up I want to try out some progressive web apps and also check what the latest state of emulating Android apps is. I ve also been meaning to follow some GTK tutorials, and trying out some ideas on a mobile device motivates me a bit more to do that. It s really impressive the large amount of work people put into making Debian and a mobile GNOME experience work so well on a phone! Good job to everyone who contributes to this eco-system!

Debian (I might as well say "we", this is the beauty of it) is about to release Debian 12 aka Bookworm. Let's take a quick look at what is new in Debian Qt land. Qt 5 Bookworm has Qt 5.15.8, which is nothing but great news. KDE will be switching to Qt 6 sooner than later and Qt 5 has been a fun ride, but Dmitry Shachnev and I needed a break, or at very least not handling two Qt versions. But in the end I need to be fair: you REALLY need to thank Dmitry for Qt 5. He has been the man power behind it in 99.5% of the cases. Qt 6 This will be the first Debian release to have official Qt 6 packages. NOTHING would have happened if it weren't for Patrick "Delta-One" Franz standing up to maintain it. BIG kudos to him! Well, there is a "little lie" in the paragraph above. Thanks to The Qt Company and ICS the current Qt 6 version, 6.4.2, is also available as Bullseye's backports. The Qt Company really also helped us here by providing us almost-to-be-released tarballs of Qt 6.4.2 so we were able to push them to unstable and do a transition in time for freeze, thanks a lot for that! So, what is the Qt 6 state? At the binary side all but OpenGL ES support should be there. Sadly this was discovered too late in the release process and we still might need help maintaining it (read the link to know why!). We are still not building the documentation. Properly building the whole documentation, as with Qt 5, would require all the Qt submodules' source code in one place, which we can't (easily?) do in Debian. So building the doc means hacking the build system and getting semi-linked documentation, much like with Qt 5. Now if you think you have an idea to solve this... we are happy to hear from you! Another great thing to know about Qt 6 is that, thanks to Helmut Grohne, pure Qt 6 applications should be able to cross compile. Applications using multi-arch enabled libraries ought to work too. Even more, many Qt submodules themselves should also cross compile! Not all of them, as we missed some patches in time, but hey, if you need to cross compile Qt, you surely can apply them yourselves! And finally tests, unit tests. In Qt 5 we had some of those, but none yet in Qt 6. This is one of the areas I would love to be able to put time... but time is scarce. The future? In my point of view the Debian 13 "Trixie" development cycle will see Qt 5 diminishing it's usage and Qt 6 becoming the major Qt version used, but from the Qt 4 experience I do not expect Qt 5 being dropped during this release cycle... let's see what the future brings us. Thanks! While I mentioned Dmitry and Patrick many more people helped us reach this place. I personally want to thank the people behind the KDE software, both upstream and, of course, the Debian maintainers. You should be thankful with them too, many hours of effort go into this. And thanks to you our dear users. We are normally overflowed with what we have in our hands and might not be up to the task sometimes, but hey, you are part of the reason we are doing this!

