Recently I ve been curious about how hibernation works on Linux, as it s an interesting interaction between hardware and software. There are some notes in the Arch wiki and the kernel documentation (as well as some kernel documentation on debugging hibernation and on sleep states more generally), and of course the ACPI Specification

The Formal Definition ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) is, according to the spec, an architecture-independent power management and configuration framework that forms a subsystem within the host OS which defines a hardware register set to define power states. ACPI defines four global system states G0, working/on, G1, sleeping, G2, soft off, and G3, mechanical off¹. Within G1 there are 4 sleep states, numbered S1 through S4. There are also S0 and S5, which are equivalent to G0 and G2 respectively².

Sleep According to the spec, the ACPI S1-S4 states all do the same thing from the operating system s perspective, but each saves progressively more power, so the operating system is expected to pick the deepest of these states when entering sleep. However, most operating systems³ distinguish between S1-S3, which are typically referred to as sleep or suspend, and S4, which is typically referred to as hibernation.

S1: CPU Stop and Cache Wipe The CPU caches are wiped and then the CPU is stopped, which the spec notes is equivalent to the WBINVD instruction followed by the STPCLK signal on x86. However, nothing is powered off.

S2: Processor Power off The system stops the processor and most system clocks (except the real time clock), then powers off the processor. Upon waking, the processor will not continue what it was doing before, but instead use its reset vector⁴.

S3: Suspend/Sleep (Suspend-to-RAM) Mostly equivalent to S2, but hardware ensures that only memory and whatever other hardware memory requires are powered.

S4: Hibernate (Suspend-to-Disk) In this state, all hardware is completely powered off and an image of the system is written to disk, to be restored from upon reapplying power. Writing the system image to disk can be handled by the operating system if supported, or by the firmware.

Linux Sleep States Linux has its own set of sleep states which mostly correspond with ACPI states.

Suspend-to-Idle This is a software only sleep that puts all hardware into the lowest power state it can, suspends timekeeping, and freezes userspace processes. All userspace and some kernel threads⁵, except those tagged with `PF_NOFREEZE`, are frozen before the system enters a sleep state. Frozen tasks are sent to the `__refrigerator()`, where they set `TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE` and `PF_FROZEN` and infinitely loop until `PF_FROZEN` is unset⁶. This prevents these tasks from doing anything during the imaging process. Any userspace process running on a different CPU while the kernel is trying to create a memory image would cause havoc. This is also done because any filesystem changes made during this would be lost and could cause the filesystem and its related in-memory structures to become inconsistent. Also, creating a hibernation image requires about 50% of memory free, so no tasks should be allocating memory, which freezing also prevents.

Standby This is equivalent to ACPI S1.

Suspend-to-RAM This is equivalent to ACPI S3.

Hibernation Hibernation is mostly equivalent to ACPI S4 but does not require S4, only requiring low-level code for resuming the system to be present for the underlying CPU architecture according to the Linux sleep state docs. To hibernate, everything is stopped and the kernel takes a snapshot of memory. Then, the system writes out the memory image to disk. Finally, the system either enters S4 or turns off completely. When the system restores power it boots a new kernel, which looks for a hibernation image and loads it into memory. It then overwrites itself with the hibernation image and jumps to a resume area of the original kernel⁷. The resumed kernel restores the system to its previous state and resumes all processes.

Hybrid Suspend Hybrid suspend does not correspond to an official ACPI state, but instead is effectively a combination of S3 and S4. The system writes out a hibernation image, but then enters suspend-to-RAM. If the system wakes up from suspend it will discard the hibernation image, but if the system loses power it can safely restore from the hibernation image.

The difference between soft and mechanical off is that mechanical off is entered and left by a mechanical means (for example, turning off the system s power through the movement of a large red switch)

It s unclear to me why G and S states overlap like this. I assume this is a relic of an older spec that only had S states, but I have not as yet found any evidence of this. If someone has any information on this, please let me know and I ll update this footnote.

Of the operating systems I know of that support ACPI sleep states (I checked Windows, Mac, Linux, and the three BSDs⁸), only MacOS does not allow the user to deliberately enable hibernation, instead supporting a hybrid suspend it calls safe sleep

The reset vector of a processor is the default location where, upon a reset, the processor will go to find the first instruction to execute. In other words, the reset vector is a pointer or address where the processor should always begin its execution. This first instruction typically branches to the system initialization code. Xiaocong Fan, Real-Time Embedded Systems, 2015

All kernel threads are tagged with `PF_NOFREEZE` by default, so they must specifically opt-in to task freezing.

This is not from the docs, but from `kernel/freezer.c` which also notes Refrigerator is place where frozen processes are stored :-).

This is the operation that requires special architecture-specific low-level code .

Interestingly NetBSD has a setting to enable hibernation, but does not actually support hibernation

Some time back I wrote up a description of my proposed (and implemented) solution for making hibernation work under Linux even within the bounds of the integrity model. It's been a while, so here's an update.

The first is that localities just aren't an option. It turns out that they're optional in the spec, and TPMs are entirely permitted to say they don't support them. The only time they're likely to work is on platforms that support DRTM implementations like TXT. Most consumer hardware doesn't fall into that category, so we don't get to use that solution. Unfortunate, but, well.

The second is that I'd ignored an attack vector. If the kernel is configured to restrict access to PCR 23, then yes, an attacker is never able to modify PCR 23 to be in the same state it would be if hibernation were occurring and the key certification data will fail to validate. Unfortunately, an attacker could simply boot into an older kernel that didn't implement the PCR 23 restriction, and could fake things up there (yes, this is getting a bit convoluted, but the entire point here is to make this impossible rather than just awkward). Once PCR 23 was in the correct state, they would then be able to write out a new swap image, boot into a new kernel that supported the secure hibernation solution, and have that resume successfully in the (incorrect) belief that the image was written out in a secure environment.

This felt like an awkward problem to fix. We need to be able to distinguish between the kernel having modified the PCRs and userland having modified the PCRs, and we need to be able to do this without modifying any kernels that have already been released[1]. The normal approach to determining whether an event occurred in a specific phase of the boot process is to "cap" the PCR - extend it with a known value that indicates a transition between stages of the boot process. Any events that occur before the cap event must have occurred in the previous stage of boot, and since the final PCR value depends on the order of measurements and not just the contents of those measurements, if a PCR is capped before userland runs, userland can't fake the same PCR value afterwards. If Linux capped a PCR before userland started running, we'd be able to place a measurement there before the cap occurred and then prove that that extension occurred before userland had the opportunity to interfere. We could simply place a statement that the kernel supported the PCR 23 restrictions there, and we'd be fine.

Unfortunately Linux doesn't currently do this, and adding support for doing so doesn't fix the problem - if an attacker boots a kernel that doesn't cap a PCR, they can just cap it themselves from userland. So, we're faced with the same problem: booting an older kernel allows the system to be placed in an identical state to the current kernel, and a fake hibernation image can be written out. Solving this required a PCR that was being modified after kernel code was running, but before userland was started, even with existing kernels.

Thankfully, there is one! PCR 5 is defined as containing measurements related to boot management configuration and data. One of the measurements it contains is the result of the UEFI ExitBootServices() call. ExitBootServices() is called at the transition from the UEFI boot environment to the running OS, and the kernel contains code that executes before it. So, if we measure an assertion regarding whether or not we support restricted access to PCR 23 into PCR 5 before we call ExitBootServices(), this will prevent userspace from spoofing us (because userspace will only be able to extend PCR 5 after the firmware extended PCR 5 in response to ExitBootServices() being called). Obviously this depends on the firmware actually performing the PCR 5 extension when ExitBootServices() is called, but if firmware's out of spec then I don't think there's any real expectation of it being secure enough for any of this to buy you anything anyway.