Just a few days back we came to know about the horrific Train Crash that happened in Odisha (Orissa). There are some things that are known and somethings that can be inferred by observance. Sadly, it seems the incident is going to be covered up . Some of the facts that have not been contested in the public domain are that there were three lines. One loop line on which the Goods Train was standing and there was an up and a down line. So three lines were there. Apparently, the signalling system and the inter-locking system had issues as highlighted by an official about a month back. That letter, thankfully is in the public domain and I have downloaded it as well. It s a letter that goes to 4 pages. The RW is incensed that the letter got leaked and is in public domain. They are blaming everyone and espousing conspiracy theories rather than taking the minister to task. Incidentally, the Minister has three ministries that he currently holds. Ministry of Communication, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEIT), and Railways Ministry. Each Ministry in itself is important and has revenues of more than 6 lakh crore rupees. How he is able to do justice to all the three ministries is beyond me The other thing is funds both for safety and relaying of tracks has been either not sanctioned or unutilized. In fact, CAG and the Railway Brass had shared how derailments have increased and unfulfilled vacancies but they were given no importance In fact, not talking about safety in the recently held Chintan Shivir (brainstorming session) tells you how much the Govt. is serious about safety. In fact, most of the programme was on high speed rail which is a white elephant. I have shared a whitepaper done by RW in the U.S. that tells how high-speed rail doesn t make economic sense. And that is an economy that is 20 times + the Indian Economy. Even the Chinese are stopping with HSR as it doesn t make economic sense. Incidentally, Air Fares again went up 200% yesterday. Somebody shared in the region of 20k + for an Air ticket from their place to Bangalore Coming back to the story itself. the Goods Train was on the loopline. Some say it was a little bit on the outer, some say otherwise, but it is established that it was on the loopline. This is standard behavior on and around Railway Stations around the world. Whether it was in the Inner or Outer doesn t make much of a difference with what happened next. The first train that collided with the goods train was the 12864 (SMVB-HWH) Yashwantpur Howrah Express and got derailed on to the next track where from the opposite direction 12841 (Shalimar- Bangalore) Coramandel Express was coming. Now they have said that around 300 people have died and that seems to be part of the cover-up. Both the trains are long trains, having between 23 odd coaches each. Even if you have reserved tickets you have 80 odd people in a coach and usually in most of these trains, it is at least double of that. Lot of money goes to TC and then above (Corruption). The Railway fares have gone up enormously but that s a question for perhaps another time . So at the very least, we could be looking at more than 1000 people having died. The numbers are being under-reported so that nobody has to take responsibility. The Railways itself has told that it is unable to identify 80% of the people who have died. This means that 80% were unreserved ticket holders or a majority of them. There have been disturbing images as how bodies have been flung over on tractors and whatnot to be either buried or cremated without a thought. We are in peak summer season so bodies will start to rot within 24-48 hours No arrangements made to cool the bodies and take some information and identifying marks or whatever. The whole thing being done in a very callous manner, not giving dignity to even those who have died for no fault of their own. The dissent note also tells that a cover-up is also in the picture. Apparently, India doesn t have nor does it feel to have a need for something like the NTSB that the U.S. used when it hauled both the plane manufacturer (Boeing) and the FAA when the 737 Max went down due to improper data collection and sharing of data with pilots. And with no accountability being fixed to Minister or any of the senior staff, a small junior staff person may be fired. Perhaps the same official that actually told them about the signal failures almost 3 months back There were and are also some reports that some jugaadu /temporary fixes were applied to signalling and inter-locking just before this incident happened. I do not know nor confirm one way or the other if the above happened. I can however point out that if such a thing happened, then usually a traffic block is announced and all traffic on those lines are stopped. This has been the thing I know for decades. Traveling between Mumbai and Pune multiple times over the years am aware about traffic block. If some repair work was going on and it wasn t able to complete the work within the time-frame then that may well have contributed to the accident. There is also a bit muddying of the waters where it is being said that one of the trains was 4 hours late, which one is conflicting stories. On top of the whole thing, they have put the case to be investigated by CBI and hinting at sabotage. They also tried to paint a religious structure as mosque, later turned out to be a temple. The RW says done by Muslims as it was Friday not taking into account as shared before that most Railway maintenance works are usually done between Friday Monday. This is a practice followed not just in India but world over. There has been also move over a decade to remove wooden sleepers and have concrete sleepers. Unlike the wooden ones they do not expand and contract as much and their life is much more longer than the wooden ones. Funds had been marked (although lower than last few years) but not yet spent. As we know in case of any accident, it is when all the holes in cheese line up it happens. Fukushima is a great example of that, no sea wall even though Japan is no stranger to Tsunamis. External power at the same level as the plant. (10 meters above sea-level), no training for cascading failures scenarios which is what happened. The Days mini-series shares some but not all the faults that happened at Fukushima and the Govt. response to it. There is a difference though, the Japanese Prime Minister resigned on moral grounds. Here, nor the PM, nor the Minister would be resigning on moral grounds or otherwise :(. Zero accountability and that was partly a natural disaster, here it s man-made. In fact, both the Minister and the Prime Minister arrived with their entourages, did a PR blitzkrieg showing how concerned they are. Within 50 hours, the lines were cleared. The part-time Railway Minister shared that he knows the root cause and then few hours later has given the case to CBI. All are saying, wait for the inquiry report. To date, none of the accidents even in this Govt. has produced an investigation report. And even if it did, I am sure it will whitewash as it did in case of Adani as I had shared before in the previous blog post. Incidentally, it is reported that Adani paid off some of its debt, but when questioned as to where they got the money, complete silence on that part :(. As can be seen cover-up after cover-up FWIW, the Coramandel Express is known as the Migrant train so has a huge number of passengers, the other one which was collided with is known as sick train as huge number of cancer patients use it to travel to Chennai and come back

Demonetization 2.0 Few days back, India announced demonetization 2.0. Surprised, don t be. Apparently, INR 2k/- is being used for corruption and Mr. Modi is unhappy about it. He actually didn t like the INR 2k/- note but was told that it was needed, who told him we are unaware to date. At that time the RBI Governor was Mr. Urjit Patel who didn t say about INR 2k/- he had said that INR 1k/- note redesigned would come in the market. That has yet to happen. What has happened is that just like INR 500/- and INR 1k/- note is concerned, RBI will no longer honor the INR 2k/- note. Obviously, this has made our neighbors angry, namely Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan etc. who do some trading with us. 2 Deccan herald columns share the limelight on it. Apparently, India wants to be the world s currency reserve but doesn t want to play by the rules for everyone else. It was pointed out that both the U.S. and Singapore had retired their currencies but they will honor that promise even today. The Singapore example being a bit closer (as it s in Asia) is perhaps a bit more relevant than the U.S. one. Singapore retired the SGD $10,000 as of 2014 but even in 2022, it remains as legal tender. They also retired the SGD $1,000 in 2020 but still remains legal tender.