My current tree is here, but there's a couple of things I want to do before submitting it, including ensuring that the key material is wiped from RAM after use (otherwise it could potentially be scraped out and used to generate another image afterwards) and, uh, actually making sure this works (I no longer have the machine I was previously using for testing, and switching my other dev machine over to TPM 2 firmware is proving troublesome, so I need to pull another machine out of the stack and reimage it).

[1] The linear nature of time makes feature development much more frustrating

comments

Almost thirty years ago, some forward looking teachers at Samisk videreg ende skole og reindriftsskole teaching metal work and Northern S mi, decided to create a list of words used in Northern S mi metal work. After almost ten years this resulted in a dictionary database, published as the book "Mekanihkk rs nit : Mekanikerord = Mekaanisen alan sanasto = Mechanic's words" in 1999. The story of this work is available from the pen of Svein Lund, one of the leading actors behind this effort. They even got the dictionary approved by the S mi Language Council as the recommended metal work words to use. Fast forward twenty years, I came across this work when I recently became interested in metal work, and started watching educational and funny videos on the topic, like the ones from mrpete222 and This Old Tony. But they all talk English, but I wanted to know what the tools and techniques they used were called in Norwegian. Trying to track down a good dictionary from English to Norwegian, after much searching, I came across the database of words created almost thirty years ago, with translations into English, Norwegian, Northern S mi, Swedish and Finnish. This gave me a lot of the Norwegian phrases I had been looking for. To make it easier for the next person trying to track down a good Norwegian dictionary for the metal worker, and because I knew the person behind the database from my Skolelinux / Debian Edu days, I decided to ask if the database could be released to the public without any usage limitations, in other words as a Creative Commons licensed data set. And happily, after consulting with the S mi Parliament of Norway, the database is now available with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license from my gitlab repository. The dictionary entries look slightly different, depending on the language in focus. This is the same entry in the different editions. English

lathe

dreiebenk (nb) v rve, v rvenbea ka, jorahanbea ka, v tnanbea ka (se) svarv (sv) sorvi (fi)

Norwegian

dreiebenk

lathe (en) v rve, v rvenbea ka, jorahanbea ka, v tnanbea ka (se) svarv (sv) sorvi (fi)

(nb): sponskj rande bearbeidingsmaskin der ein med skj reverkt y lausgj r spon fr eit roterande arbetsstykke

Northern S mi

v rve, v rvenbea ka, jorahanbea ka, v tnanbea ka

dreiebenk (nb) lathe (en) svarv (sv) sorvi (fi)

(se): ma iidna mainna uohpp vuolahasaid jorri bargo vdnasis

(nb): sponskj rande bearbeidingsmaskin der ein med skj reverkt y lausgj r spon fr eit roterande arbetsstykke

The database included term description in both Norwegian and Northern S mi, but not English. Because of this, the Northern S mi edition include both descriptions, the Norwegian edition include the Norwegian description and the English edition lack a descripiton. Once the database was available without any usage restrictions, and armed with my experience in publishing books, I decided to publish a Norwegian/English dictionary as a book using the database, to make the data set available also on paper and as an ebook. Further into the project, it occurred to me that I could just as easily make an English dictionary, and talking to Svein and concluding that it was within reach, I decided to make a Northern S mi dictionary too. Thus I suddenly find myself publishing a Northern S mi dictionary, even though I do not understand the language myself. I hope it will be well received, and can help revive the impressive work done almost thirty years ago to document the vocabulary of metal workers. If I get some help, I might even extend it with some of the words I find missing, like collet, rotary broach, carbide, knurler, arbor press and others. But the first edition build from a lightly edited version of the original database, with no new entries added. If you would like to check it out, visit my list of published books and consider buying a paper or ebook copy from lulu.com. The paper edition is only available in hardcover to increase its durability in the workshop. I am very happy to report that in the process, and thanks to help from both Svein Lund and B rre Gaup who understand the language, the docbook tools I use to create books, dblatex and docbook-xsl, now include support for Northern S mi. Before I started, these lacked the needed locale settings for this language, but now the patches are included upstream. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

I built my current desktop PC in 2014. A second SSD was added in 2015. The motherboard and the power supply were replaced after a fault¹ in 2016. The memory was upgraded in 2018. A discrete AMD GPU was installed in 2019 to drive two 4K screens. An NVMe disk was added earlier this year to further increase storage performance. This is a testament to the durability of a desktop PC compared to a laptop: it s evolutive and you can keep it a long time. While fine for most usage, the CPU started to become a bottleneck during video conferences.² So, it was set for an upgrade. The table below summarizes the change. This update cost me about 800 .

	Before	After
CPU	Intel i5-4670K @ 3.4 GHz	AMD Ryzen 5 5600X @ 3.7 GHz
CPU fan	Zalman CNPS9900	Noctua NH-U12S
Motherboard	Asus Z97-PRO Gamer	Asus TUF Gaming B550-PLUS
RAM	2 8 GB + 2 4 GB DDR3 @ 1.6 GHz	2 16 GB DDR4 @ 3.6 GHz
GPU	Asus Radeon PH RX 550 4G M7
Disks	500 GB Crucial P2 NVMe 256 GB Samsung SSD 850 256 GB Samsung SSD 840
PSU	be quiet! Pure Power CM L8 @ 530 W
Case	Antec P100

According to some benchmark, the new CPU should be 4 faster when all cores are used and 1.5 faster for a single-threaded workload. Compiling an arbitrary³ kernel provides a 3 speedup. Before:

$ lscpu -e
CPU NODE SOCKET CORE L1d:L1i:L2:L3 ONLINE    MAXMHZ   MINMHZ
  0    0      0    0 0:0:0:0          yes 3800.0000 800.0000
  1    0      0    1 1:1:1:0          yes 3800.0000 800.0000
  2    0      0    2 2:2:2:0          yes 3800.0000 800.0000
  3    0      0    3 3:3:3:0          yes 3800.0000 800.0000
$ CCACHE_DISABLE=1 =time -f '  %E' make -j$(nproc)
[ ]
  OBJCOPY arch/x86/boot/vmlinux.bin
  AS      arch/x86/boot/header.o
  LD      arch/x86/boot/setup.elf
  OBJCOPY arch/x86/boot/setup.bin
  BUILD   arch/x86/boot/bzImage
Kernel: arch/x86/boot/bzImage is ready  (#1)
  4:54.32

After:

$ lscpu -e
CPU NODE SOCKET CORE L1d:L1i:L2:L3 ONLINE    MAXMHZ    MINMHZ
  0    0      0    0 0:0:0:0          yes 5210.3511 2200.0000
  1    0      0    1 1:1:1:0          yes 4650.2920 2200.0000
  2    0      0    2 2:2:2:0          yes 5210.3511 2200.0000
  3    0      0    3 3:3:3:0          yes 5073.0459 2200.0000
  4    0      0    4 4:4:4:0          yes 4932.1279 2200.0000
  5    0      0    5 5:5:5:0          yes 4791.2100 2200.0000
  6    0      0    0 0:0:0:0          yes 5210.3511 2200.0000
  7    0      0    1 1:1:1:0          yes 4650.2920 2200.0000
  8    0      0    2 2:2:2:0          yes 5210.3511 2200.0000
  9    0      0    3 3:3:3:0          yes 5073.0459 2200.0000
 10    0      0    4 4:4:4:0          yes 4932.1279 2200.0000
 11    0      0    5 5:5:5:0          yes 4791.2100 2200.0000
$ CCACHE_DISABLE=1 =time -f '  %E' make -j$(nproc)
[ ]
  OBJCOPY arch/x86/boot/vmlinux.bin
  AS      arch/x86/boot/header.o
  LD      arch/x86/boot/setup.elf
  OBJCOPY arch/x86/boot/setup.bin
  BUILD   arch/x86/boot/bzImage
Kernel: arch/x86/boot/bzImage is ready  (#1)
  1:40.18

Here we go for another seven years!

The original power supply was from an older configuration. It suddenly became unable to reliably start the PC. The motherboard got replaced as it was the first suspect: without load, the power supply was working correctly.
On Linux, many programs are unable to leverage hardware acceleration. This is a pity. On a laptop, this can also draws the battery pretty fast.
The kernel is configured with make defconfig on commit 15fae3410f1d.

Bullseye Banner, Copyright 2020 Juliette Taka

Debian v11 with codename bullseye is supposed to be released as new stable release soon-ish (let s hope for June, 2021! :)). Similar to what we had with #newinbuster and previous releases, now it s time for #newinbullseye! I was the driving force at several of my customers to be well prepared for bullseye before its freeze, and since then we re on good track there overall. In my opinion, Debian s release team did (and still does) a great job I m very happy about how unblock requests (not only mine but also ones I kept an eye on) were handled so far. As usual with major upgrades, there are some things to be aware of, and hereby I m starting my public notes on bullseye that might be worth also for other folks. My focus is primarily on server systems and looking at things from a sysadmin perspective. Further readings Of course start with taking a look at the official Debian release notes, make sure to especially go through What s new in Debian 11 + Issues to be aware of for bullseye. Chris published notes on upgrading to Debian bullseye, and also anarcat published upgrade notes for bullseye. Package versions As a starting point, let s look at some selected packages and their versions in buster vs. bullseye as of 2021-05-27 (mainly having amd64 in mind):

Package	buster/v10	bullseye/v11
ansible	2.7.7	2.10.8
apache	2.4.38	2.4.46
apt	1.8.2.2	2.2.3
bash	5.0	5.1
ceph	12.2.11	14.2.20
docker	18.09.1	20.10.5
dovecot	2.3.4	2.3.13
dpkg	1.19.7	1.20.9
emacs	26.1	27.1
gcc	8.3.0	10.2.1
git	2.20.1	2.30.2
golang	1.11	1.15
libc	2.28	2.31
linux kernel	4.19	5.10
llvm	7.0	11.0
lxc	3.0.3	4.0.6
mariadb	10.3.27	10.5.10
nginx	1.14.2	1.18.0
nodejs	10.24.0	12.21.0
openjdk	11.0.9.1	11.0.11+9 + 17~19
openssh	7.9p1	8.4p1
openssl	1.1.1d	1.1.1k
perl	5.28.1	5.32.1
php	7.3	7.4+76
postfix	3.4.14	3.5.6
postgres	11	13
puppet	5.5.10	5.5.22
python2	2.7.16	2.7.18
python3	3.7.3	3.9.2
qemu/kvm	3.1	5.2
ruby	2.5.1	2.7+2
rust	1.41.1	1.48.0
samba	4.9.5	4.13.5
systemd	241	247.3
unattended-upgrades	1.11.2	2.8
util-linux	2.33.1	2.36.1
vagrant	2.2.3	2.2.14
vim	8.1.0875	8.2.2434
zsh	5.7.1	5.8

Linux Kernel The bullseye release will ship a Linux kernel based on v5.10 (v5.10.28 as of 2021-05-27, with v5.10.38 pending in unstable/sid), whereas buster shipped kernel 4.19. As usual there are plenty of changes in the kernel area and this might warrant a separate blog entry, but to highlight some issues: One surprising change might be that the scrollback buffer (Shift + PageUp) is gone from the Linux console. Make sure to always use screen/tmux or handle output through a pager of your choice if you need all of it and you re in the console. The kernel provides BTF support (via CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO_BTF, see #973870), which means it s no longer necessary to install LLVM, Clang, etc (requiring >100MB of disk space), see Gregg s excellent blog post regarding the underlying rational. Sadly the libbpf-tools packaging didn t make it into bullseye (#978727), but if you want to use your own self-made Debian packages, my notes might be useful. With kernel version 5.4, SUBDIRS support was removed from kbuild, so if an out-of-tree kernel module (like a *-dkms package) fails to compile on bullseye, make sure to use a recent version of it which uses M= or KBUILD_EXTMOD= instead. Unprivileged user namespaces are enabled by default (see #898446 + #987777), so programs can create more restricted sandboxes without the need to run as root or via a setuid-root helper. If you prefer to keep this feature restricted (or tools like web browsers, WebKitGTK, Flatpak, don t work), use sysctl -w kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=0 . The /boot/System.map file(s) no longer provide the actual data, you need to switch to the dbg package if you rely on that information:

% cat /boot/System.map-5.10.0-6-amd64 
ffffffffffffffff B The real System.map is in the linux-image-<version>-dbg package

Be aware though, that the *-dbg package requires ~5GB of additional disk space. Systemd systemd v247 made it into bullseye (updated from v241). Same as for the kernel this might warrant a separate blog entry, but to mention some highlights: Systemd in bullseye activates its persistent journal functionality by default (storing its files in /var/log/journal/, see #717388). systemd-timesyncd is no longer part of the systemd binary package itself, but available as standalone package. This allows usage of ntp, chrony, openntpd, without having systemd-timesyncd installed (which prevents race conditions like #889290, which was biting me more than once). journalctl gained new options:

--cursor-file=FILE      Show entries after cursor in FILE and update FILE
--facility=FACILITY...  Show entries with the specified facilities
--image=IMAGE           Operate on files in filesystem image
--namespace=NAMESPACE   Show journal data from specified namespace
--relinquish-var        Stop logging to disk, log to temporary file system
--smart-relinquish-var  Similar, but NOP if log directory is on root mount

systemctl gained new options:

clean UNIT...                       Clean runtime, cache, state, logs or configuration of unit
freeze PATTERN...                   Freeze execution of unit processes
thaw PATTERN...                     Resume execution of a frozen unit
log-level [LEVEL]                   Get/set logging threshold for manager
log-target [TARGET]                 Get/set logging target for manager
service-watchdogs [BOOL]            Get/set service watchdog state
--with-dependencies                 Show unit dependencies with 'status', 'cat', 'list-units', and 'list-unit-files'
 -T --show-transaction              When enqueuing a unit job, show full transaction
 --what=RESOURCES                   Which types of resources to remove
--boot-loader-menu=TIME             Boot into boot loader menu on next boot
--boot-loader-entry=NAME            Boot into a specific boot loader entry on next boot
--timestamp=FORMAT                  Change format of printed timestamps

If you use systemctl edit to adjust overrides, then you ll now also get the existing configuration file listed as comment, which I consider very helpful. The MACAddressPolicy behavior with systemd naming schema v241 changed for virtual devices (I plan to write about this in a separate blog post). There are plenty of new manual pages:

systemd also gained new unit configurations related to security hardening:

Another new unit configuration is SystemCallLog= , which supports listing the system calls to be logged. This is very useful for for auditing or temporarily when constructing system call filters. The cgroupv2 change is also documented in the release notes, but to explicitly mention it also here, quoting from /usr/share/doc/systemd/NEWS.Debian.gz:

systemd now defaults to the unified cgroup hierarchy (i.e. cgroupv2).
This change reflects the fact that cgroups2 support has matured
substantially in both systemd and in the kernel.
All major container tools nowadays should support cgroupv2.
If you run into problems with cgroupv2, you can switch back to the previous,
hybrid setup by adding systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=false to the
kernel command line.
You can read more about the benefits of cgroupv2 at
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/cgroup-v2.html

Note that cgroup-tools (lssubsys + lscgroup etc) don t work in cgroup2/unified hierarchy yet (see #959022 for the details). Configuration management puppet s upstream doesn t provide packages for bullseye yet (see PA-3624 + MODULES-11060), and sadly neither v6 nor v7 made it into bullseye, so when using the packages from Debian you re still stuck with v5.5 (also see #950182). ansible is also available, and while it looked like that only version 2.9.16 would make it into bullseye (see #984557 + #986213), actually version 2.10.8 made it into bullseye. chef was removed from Debian and is not available with bullseye (due to trademark issues). Prometheus stack Prometheus server was updated from v2.7.1 to v2.24.1, and the prometheus service by default applies some systemd hardening now. Also all the usual exporters are still there, but bullseye also gained some new ones:

prometheus-elasticsearch-exporter (v1.1.0)
prometheus-exporter-exporter (v0.4.0-1)
prometheus-hacluster-exporter (v1.2.1-1)
prometheus-homeplug-exporter (v0.3.0-2)
prometheus-ipmi-exporter (v1.2.0)
prometheus-libvirt-exporter (v0.2.0-1)
prometheus-mqtt-exporter (v0.1.4-2)
prometheus-nginx-vts-exporter (v0.10.3)
prometheus-postfix-exporter (v0.2.0-3)
prometheus-redis-exporter (v1.16.0-1)
prometheus-smokeping-prober (v0.4.1-2)
prometheus-tplink-plug-exporter (v0.2.0)

Virtualization docker (v20.10.5), ganeti (v3.0.1), libvirt (v7.0.0), lxc (v4.0.6), openstack, qemu/kvm (v5.2), xen (v4.14.1), are all still around, though what s new and noteworthy is that podman version 3.0.1 (tool for managing OCI containers and pods) made it into bullseye. If you re using the docker packages from upstream, be aware that they still don t seem to understand Debian package version handling. The docker* packages will not be automatically considered for upgrade, as 5:20.10.6~3-0~debian-buster is considered newer than 5:20.10.6~3-0~debian-bullseye:

% apt-cache policy docker-ce
  docker-ce:
    Installed: 5:20.10.6~3-0~debian-buster
    Candidate: 5:20.10.6~3-0~debian-buster
    Version table:
   *** 5:20.10.6~3-0~debian-buster 100
          100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
       5:20.10.6~3-0~debian-bullseye 500
          500 https://download.docker.com/linux/debian bullseye/stable amd64 Packages

Vagrant is available in version 2.2.14, the package from upstream works perfectly fine on bullseye as well. If you re relying on VirtualBox, be aware that upstream doesn t provide packages for bullseye yet, but the package from Debian/unstable (v6.1.22 as of 2021-05-27) works fine on bullseye (VirtualBox isn t shipped with stable releases since quite some time due to lack of cooperation from upstream on security support for older releases, see #794466). If you rely on the virtualbox-guest-additions-iso and its shared folders support, you might be glad to hear that v6.1.22 made it into bullseye (see #988783), properly supporting more recent kernel versions like present in bullseye. debuginfod There s a new service debuginfod.debian.net (see debian-devel-announce and Debian Wiki), which makes the debugging experience way smoother. You no longer need to download the debugging Debian packages (*-dbgsym/*-dbg), but instead can fetch them on demand, by exporting the following variables (before invoking gdb or alike):

% export DEBUGINFOD_PROGRESS=1    # for optional download progress reporting
% export DEBUGINFOD_URLS="https://debuginfod.debian.net"

BTW: if you can t rely on debuginfod (for whatever reason), I d like to point your attention towards find-dbgsym-packages from the debian-goodies package. Vim Sadly Vim 8.2 once again makes another change for bad defaults (hello mouse behavior!). When incsearch is set, it also applies to :substitute. This makes it veeeeeeeeeery annoying when running something like :%s/\s\+$// to get rid of trailing whitespace characters, because if there are no matches it jumps to the beginning of the file and then back, sigh. To get the old behavior back, you can use this:

au CmdLineEnter : let s:incs = &incsearch   set noincsearch
au CmdLineLeave : let &incsearch = s:incs

rsync rsync was updated from v3.1.3 to v3.2.3. It provides various checksum enhancements (see option --checksum-choice). We got new capabilities (hardlink-specials, atimes, optional protect-args, stop-at, no crtimes) and the addition of zstd and lz4 compression algorithms. And we got new options:

--atimes: preserve access (use) times
--copy-as=USER: specify user (and optionally group) for the copy
--crtimes/-N: for preserving the file s create time
--max-alloc=SIZE: change a limit relating to memory allocation
--mkpath:create the destination s path component
--open-noatime: avoid changing the atime on opened files
--stop-after=MINS: stop rsync after MINS minutes have elapsed
--write-devices: write to devices as files (implies inplace)

OpenSSH OpenSSH was updated from v7.9p1 to 8.4p1, so if you re interested in all the changes, check out the release notes between those version (8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 + 8.4). Let s highlight some notable new features:

It now defers creation of ~/.ssh until there s something to write (e.g. the known_hosts file), so the good old admin trick to run ssh localhost and cancel immediately to create ~/.ssh with proper permissions no longer works
v8.2 brought FIDO/U2F + FIDO2 resident keys Support
The new include sshd_config keyword allows including additional configuration files via glob(3) patterns
ssh now allows %n to be expanded in ProxyCommand strings.
The scp and sftp command-lines now accept -J option as an alias to ProxyJump.
The scp and sftp command-lines allow the -A flag to explicitly enable agent forwarding.

Misc unsorted

apt: was updated from version 1.8 to 2.2, apt maintainer Julian Andres Klode wrote something about changes in apt 2.0 and changes in apt 2.2
e2fsprogs: supports the new ext4 fast_commit feature
exim: you might be interested being aware of the allow_insecure_tainted_data option, see #987133 + #987924 (Exim 4.94 includes a new tainting-feature)
glusterfs: was updated from 5.5 to v9.1, there s no direct upgrade path (only v5 towards v8 would be supported), so online migration does not work
mariadb: no longer runs as /usr/sbin/mysqld, but as /usr/sbin/mariadbd
python: Python 2.7 (and a few core packages) is still present, but there won t be any security updates for Python 2, see wiki.debian.org/Python/2Removal
qemu-system-x86: /proc/stat on host does not show guest cpu usage
rsnapshot is gone (see #986709)

It all started with the big bang! We nearly lost 33 of 36 disks on a Proxmox/Ceph Cluster; this is the story of how we recovered them. At the end of 2020, we eventually had a long outstanding maintenance window for taking care of system upgrades at a customer. During this maintenance window, which involved reboots of server systems, the involved Ceph cluster unexpectedly went into a critical state. What was planned to be a few hours of checklist work in the early evening turned out to be an emergency case; let s call it a nightmare (not only because it included a big part of the night). Since we have learned a few things from our post mortem and RCA, it s worth sharing those with others. But first things first, let s step back and clarify what we had to deal with. The system and its upgrade One part of the upgrade included 3 Debian servers (we re calling them server1, server2 and server3 here), running on Proxmox v5 + Debian/stretch with 12 Ceph OSDs each (65.45TB in total), a so-called Proxmox Hyper-Converged Ceph Cluster.