So let s have a fictitious example to illustrate what is meant by what Singapore has done. Let s say I go to Singapore, rent a flat, and find a $1000 note in that house somewhere. Both practically and theoretically, I could go down to any of the banks, get the amount transferred to my wallet, bank account etc. and nobody will question. Because they have promised the same. Interestingly, the Singapore Dollar has been pretty resilient against the USD for quite a number of years vis-a-vis other Asian currencies. Most of the INR 2k/- notes were also found and exchanged in Gujarat in just a few days (The PM and HM s state.). I am sure you are looking into the mental gymnastics that the RW indulge in :(. What is sadder that most of the people who try to defend can t make sense one way or the other and start to name-call and get personal as they have nothing else

Disability questions dropped in NHFS-6 Just came to know today that in the upcoming National Family Health Survey-6 disability questions are being dropped. Why is this important. To put it simply, if you don t have numbers, you won t and can t make policies for them. India is one of the worst countries to live if you are disabled. The easiest way to share to draw attention is most Railway platforms are not at level with people. Just as Mick Lynch shares in the UK, the same is pretty much true for India too. Meanwhile in Europe, they do make an effort to be level so even disabled people have some dignity. If your public transport is sorted, then people would want much more and you will be obligated to provide for them as they are citizens. Here, we have had many reports of women being sexually molested when being transferred from platform to coach irrespective of their age or whatnot The main takeaway is if you do not have their voice, you won t make policies for them. They won t go away but you will make life hell for them. One thing to keep in mind that most people assume that most people are disabled from birth. This may or may not be true. For e.g. in the above triple Railways accidents, there are bound to be disabled people or newly disabled people who were healthy before the accident. The most common accident is road accidents, some involving pedestrians and vehicles or both, the easiest is Ministry of Road Transport data that says 4,00,000 people sustained injuries in 2021 alone in road mishaps. And this is in a country where even accidents are highly under-reported, for more than one reason. The biggest reason especially in 2 and 4 wheeler is the increased premium they would have to pay if in an accident, so they usually compromise with the other and pay off the Traffic Inspector. Sadly, I haven t read a new book, although there are a few books I m looking forward to have. People living in India and neighbors please be careful as more heat waves are expected. Till later.

Welcome to the May 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project In our reports, we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As always, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.

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Holger Levsen gave a talk at the 2023 edition of the Debian Reunion Hamburg, a semi-informal meetup of Debian-related people in northern Germany. The slides are available online.

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In April, Holger Levsen gave a talk at foss-north 2023 titled Reproducible Builds, the first ten years. Last month, however, Holger s talk was covered in a round-up of the conference on the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) blog.

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Pronnoy Goswami, Saksham Gupta, Zhiyuan Li, Na Meng and Daphne Yao from Virginia Tech published a paper investigating the Reproducibility of NPM Packages. The abstract includes:

When using open-source NPM packages, most developers download prebuilt packages on npmjs.com instead of building those packages from available source, and implicitly trust the downloaded packages. However, it is unknown whether the blindly trusted prebuilt NPM packages are reproducible (i.e., whether there is always a verifiable path from source code to any published NPM package). [ ] We downloaded versions/releases of 226 most popularly used NPM packages and then built each version with the available source on GitHub. Next, we applied a differencing tool to compare the versions we built against versions downloaded from NPM, and further inspected any reported difference.

The paper reports that among the 3,390 versions of the 226 packages, only 2,087 versions are reproducible, and furthermore that multiple factors contribute to the non-reproducibility including flexible versioning information in package.json file and the divergent behaviors between distinct versions of tools used in the build process. The paper concludes with insights for future verifiable build procedures. Unfortunately, a PDF is not available publically yet, but a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is available on the paper s IEEE page.

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Elsewhere in academia, Betul Gokkaya, Leonardo Aniello and Basel Halak of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton published a new paper containing a broad overview of attacks and comprehensive risk assessment for software supply chain security. Their paper, titled Software supply chain: review of attacks, risk assessment strategies and security controls, analyses the most common software supply-chain attacks by providing the latest trend of analyzed attack, and identifies the security risks for open-source and third-party software supply chains. Furthermore, their study introduces unique security controls to mitigate analyzed cyber-attacks and risks by linking them with real-life security incidence and attacks . (arXiv.org, PDF)

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NixOS is now tracking two new reports at reproducible.nixos.org. Aside from the collection of build-time dependencies of the minimal and Gnome installation ISOs, this page now also contains reports that are restricted to the artifacts that make it into the image. The minimal ISO is currently reproducible except for Python 3.10, which hopefully will be resolved with the coming update to Python version 3.11.

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On our rb-general mailing list this month: David A. Wheeler started a thread noting that the OSSGadget project s oss-reproducible tool was measuring something related to but not the same as reproducible builds. Initially they had adopted the term semantically reproducible build term for what it measured, which they defined as being if its build results can be either recreated exactly (a bit for bit reproducible build), or if the differences between the release package and a rebuilt package are not expected to produce functional differences in normal cases. This generated a significant number of replies, and several were concerned that people might confuse what they were measuring with reproducible builds . After discussion, the OSSGadget developers decided to switch to the term semantically equivalent for what they measured in order to reduce the risk of confusion. Vagrant Cascadian (vagrantc) posted an update about GCC, binutils, and Debian s build-essential set with some progress, some hope, and I daresay, some fears . Lastly, kpcyrd asked a question about building a reproducible Linux kernel package for Arch Linux (answered by Arnout Engelen). In the same, thread David A. Wheeler pointed out that the Linux Kernel documentation has a chapter about Reproducible kernel builds now as well.

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In Debian this month, nine reviews of Debian packages were added, 20 were updated and 6 were removed this month, all adding to our knowledge about identified issues. In addition, Vagrant Cascadian added a link to the source code causing various ecbuild issues. [ ]

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The F-Droid project updated its Inclusion How-To with a new section explaining why it considers reproducible builds to be best practice and hopes developers will support the team s efforts to make as many (new) apps reproducible as it reasonably can.

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In diffoscope development this month, version 242 was uploaded to Debian unstable by Chris Lamb who also made the following changes:

• If binwalk is not available, ensure the user knows they may be missing more info. [ ]
• Factor out generating a human-readable comment when missing a Python module. [ ]

In addition, Mattia Rizzolo documented how to (re)-produce a binary blob in the code [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian updated the version of diffoscope in GNU Guix to 242 [ ].

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reprotest is our tool for building the same source code twice in different environments and then checking the binaries produced by each build for any differences. This month, Holger Levsen uploaded versions 0.7.24 and 0.7.25 to Debian unstable which added support for Tox versions 3 and 4 with help from Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ]

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Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

• Alper Nebi Yasak:
  • #1035375 filed against mtools (forwarded upstream).
• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • snobol4 (datetime-related issue)
  • python310 (.pyc ordering issue)
  • xmvn (randomised issue)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1036220 filed against refnx.
  • #1036221 filed against mfem.
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • #1035365 filed against lombok.
  • #1035394 filed against lcov.
  • #1035400 filed against lucene8.
  • #1035405 filed against bnd.
  • #1035630 filed against clc-intercal.
  • #1035704 filed against proj.
  • #1036367 filed against gcc-13.
  • #1036521 filed against pygopherd.
  • #1036522 filed against pytorch-audio.
  • #1036571 & #1036572 filed against vcmi.
  • #1036939 filed against proj.

In addition, Jason A. Donenfeld filed a bug (now fixed in the latest alpha version) in the Android issue tracker to report that generateLocaleConfig in Android Gradle Plugin version 8.1.0 generates XML files using non-deterministic ordering, breaking reproducible builds. [ ]

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Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In May, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:

• Update the kernel configuration of arm64 nodes only put required modules in the initrd to save space in the /boot partition. [ ]
• A huge number of changes to a new tool to document/track Jenkins node maintenance, including adding --fetch, --help, --no-future and --verbose options [ ][ ][ ][ ] as well as adding a suite of new actions, such as apt-upgrade, command, deploy-git, rmstamp, etc. [ ][ ][ ][ ] in addition a significant amount of refactoring [ ][ ][ ][ ].
• Issue warnings if apt has updates to install. [ ]
• Allow Jenkins to run apt get update in maintenance job. [ ]
• Installed bind9-dnsutils on some Ubuntu 18.04 nodes. [ ][ ]
• Fixed the Jenkins shell monitor to correctly deal with little-used directories. [ ]
• Updated the node health check to warn when apt upgrades are available. [ ]
• Performed some node maintenance. [ ]

In addition, Vagrant Cascadian added the nocheck, nopgo and nolto when building gcc-* and binutils packages [ ] as well as performed some node maintenance [ ][ ]. In addition, Roland Clobus updated the openQA configuration to specify longer timeouts and access to the developer mode [ ] and updated the URL used for reproducible Debian Live images [ ].

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If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org
• Twitter: @ReproBuilds

I ve recently been working on porting some of my Python code to rust, both for performance reasons, and because of the strong typing in the language. As a fan of Haskell, I also just really enjoy using the language. Porting any large project to a new language can be a challenge. There is a temptation to do a rewrite from the ground-up in idiomatic rust and using all new fancy features of the language.