First, we went for upgrading the Proxmox v5/stretch system to Proxmox v6/buster, before updating Ceph Luminous v12.2.13 to the latest v14.2 release, supported by Proxmox v6/buster. The Proxmox upgrade included updating corosync from v2 to v3. As part of this upgrade, we had to apply some configuration changes, like adjust ring0 + ring1 address settings and add a mon_host configuration to the Ceph configuration. During the first two servers reboots, we noticed configuration glitches. After fixing those, we went for a reboot of the third server as well. Then we noticed that several Ceph OSDs were unexpectedly down. The NTP service wasn t working as expected after the upgrade. The underlying issue is a race condition of ntp with systemd-timesyncd (see #889290). As a result, we had clock skew problems with Ceph, indicating that the Ceph monitors clocks aren t running in sync (which is essential for proper Ceph operation). We initially assumed that our Ceph OSD failure derived from this clock skew problem, so we took care of it. After yet another round of reboots, to ensure the systems are running all with identical and sane configurations and services, we noticed lots of failing OSDs. This time all but three OSDs (19, 21 and 22) were down:

% sudo ceph osd tree
ID CLASS WEIGHT   TYPE NAME      STATUS REWEIGHT PRI-AFF
-1       65.44138 root default
-2       21.81310     host server1
 0   hdd  1.08989         osd.0    down  1.00000 1.00000
 1   hdd  1.08989         osd.1    down  1.00000 1.00000
 2   hdd  1.63539         osd.2    down  1.00000 1.00000
 3   hdd  1.63539         osd.3    down  1.00000 1.00000
 4   hdd  1.63539         osd.4    down  1.00000 1.00000
 5   hdd  1.63539         osd.5    down  1.00000 1.00000
18   hdd  2.18279         osd.18   down  1.00000 1.00000
20   hdd  2.18179         osd.20   down  1.00000 1.00000
28   hdd  2.18179         osd.28   down  1.00000 1.00000
29   hdd  2.18179         osd.29   down  1.00000 1.00000
30   hdd  2.18179         osd.30   down  1.00000 1.00000
31   hdd  2.18179         osd.31   down  1.00000 1.00000
-4       21.81409     host server2
 6   hdd  1.08989         osd.6    down  1.00000 1.00000
 7   hdd  1.08989         osd.7    down  1.00000 1.00000
 8   hdd  1.63539         osd.8    down  1.00000 1.00000
 9   hdd  1.63539         osd.9    down  1.00000 1.00000
10   hdd  1.63539         osd.10   down  1.00000 1.00000
11   hdd  1.63539         osd.11   down  1.00000 1.00000
19   hdd  2.18179         osd.19     up  1.00000 1.00000
21   hdd  2.18279         osd.21     up  1.00000 1.00000
22   hdd  2.18279         osd.22     up  1.00000 1.00000
32   hdd  2.18179         osd.32   down  1.00000 1.00000
33   hdd  2.18179         osd.33   down  1.00000 1.00000
34   hdd  2.18179         osd.34   down  1.00000 1.00000
-3       21.81419     host server3
12   hdd  1.08989         osd.12   down  1.00000 1.00000
13   hdd  1.08989         osd.13   down  1.00000 1.00000
14   hdd  1.63539         osd.14   down  1.00000 1.00000
15   hdd  1.63539         osd.15   down  1.00000 1.00000
16   hdd  1.63539         osd.16   down  1.00000 1.00000
17   hdd  1.63539         osd.17   down  1.00000 1.00000
23   hdd  2.18190         osd.23   down  1.00000 1.00000
24   hdd  2.18279         osd.24   down  1.00000 1.00000
25   hdd  2.18279         osd.25   down  1.00000 1.00000
35   hdd  2.18179         osd.35   down  1.00000 1.00000
36   hdd  2.18179         osd.36   down  1.00000 1.00000
37   hdd  2.18179         osd.37   down  1.00000 1.00000

Our blood pressure increased slightly! Did we just lose all of our cluster? What happened, and how can we get all the other OSDs back? We stumbled upon this beauty in our logs:

kernel: [   73.697957] XFS (sdl1): SB stripe unit sanity check failed
kernel: [   73.698002] XFS (sdl1): Metadata corruption detected at xfs_sb_read_verify+0x10e/0x180 [xfs], xfs_sb block 0xffffffffffffffff
kernel: [   73.698799] XFS (sdl1): Unmount and run xfs_repair
kernel: [   73.699199] XFS (sdl1): First 128 bytes of corrupted metadata buffer:
kernel: [   73.699677] 00000000: 58 46 53 42 00 00 10 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 62 00  XFSB..........b.
kernel: [   73.700205] 00000010: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
kernel: [   73.700836] 00000020: 62 44 2b c0 e6 22 40 d7 84 3d e1 cc 65 88 e9 d8  bD+.."@..=..e...
kernel: [   73.701347] 00000030: 00 00 00 00 00 00 40 08 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00  ......@.........
kernel: [   73.701770] 00000040: 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 02  ................
ceph-disk[4240]: mount: /var/lib/ceph/tmp/mnt.jw367Y: mount(2) system call failed: Structure needs cleaning.
ceph-disk[4240]: ceph-disk: Mounting filesystem failed: Command '['/bin/mount', '-t', u'xfs', '-o', 'noatime,inode64', '--', '/dev/disk/by-parttypeuuid/4fbd7e29-9d25-41b8-afd0-062c0ceff05d.cdda39ed-5
ceph/tmp/mnt.jw367Y']' returned non-zero exit status 32
kernel: [   73.702162] 00000050: 00 00 00 01 00 00 18 80 00 00 00 04 00 00 00 00  ................
kernel: [   73.702550] 00000060: 00 00 06 48 bd a5 10 00 08 00 00 02 00 00 00 00  ...H............
kernel: [   73.702975] 00000070: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0c 0c 0b 01 0d 00 00 19  ................
kernel: [   73.703373] XFS (sdl1): SB validate failed with error -117.