I m calling time on DNSSEC. Last week, prompted by a change in my DNS hosting setup, I began removing it from the few personal zones I had signed. Then this Monday the .nz ccTLD experienced a multi-day availability incident triggered by the annual DNSSEC key rotation process. This incident broke several of my unsigned zones, which led me to say very unkind things about DNSSEC on Mastodon and now I feel compelled to more completely explain my thinking: For almost all domains and use-cases, the costs and risks of deploying DNSSEC outweigh the benefits it provides. Don t bother signing your zones. The .nz incident, while topical, is not the motivation or the trigger for this conclusion. Had it been a novel incident, it would still have been annoying, but novel incidents are how we learn so I have a small tolerance for them. The problem with DNSSEC is precisely that this incident was not novel, just the latest in a long and growing list. It s a clear pattern. DNSSEC is complex and risky to deploy. Choosing to sign your zone will almost inevitably mean that you will experience lower availability for your domain over time than if you leave it unsigned. Even if you have a team of DNS experts maintaining your zone and DNS infrastructure, the risk of routine operational tasks triggering a loss of availability (unrelated to any attempted attacks that DNSSEC may thwart) is very high - almost guaranteed to occur. Worse, because of the nature of DNS and DNSSEC these incidents will tend to be prolonged and out of your control to remediate in a timely fashion. The only benefit you get in return for accepting this almost certain reduction in availability is trust in the integrity of the DNS data a subset of your users (those who validate DNSSEC) receive. Trusted DNS data that is then used to communicate across an untrusted network layer. An untrusted network layer which you are almost certainly protecting with TLS which provides a more comprehensive and trustworthy set of security guarantees than DNSSEC is capable of, and provides those guarantees to all your users regardless of whether they are validating DNSSEC or not. In summary, in our modern world where TLS is ubiquitous, DNSSEC provides only a thin layer of redundant protection on top of the comprehensive guarantees provided by TLS, but adds significant operational complexity, cost and a high likelihood of lowered availability. In an ideal world, where the deployment cost of DNSSEC and the risk of DNSSEC-induced outages were both low, it would absolutely be desirable to have that redundancy in our layers of protection. In the real world, given the DNSSEC protocol we have today, the choice to avoid its complexity and rely on TLS alone is not at all painful or risky to make as the operator of an online service. In fact, it s the prudent choice that will result in better overall security outcomes for your users. Ignore DNSSEC and invest the time and resources you would have spent deploying it improving your TLS key and certificate management. Ironically, the one use-case where I think a valid counter-argument for this position can be made is TLDs (including ccTLDs such as .nz). Despite its many failings, DNSSEC is an Internet Standard, and as infrastructure providers, TLDs have an obligation to enable its use. Unfortunately this means that everyone has to bear the costs, complexities and availability risks that DNSSEC burdens these operators with. We can t avoid that fact, but we can avoid creating further costs, complexities and risks by choosing not to deploy DNSSEC on the rest of our non-TLD zones.

But DNSSEC will save us from the evil CA ecosystem! Historically, the strongest motivation for DNSSEC has not been the direct security benefits themselves (which as explained above are minimal compared to what TLS provides), but in the new capabilities and use-cases that could be enabled if DNS were able to provide integrity and trusted data to applications. Specifically, the promise of DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE) is that with DNSSEC we can be free of the X.509 certificate authority ecosystem and along with it the expensive certificate issuance racket and dubious trust properties that have long been its most distinguishing features. Ten years ago this was an extremely compelling proposition with significant potential to improve the Internet. That potential has gone unfulfilled. Instead of maturing as deployments progressed and associated operational experience was gained, DNSSEC has been beset by the discovery of issue after issue. Each of these has necessitated further changes and additions to the protocol, increasing complexity and deployment cost. For many zones, including significant zones like google.com (where I led the attempt to evaluate and deploy DNSSEC in the mid 2010s), it is simply infeasible to deploy the protocol at all, let alone in a reliable and dependable manner. While DNSSEC maturation and deployment has been languishing, the TLS ecosystem has been steadily and impressively improving. Thanks to the efforts of many individuals and companies, although still founded on the use of a set of root certificate authorities, the TLS and CA ecosystem today features transparency, validation and multi-party accountability that comprehensively build trust in the ability to depend and rely upon the security guarantees that TLS provides. When you use TLS today, you benefit from:

• Free/cheap issuance from a number of different certificate authorities.
• Regular, automated issuance/renewal via the ACME protocol.
• Visibility into who has issued certificates for your domain and when through Certificate Transparency logs.
• Confidence that certificates issued without certificate transparency (and therefore lacking an SCT) will not be accepted by the leading modern browsers.
• The use of modern cryptographic protocols as a baseline, with a plausible and compelling story for how these can be steadily and promptly updated over time.

DNSSEC with DANE can match the TLS ecosystem on the first benefit (up front price) and perhaps makes the second benefit moot, but has no ability to match any of the other transparency and accountability measures that today s TLS ecosystem offers. If your ZSK is stolen, or a parent zone is compromised or coerced, validly signed TLSA records for a forged certificate can be produced and spoofed to users under attack with minimal chances of detection. Finally, in terms of overall trust in the roots of the system, the CA/Browser forum requirements continue to improve the accountability and transparency of TLS certificate authorities, significantly reducing the ability for any single actor (say a nefarious government) to subvert the system. The DNS root has a well established transparent multi-party system for establishing trust in the DNSSEC root itself, but at the TLD level, almost intentionally thanks to the hierarchical nature of DNS, DNSSEC has multiple single points of control (or coercion) which exist outside of any formal system of transparency or accountability. We ve moved from DANE being a potential improvement in security over TLS when it was first proposed, to being a definite regression from what TLS provides today. That s not to say that TLS is perfect, but given where we re at, we ll get a better security return from further investment and improvements in the TLS ecosystem than we will from trying to fix DNSSEC.

But TLS is not ubiquitous for non-HTTP applications The arguments above are most compelling when applied to the web-based HTTP-oriented ecosystem which has driven most of the TLS improvements we ve seen to date. Non-HTTP protocols are lagging in adoption of many of the improvements and best practices TLS has on the web. Some claim this need to provide a solution for non-HTTP, non-web applications provides a motivation to continue pushing DNSSEC deployment. I disagree, I think it provides a motivation to instead double-down on moving those applications to TLS. TLS as the new TCP. The problem is that costs of deploying and operating DNSSEC are largely fixed regardless of how many protocols you are intending to protect with it, and worse, the negative side-effects of DNSSEC deployment can and will easily spill over to affect zones and protocols that don t want or need DNSSEC s protection. To justify continued DNSSEC deployment and operation in this context means using a smaller set of benefits (just for the non-HTTP applications) to justify the already high costs of deploying DNSSEC itself, plus the cost of the risk that DNSSEC poses to the reliability to your websites. I don t see how that equation can ever balance, particularly when you evaluate it against the much lower costs of just turning on TLS for the rest of your non-HTTP protocols instead of deploying DNSSEC. MTA-STS is a worked example of how this can be achieved. If you re still not convinced, consider that even DNS itself is considering moving to TLS (via DoT and DoH) in order to add the confidentiality/privacy attributes the protocol currently lacks. I m not a huge fan of the latency implications of these approaches, but the ongoing discussion shows that clever solutions and mitigations for that may exist. DoT/DoH solve distinct problems from DNSSEC and in principle should be used in combination with it, but in a world where DNS itself is relying on TLS and therefore has eliminated the majority of spoofing and cache poisoning attacks through DoT/DoH deployment the benefit side of the DNSSEC equation gets smaller and smaller still while the costs remain the same.

OK, but better software or more careful operations can reduce DNSSEC s cost Some see the current DNSSEC costs simply as teething problems that will reduce as the software and tooling matures to provide more automation of the risky processes and operational teams learn from their mistakes or opt to simply transfer the risk by outsourcing the management and complexity to larger providers to take care of. I don t find these arguments compelling. We ve already had 15+ years to develop improved software for DNSSEC without success. What s changed that we should expect a better outcome this year or next? Nothing. Even if we did have better software or outsourced operations, the approach is still only hiding the costs behind automation or transferring the risk to another organisation. That may appear to work in the short-term, but eventually when the time comes to upgrade the software, migrate between providers or change registrars the debt will come due and incidents will occur. The problem is the complexity of the protocol itself. No amount of software improvement or outsourcing addresses that. After 15+ years of trying, I think it s worth considering that combining cryptography, caching and distributed consensus, some of the most fundamental and complex computer science problems, into a slow-moving and hard to evolve low-level infrastructure protocol while appropriately balancing security, performance and reliability appears to be beyond our collective ability. That doesn t have to be the end of the world, the improvements achieved in the TLS ecosystem over the same time frame provide a positive counter example - perhaps DNSSEC is simply focusing our attention at the wrong layer of the stack. Ideally secure DNS data would be something we could have, but if the complexity of DNSSEC is the price we have to pay to achieve it, I m out. I would rather opt to remain with the simpler yet insecure DNS protocol and compensate for its short comings at higher transport or application layers where experience shows we are able to more rapidly improve and develop our security capabilities.

Summing up For the vast majority of domains and use-cases there is simply no net benefit to deploying DNSSEC in 2023. I d even go so far as to say that if you ve already signed your zones, you should (carefully) move them back to being unsigned - you ll reduce the complexity of your operating environment and lower your risk of availability loss triggered by DNS. Your users will thank you. The threats that DNSSEC defends against are already amply defended by the now mature and still improving TLS ecosystem at the application layer, and investing in further improvements here carries far more return than deployment of DNSSEC. For TLDs, like .nz whose outage triggered this post, DNSSEC is not going anywhere and investment in mitigating its complexities and risks is an unfortunate burden that must be shouldered. While the full incident report of what went wrong with .nz is not yet available, the interim report already hints at some useful insights. It is important that InternetNZ publishes a full and comprehensive review so that the full set of learnings and improvements this incident can provide can be fully realised by .nz and other TLD operators stuck with the unenviable task of trying to safely operate DNSSEC.

Postscript After taking a few days to draft and edit this post, I ve just stumbled across a presentation from the well respected Geoff Huston at last weeks RIPE86 meeting. I ve only had time to skim the slides (video here) - they don t seem to disagree with my thinking regarding the futility of the current state of DNSSEC, but also contain some interesting ideas for what it might take for DNSSEC to become a compelling proposition. Probably worth a read/watch!