The same issue was present for the other failing OSDs. We hoped, that the data itself was still there, and only the mounting of the XFS partitions failed. The Ceph cluster was initially installed in 2017 with Ceph jewel/10.2 with the OSDs on filestore (nowadays being a legacy approach to storing objects in Ceph). However, we migrated the disks to bluestore since then (with ceph-disk and not yet via ceph-volume what s being used nowadays). Using ceph-disk introduces these 100MB XFS partitions containing basic metadata for the OSD. Given that we had three working OSDs left, we decided to investigate how to rebuild the failing ones. Some folks on #ceph (thanks T1, ormandj + peetaur!) were kind enough to share how working XFS partitions looked like for them. After creating a backup (via dd), we tried to re-create such an XFS partition on server1. We noticed that even mounting a freshly created XFS partition failed:

synpromika@server1 ~ % sudo mkfs.xfs -f -i size=2048 -m uuid="4568c300-ad83-4288-963e-badcd99bf54f" /dev/sdc1
meta-data=/dev/sdc1              isize=2048   agcount=4, agsize=6272 blks
         =                       sectsz=4096  attr=2, projid32bit=1
         =                       crc=1        finobt=1, sparse=1, rmapbt=0
         =                       reflink=0
data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=25088, imaxpct=25
         =                       sunit=128    swidth=64 blks
naming   =version 2              bsize=4096   ascii-ci=0, ftype=1
log      =internal log           bsize=4096   blocks=1608, version=2
         =                       sectsz=4096  sunit=1 blks, lazy-count=1
realtime =none                   extsz=4096   blocks=0, rtextents=0
synpromika@server1 ~ % sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/ceph-recovery
SB stripe unit sanity check failed
Metadata corruption detected at 0x433840, xfs_sb block 0x0/0x1000
libxfs_writebufr: write verifer failed on xfs_sb bno 0x0/0x1000
cache_node_purge: refcount was 1, not zero (node=0x1d3c400)
SB stripe unit sanity check failed
Metadata corruption detected at 0x433840, xfs_sb block 0x18800/0x1000
libxfs_writebufr: write verifer failed on xfs_sb bno 0x18800/0x1000
SB stripe unit sanity check failed
Metadata corruption detected at 0x433840, xfs_sb block 0x0/0x1000
libxfs_writebufr: write verifer failed on xfs_sb bno 0x0/0x1000
SB stripe unit sanity check failed
Metadata corruption detected at 0x433840, xfs_sb block 0x24c00/0x1000
libxfs_writebufr: write verifer failed on xfs_sb bno 0x24c00/0x1000
SB stripe unit sanity check failed
Metadata corruption detected at 0x433840, xfs_sb block 0xc400/0x1000
libxfs_writebufr: write verifer failed on xfs_sb bno 0xc400/0x1000
releasing dirty buffer (bulk) to free list!releasing dirty buffer (bulk) to free list!releasing dirty buffer (bulk) to free list!releasing dirty buffer (bulk) to free list!found dirty buffer (bulk) on free list!bad magic number
bad magic number
Metadata corruption detected at 0x433840, xfs_sb block 0x0/0x1000
libxfs_writebufr: write verifer failed on xfs_sb bno 0x0/0x1000
releasing dirty buffer (bulk) to free list!mount: /mnt/ceph-recovery: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdc1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.

Ouch. This very much looked related to the actual issue we re seeing. So we tried to execute mkfs.xfs with a bunch of different sunit/swidth settings. Using -d sunit=512 -d swidth=512 at least worked then, so we decided to force its usage in the creation of our OSD XFS partition. This brought us a working XFS partition. Please note, sunit must not be larger than swidth (more on that later!). Then we reconstructed how to restore all the metadata for the OSD (

activate.monmap, active, block_uuid, bluefs, ceph_fsid, fsid, keyring, kv_backend, magic, mkfs_done, ready, require_osd_release, systemd, type, whoami

). To identify the UUID, we can read the data from ceph --format json osd dump , like this for all our OSDs (Zsh syntax ftw!):

synpromika@server1 ~ % for f in  0..37  ; printf "osd-$f: %s\n" "$(sudo ceph --format json osd dump   jq -r ".osds[]   select(.osd==$f)   .uuid")"
osd-0: 4568c300-ad83-4288-963e-badcd99bf54f
osd-1: e573a17a-ccde-4719-bdf8-eef66903ca4f
osd-2: 0e1b2626-f248-4e7d-9950-f1a46644754e
osd-3: 1ac6a0a2-20ee-4ed8-9f76-d24e900c800c
[...]

Identifying the corresponding raw device for each OSD UUID is possible via:

synpromika@server1 ~ % UUID="4568c300-ad83-4288-963e-badcd99bf54f"
synpromika@server1 ~ % readlink -f /dev/disk/by-partuuid/"$ UUID "
/dev/sdc1

The OSD s key ID can be retrieved via:

synpromika@server1 ~ % OSD_ID=0
synpromika@server1 ~ % sudo ceph auth get osd."$ OSD_ID " -f json 2>/dev/null   jq -r '.[]   .key'
AQCKFpZdm0We[...]

Now we also need to identify the underlying block device:

synpromika@server1 ~ % OSD_ID=0
synpromika@server1 ~ % sudo ceph osd metadata osd."$ OSD_ID " -f json   jq -r '.bluestore_bdev_partition_path'    
/dev/sdc2

With all of this, we reconstructed the keyring, fsid, whoami, block + block_uuid files. All the other files inside the XFS metadata partition are identical on each OSD. So after placing and adjusting the corresponding metadata on the XFS partition for Ceph usage, we got a working OSD hurray! Since we had to fix yet another 32 OSDs, we decided to automate this XFS partitioning and metadata recovery procedure. We had a network share available on /srv/backup for storing backups of existing partition data. On each server, we tested the procedure with one single OSD before iterating over the list of remaining failing OSDs. We started with a shell script on server1, then adjusted the script for server2 and server3. This is the script, as we executed it on the 3rd server. Thanks to this, we managed to get the Ceph cluster up and running again. We didn t want to continue with the Ceph upgrade itself during the night though, as we wanted to know exactly what was going on and why the system behaved like that. Time for RCA! Root Cause Analysis So all but three OSDs on server2 failed, and the problem seems to be related to XFS. Therefore, our starting point for the RCA was, to identify what was different on server2, as compared to server1 + server3. My initial assumption was that this was related to some firmware issues with the involved controller (and as it turned out later, I was right!). The disks were attached as JBOD devices to a ServeRAID M5210 controller (with a stripe size of 512). Firmware state:

synpromika@server1 ~ % sudo storcli64 /c0 show all   grep '^Firmware'
Firmware Package Build = 24.16.0-0092
Firmware Version = 4.660.00-8156
synpromika@server2 ~ % sudo storcli64 /c0 show all   grep '^Firmware'
Firmware Package Build = 24.21.0-0112
Firmware Version = 4.680.00-8489
synpromika@server3 ~ % sudo storcli64 /c0 show all   grep '^Firmware'
Firmware Package Build = 24.16.0-0092
Firmware Version = 4.660.00-8156

This looked very promising, as server2 indeed runs with a different firmware version on the controller. But how so? Well, the motherboard of server2 got replaced by a Lenovo/IBM technician in January 2020, as we had a failing memory slot during a memory upgrade. As part of this procedure, the Lenovo/IBM technician installed the latest firmware versions. According to our documentation, some OSDs were rebuilt (due to the filestore->bluestore migration) in March and April 2020. It turned out that precisely those OSDs were the ones that survived the upgrade. So the surviving drives were created with a different firmware version running on the involved controller. All the other OSDs were created with an older controller firmware. But what difference does this make? Now let s check firmware changelogs. For the 24.21.0-0097 release we found this:

- Cannot create or mount xfs filesystem using xfsprogs 4.19.x kernel 4.20(SCGCQ02027889)
- xfs_info command run on an XFS file system created on a VD of strip size 1M shows sunit and swidth as 0(SCGCQ02056038)

Our XFS problem certainly was related to the controller s firmware. We also recalled that our monitoring system reported different sunit settings for the OSDs that were rebuilt in March and April. For example, OSD 21 was recreated and got different sunit settings:

WARN  server2.example.org  Mount options of /var/lib/ceph/osd/ceph-21      WARN - Missing: sunit=1024, Exceeding: sunit=512

We compared the new OSD 21 with an existing one (OSD 25 on server3):

synpromika@server2 ~ % systemctl show var-lib-ceph-osd-ceph\\x2d21.mount   grep sunit
Options=rw,noatime,attr2,inode64,sunit=512,swidth=512,noquota
synpromika@server3 ~ % systemctl show var-lib-ceph-osd-ceph\\x2d25.mount   grep sunit
Options=rw,noatime,attr2,inode64,sunit=1024,swidth=512,noquota

Thanks to our documentation, we could compare execution logs of their creation:

% diff -u ceph-disk-osd-25.log ceph-disk-osd-21.log
-synpromika@server2 ~ % sudo ceph-disk -v prepare --bluestore /dev/sdj --osd-id 25
+synpromika@server3 ~ % sudo ceph-disk -v prepare --bluestore /dev/sdi --osd-id 21
[...]
-command_check_call: Running command: /sbin/mkfs -t xfs -f -i size=2048 -- /dev/sdj1
-meta-data=/dev/sdj1              isize=2048   agcount=4, agsize=6272 blks
[...]
+command_check_call: Running command: /sbin/mkfs -t xfs -f -i size=2048 -- /dev/sdi1
+meta-data=/dev/sdi1              isize=2048   agcount=4, agsize=6336 blks
          =                       sectsz=4096  attr=2, projid32bit=1
          =                       crc=1        finobt=1, sparse=0, rmapbt=0, reflink=0
-data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=25088, imaxpct=25
-         =                       sunit=128    swidth=64 blks
+data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=25344, imaxpct=25
+         =                       sunit=64     swidth=64 blks
 naming   =version 2              bsize=4096   ascii-ci=0 ftype=1
 log      =internal log           bsize=4096   blocks=1608, version=2
          =                       sectsz=4096  sunit=1 blks, lazy-count=1
 realtime =none                   extsz=4096   blocks=0, rtextents=0
[...]

So back then, we even tried to track this down but couldn t make sense of it yet. But now this sounds very much like it is related to the problem we saw with this Ceph/XFS failure. We follow Occam s razor, assuming the simplest explanation is usually the right one, so let s check the disk properties and see what differs:

synpromika@server1 ~ % sudo blockdev --getsz --getsize64 --getss --getpbsz --getiomin --getioopt /dev/sdk
4685545472
2398999281664
512
4096
524288
262144
synpromika@server2 ~ % sudo blockdev --getsz --getsize64 --getss --getpbsz --getiomin --getioopt /dev/sdk
4685545472
2398999281664
512
4096
262144
262144

See the difference between server1 and server2 for identical disks? The getiomin option now reports something different for them:

synpromika@server1 ~ % sudo blockdev --getiomin /dev/sdk            
524288
synpromika@server1 ~ % cat /sys/block/sdk/queue/minimum_io_size
524288
synpromika@server2 ~ % sudo blockdev --getiomin /dev/sdk 
262144
synpromika@server2 ~ % cat /sys/block/sdk/queue/minimum_io_size
262144

It doesn t make sense that the minimum I/O size (iomin, AKA BLKIOMIN) is bigger than the optimal I/O size (ioopt, AKA BLKIOOPT). This leads us to Bug 202127 cannot mount or create xfs on a 597T device, which matches our findings here. But why did this XFS partition work in the past and fails now with the newer kernel version? The XFS behaviour change Now given that we have backups of all the XFS partition, we wanted to track down, a) when this XFS behaviour was introduced, and b) whether, and if so how it would be possible to reuse the XFS partition without having to rebuild it from scratch (e.g. if you would have no working Ceph OSD or backups left). Let s look at such a failing XFS partition with the Grml live system:

root@grml ~ # grml-version
grml64-full 2020.06 Release Codename Ausgehfuahangl [2020-06-24]
root@grml ~ # uname -a
Linux grml 5.6.0-2-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.6.14-2 (2020-06-09) x86_64 GNU/Linux
root@grml ~ # grml-hostname grml-2020-06
Setting hostname to grml-2020-06: done
root@grml ~ # exec zsh
root@grml-2020-06 ~ # dpkg -l xfsprogs util-linux
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
  Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
 / Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
 / Name           Version      Architecture Description
+++-==============-============-============-=========================================
ii  util-linux     2.35.2-4     amd64        miscellaneous system utilities
ii  xfsprogs       5.6.0-1+b2   amd64        Utilities for managing the XFS filesystem

There it s failing, no matter which mount option we try:

root@grml-2020-06 ~ # mount ./sdd1.dd /mnt
mount: /mnt: mount(2) system call failed: Structure needs cleaning.
root@grml-2020-06 ~ # dmesg   tail -30
[...]
[   64.788640] XFS (loop1): SB stripe unit sanity check failed
[   64.788671] XFS (loop1): Metadata corruption detected at xfs_sb_read_verify+0x102/0x170 [xfs], xfs_sb block 0xffffffffffffffff
[   64.788671] XFS (loop1): Unmount and run xfs_repair
[   64.788672] XFS (loop1): First 128 bytes of corrupted metadata buffer:
[   64.788673] 00000000: 58 46 53 42 00 00 10 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 62 00  XFSB..........b.
[   64.788674] 00000010: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
[   64.788675] 00000020: 32 b6 dc 35 53 b7 44 96 9d 63 30 ab b3 2b 68 36  2..5S.D..c0..+h6
[   64.788675] 00000030: 00 00 00 00 00 00 40 08 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00  ......@.........
[   64.788675] 00000040: 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 02  ................
[   64.788676] 00000050: 00 00 00 01 00 00 18 80 00 00 00 04 00 00 00 00  ................
[   64.788677] 00000060: 00 00 06 48 bd a5 10 00 08 00 00 02 00 00 00 00  ...H............
[   64.788677] 00000070: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0c 0c 0b 01 0d 00 00 19  ................
[   64.788679] XFS (loop1): SB validate failed with error -117.
root@grml-2020-06 ~ # mount -t xfs -o rw,relatime,attr2,inode64,sunit=1024,swidth=512,noquota ./sdd1.dd /mnt/
mount: /mnt: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.
32 root@grml-2020-06 ~ # dmesg   tail -1
[   66.342976] XFS (loop1): stripe width (512) must be a multiple of the stripe unit (1024)
root@grml-2020-06 ~ # mount -t xfs -o rw,relatime,attr2,inode64,sunit=512,swidth=512,noquota ./sdd1.dd /mnt/
mount: /mnt: mount(2) system call failed: Structure needs cleaning.
32 root@grml-2020-06 ~ # dmesg   tail -14
[   66.342976] XFS (loop1): stripe width (512) must be a multiple of the stripe unit (1024)
[   80.751277] XFS (loop1): SB stripe unit sanity check failed
[   80.751323] XFS (loop1): Metadata corruption detected at xfs_sb_read_verify+0x102/0x170 [xfs], xfs_sb block 0xffffffffffffffff 
[   80.751324] XFS (loop1): Unmount and run xfs_repair
[   80.751325] XFS (loop1): First 128 bytes of corrupted metadata buffer:
[   80.751327] 00000000: 58 46 53 42 00 00 10 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 62 00  XFSB..........b.
[   80.751328] 00000010: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
[   80.751330] 00000020: 32 b6 dc 35 53 b7 44 96 9d 63 30 ab b3 2b 68 36  2..5S.D..c0..+h6
[   80.751331] 00000030: 00 00 00 00 00 00 40 08 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00  ......@.........
[   80.751331] 00000040: 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 02  ................
[   80.751332] 00000050: 00 00 00 01 00 00 18 80 00 00 00 04 00 00 00 00  ................
[   80.751333] 00000060: 00 00 06 48 bd a5 10 00 08 00 00 02 00 00 00 00  ...H............
[   80.751334] 00000070: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0c 0c 0b 01 0d 00 00 19  ................
[   80.751338] XFS (loop1): SB validate failed with error -117.