Review: The Mimicking of Known Successes, by Malka Older

Series:	Mossa and Pleiti #1
Publisher:	Tordotcom
Copyright:	2023
ISBN:	1-250-86051-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	169

The Mimicking of Known Successes is a science fiction mystery novella, the first of an expected series. (The second novella is scheduled to be published in February of 2024.) Mossa is an Investigator, called in after a man disappears from the eastward platform on the 4 63' line. It's an isolated platform, five hours away from Mossa's base, and home to only four residential buildings and a pub. The most likely explanation is that the man jumped, but his behavior before he disappeared doesn't seem consistent with that theory. He was bragging about being from Valdegeld University, talking to anyone who would listen about the important work he was doing not typically the behavior of someone who is suicidal. Valdegeld is the obvious next stop in the investigation. Pleiti is a Classics scholar at Valdegeld. She is also Mossa's ex-girlfriend, making her both an obvious and a fraught person to ask for investigative help. Mossa is the last person she expected to be waiting for her on the railcar platform when she returns from a trip to visit her parents. The Mimicking of Known Successes is mostly a mystery, following Mossa's attempts to untangle the story of what happened to the disappeared man, but as you might have guessed there's a substantial sapphic romance subplot. It's also at least adjacent to Sherlock Holmes: Mossa is brilliant, observant, somewhat monomaniacal, and very bad at human relationships. All of this story except for the prologue is told from Pleiti's perspective as she plays a bit of a Watson role, finding Mossa unreadable, attractive, frustrating, and charming in turn. Following more recent Holmes adaptations, Mossa is portrayed as probably neurodivergent, although the story doesn't attach any specific labels. I have no strong opinions about this novella. It was fine? There's a mystery with a few twists, there's a sapphic romance of the second chance variety, there's a bit of action and a bit of hurt/comfort after the action, and it all felt comfortably entertaining but kind of predictable. Susan Stepney has a "passes the time" review rating, and while that may be a bit harsh, that's about where I ended up. The most interesting part of the story is the science fiction setting. We're some indefinite period into the future. Humans have completely messed up Earth to the point of making it uninhabitable. We then took a shot at terraforming Mars and messed that planet up to the point of uninhabitability as well. Now, what's left of humanity (maybe not all of it the story isn't clear) lives on platforms connected by rail lines high in the atmosphere of Jupiter. (Everyone in the story calls Jupiter "Giant" for reasons that I didn't follow, given that they didn't rename any of its moons.) Pleiti's position as a Classics scholar means that she studies Earth and its now-lost ecosystems, whereas the Modern faculty focus on their new platform life. This background does become relevant to the mystery, although exactly how is not clear at the start. I wouldn't call this a very realistic setting. One has to accept that people are living on platforms attached to artificial rings around the solar system's largest planet and walk around in shirt sleeves and only minor technological support due to "atmoshields" of some unspecified capability, and where the native atmosphere plays the role of London fog. Everything feels vaguely Edwardian, including to the occasional human porter and message runner, which matches the story concept but seems unlikely as a plausible future culture. I also disbelieve in humanity's ability to do anything to Earth that would make it less inhabitable than the clouds of Jupiter. That said, the setting is a lot of fun, which is probably more important. It's fun to try to visualize, and it has that slightly off-balance, occasionally surprising feel of science fiction settings where everyone is recognizably human but the things they consider routine and unremarkable are unexpected by the reader. This novella also has a great title. The Mimicking of Known Successes is simultaneously a reference a specific plot point from late in the story, a nod to the shape of the romance, and an acknowledgment of the Holmes pastiche, and all of those references work even better once you know what the plot point is. That was nicely done. This was not very memorable apart from the setting, but it was pleasant enough. I can't say that I'm inspired to pre-order the next novella in this series, but I also wouldn't object to reading it. If you're in the mood for gender-swapped Holmes in an exotic setting, you could do worse. Followed by The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles. Rating: 6 out of 10

As we get closer to Debian Bookworm's release, I thought I'd share one change in Python 3.11 that will surely affect many people. Python 3.11 implements the new PEP 668, Marking Python base environments as externally managed ¹. If you use pip regularly on Debian, it's likely you'll eventually hit the externally-managed-environment error: With this PEP, Python tools can now distinguish between packages that have been installed by the user with a tool like pip and ones installed using a distribution's package manager, like apt. This is generally great news: it was previously too easy to break a system by mixing the two types of packages. This PEP will simplify our role as a distribution, as well as improve the overall Python user experience in Debian. Sadly, it's also likely this change will break some of your scripts, especially CI that (legitimately) install packages via pip alongside system packages. For example, I use the following gitlab-ci snippet to make sure my PRs don't break my build process²: With Python 3.11, this snippet will error out, as pip will refuse to install packages alongside the system's. The fix is to tell pip it's OK to "break" your system packages, either using the --break-system-packages parameter, or the PIP_BREAK_SYSTEM_PACKAGES=1 environment variable³. This, of course, is not something you should be using in production to restore the old behavior! The "proper" way to fix this issue, as the externally-managed-environment error message aptly (har har) informs you, is to use virtual environments. Happy hacking!

I've been watching the neovim community for a while and what seems like a cambrian explosion of plugins emerging. A few weeks back I decided to spend most of a "day of learning" on investigating some of the plugins and technologies that I'd read about: Language Server Protocol, TreeSitter, neorg (a grandiose organiser plugin), etc. It didn't go so well. I spent most of my time fighting version incompatibilities or tracing through scant documentation or code to figure out what plugin was incompatible with which other. There's definitely a line where crossing it is spending too much time playing with your tools instead of creating. On the other hand, there's definitely value in honing your tools and learning about new technologies. Everyone's line is probably in a different place. I've come to the conclusion that I don't have the time or inclination (or both) to approach exploring the neovim universe in this way. There exist a number of plugin "distributions" (such as LunarVim): collections of pre- configured and integrated plugins that you can try to use out-of-the-box. Next time I think I'll pick one up and give that a try &emdash independently from my existing configuration &emdash and see which ideas from it I might like to adopt. shared vimrcs Some folks upload their vim or neovim configurations in their entirety for others to see. I noticed Jess Frazelle had published hers so I took a look. I suppose one could evaluate a bunch of plugins and configuration in isolation using a shared vimrc like this, in the same was as a distribution. bufferline Amongst the plugins she uses was bufferline, a plugin to re-work neovim's tab bar to behave like tab bars from more conventional editors¹. I don't make use of neovim's tabs at all², so I would lose nothing having the (presently hidden) tab bar reworked, so I thought I'd give it a go. I had to disable an existing plugin lightline, which I've had enabled for years but I wasn't sure I was getting much value from. Apparently it also messes with the tab bar! Disabling it, at least for now, at least means I'll find out if I miss it. I am already using vim-buffergator as a means of seeing and managing open buffers: a hotkey opens a sidebar with a list of open buffers, to switch between or close. Bufferline gives me a more immediate, always-present view of open buffers, which is faintly useful: but not much. Perhaps I'd like it more if I was coming from an editor that had made it more of an expected feature. The two things I noticed about it that aren't especially useful for me: when browsing around vimwiki pages, I quickly open a lot of buffers. The horizontal line fills up very quickly. Even when I don't, I habitually have quite a lot of buffers open, and the horizontal line is quickly overwhelmed. I have found myself closing open buffers with the mouse, which I didn't do before. vert Since I have brought up a neovim UI feature (tabs) I thought I'd briefly mention my new favourite neovim built-in command: vert. Quite a few plugins and commands open up a new window (e.g. git-fugitive, Man, etc.) and they typically do so in a horizontal split. I'm increasingly preferring vertical splits. Prefixing any³ such command with vert forces the split to be vertical instead.

It s been a while since I had this idea to leverage the power of WireGuard to self-host stuff at home. Even though I pay for a proper server somewhere in the world, there are some services that I don t consider critical to put there, or that I consider too critical to host outside my home.

It s only NATural With today s ISP packages for end users, I find it very annoying the amount of trouble they create when you try to host anything at home. Dynamic IPs, NAT/CGNAT, port-blocking, traffic shapping are only a few examples of methods or limitations that prevent users from making local services reachable in a reliable way from outside.

WireGuard comes to help If you already pay for a VPS or a dedicated server somewhere, why not use its existing infrastructure (and public availability) in your favour? That s what I thought when I started this journey. My initial idea was to use a reverse proxy to redirect external requests to the service running at my home. But how could I make sure that these requests reach my dynamic-IP-behind-a-NAT-behind-another-NAT? Well, let s create a tunnel! WireGuard is the perfect tool for that because of many things: it s stateless, very performant, secure, and requires very little configuration.

Setting up on the server On the server side (i.e., VPS or dedicated server), you will create the first endpoint. Something like the following should do:

[Interface]
PrivateKey = PRIVATE_KEY_HERE
Address = 10.0.0.1/32
ListenPort = 51821
[Peer]
PublicKey = PUBLIC_KEY_HERE
AllowedIps = 10.0.0.2/32
PersistentKeepalive = 10

A few interesting points to note:

• The Peer section contains information about the home service that will be configured below.
• I m using PersistentKeepalive because I have a dynamic IP at my home. If you have a static IP, you could get rid of PersistentKeepalive and specify an Endpoint here (don t forget to set a ListenPort below, in the Interface section).
• Now you have an IP where you can forward requests to. If we re talking about HTTP traffic, Apache and nginx are absolutely capable of doing it. If we re talking about other kind of traffic, you might want to look into other utilities, like HAProxy, Traefik and others.

Setting up at your home At your home, you will configure the peer:

[Interface]
PrivateKey = PRIVATE_KEY_HERE
Address = 10.0.0.2/32
[Peer]
PublicKey = PUBLIC_KEY_HERE
AllowedIps = 10.0.0.1/32
Endpoint = YOUR_SERVER:51821
PersistentKeepalive = 10

A few notes about security I would be remiss if I didn t say anything about security, especially because we re talking about hosting services at home. So, here are a few recommendations:

• Make sure to put your services in a separate local network. Using VLANs is also a good option.
• Don t run services on your personal (or work!) computer, even if they ll be running inside a VM.
• Run a firewall on the WireGuard interface and make sure that you only allow traffic over the required ports.

Have fun!