Also xfs_repair doesn t help either:

root@grml-2020-06 ~ # xfs_info ./sdd1.dd
meta-data=./sdd1.dd              isize=2048   agcount=4, agsize=6272 blks
         =                       sectsz=4096  attr=2, projid32bit=1
         =                       crc=1        finobt=1, sparse=0, rmapbt=0
         =                       reflink=0
data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=25088, imaxpct=25
         =                       sunit=128    swidth=64 blks
naming   =version 2              bsize=4096   ascii-ci=0, ftype=1
log      =internal log           bsize=4096   blocks=1608, version=2
         =                       sectsz=4096  sunit=1 blks, lazy-count=1
realtime =none                   extsz=4096   blocks=0, rtextents=0
root@grml-2020-06 ~ # xfs_repair ./sdd1.dd
Phase 1 - find and verify superblock...
bad primary superblock - bad stripe width in superblock !!!
attempting to find secondary superblock...
..............................................................................................Sorry, could not find valid secondary superblock
Exiting now.

With the SB stripe unit sanity check failed message, we could easily track this down to the following commit fa4ca9c:

% git show fa4ca9c5574605d1e48b7e617705230a0640b6da   cat
commit fa4ca9c5574605d1e48b7e617705230a0640b6da
Author: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Date:   Tue Jun 5 10:06:16 2018 -0700
    
    xfs: catch bad stripe alignment configurations
    
    When stripe alignments are invalid, data alignment algorithms in the
    allocator may not work correctly. Ensure we catch superblocks with
    invalid stripe alignment setups at mount time. These data alignment
    mismatches are now detected at mount time like this:
    
    XFS (loop0): SB stripe unit sanity check failed
    XFS (loop0): Metadata corruption detected at xfs_sb_read_verify+0xab/0x110, xfs_sb block 0xffffffffffffffff
    XFS (loop0): Unmount and run xfs_repair
    XFS (loop0): First 128 bytes of corrupted metadata buffer:
    0000000091c2de02: 58 46 53 42 00 00 10 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 10 00  XFSB............
    0000000023bff869: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
    00000000cdd8c893: 17 32 37 15 ff ca 46 3d 9a 17 d3 33 04 b5 f1 a2  .27...F=...3....
    000000009fd2844f: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 04 00 00 00 00 00 00 06 d0  ................
    0000000088e9b0bb: 00 00 00 00 00 00 06 d1 00 00 00 00 00 00 06 d2  ................
    00000000ff233a20: 00 00 00 01 00 00 10 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00  ................
    000000009db0ac8b: 00 00 03 60 e1 34 02 00 08 00 00 02 00 00 00 00  ... .4..........
    00000000f7022460: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0c 09 0b 01 0c 00 00 19  ................
    XFS (loop0): SB validate failed with error -117.
    
    And the mount fails.
    
    Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
    Reviewed-by: Carlos Maiolino <cmaiolino@redhat.com>
    Reviewed-by: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
    Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
diff --git fs/xfs/libxfs/xfs_sb.c fs/xfs/libxfs/xfs_sb.c
index b5dca3c8c84d..c06b6fc92966 100644
--- fs/xfs/libxfs/xfs_sb.c
+++ fs/xfs/libxfs/xfs_sb.c
@@ -278,6 +278,22 @@ xfs_mount_validate_sb(
                return -EFSCORRUPTED;
         
        
+       if (sbp->sb_unit)  
+               if (!xfs_sb_version_hasdalign(sbp)  
+                   sbp->sb_unit > sbp->sb_width  
+                   (sbp->sb_width % sbp->sb_unit) != 0)  
+                       xfs_notice(mp, "SB stripe unit sanity check failed");
+                       return -EFSCORRUPTED;
+                 
+         else if (xfs_sb_version_hasdalign(sbp))   
+               xfs_notice(mp, "SB stripe alignment sanity check failed");
+               return -EFSCORRUPTED;
+         else if (sbp->sb_width)  
+               xfs_notice(mp, "SB stripe width sanity check failed");
+               return -EFSCORRUPTED;
+        
+
+       
        if (xfs_sb_version_hascrc(&mp->m_sb) &&
            sbp->sb_blocksize < XFS_MIN_CRC_BLOCKSIZE)  
                xfs_notice(mp, "v5 SB sanity check failed");

This change is included in kernel versions 4.18-rc1 and newer:

% git describe --contains fa4ca9c5574605d1e48
v4.18-rc1~37^2~14

Now let s try with an older kernel version (4.9.0), using old Grml 2017.05 release:

root@grml ~ # grml-version
grml64-small 2017.05 Release Codename Freedatensuppe [2017-05-31]
root@grml ~ # uname -a
Linux grml 4.9.0-1-grml-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.9.29-1+grml.1 (2017-05-24) x86_64 GNU/Linux
root@grml ~ # lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Debian
Description:    Debian GNU/Linux 9.0 (stretch)
Release:        9.0
Codename:       stretch
root@grml ~ # grml-hostname grml-2017-05
Setting hostname to grml-2017-05: done
root@grml ~ # exec zsh
root@grml-2017-05 ~ #
root@grml-2017-05 ~ # xfs_info ./sdd1.dd
xfs_info: ./sdd1.dd is not a mounted XFS filesystem
1 root@grml-2017-05 ~ # xfs_repair ./sdd1.dd
Phase 1 - find and verify superblock...
bad primary superblock - bad stripe width in superblock !!!
attempting to find secondary superblock...
..............................................................................................Sorry, could not find valid secondary superblock
Exiting now.
1 root@grml-2017-05 ~ # mount ./sdd1.dd /mnt
root@grml-2017-05 ~ # mount -t xfs
/root/sdd1.dd on /mnt type xfs (rw,relatime,attr2,inode64,sunit=1024,swidth=512,noquota)
root@grml-2017-05 ~ # ls /mnt
activate.monmap  active  block  block_uuid  bluefs  ceph_fsid  fsid  keyring  kv_backend  magic  mkfs_done  ready  require_osd_release  systemd  type  whoami
root@grml-2017-05 ~ # xfs_info /mnt
meta-data=/dev/loop1             isize=2048   agcount=4, agsize=6272 blks
         =                       sectsz=4096  attr=2, projid32bit=1
         =                       crc=1        finobt=1 spinodes=0 rmapbt=0
         =                       reflink=0
data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=25088, imaxpct=25
         =                       sunit=128    swidth=64 blks
naming   =version 2              bsize=4096   ascii-ci=0 ftype=1
log      =internal               bsize=4096   blocks=1608, version=2
         =                       sectsz=4096  sunit=1 blks, lazy-count=1
realtime =none                   extsz=4096   blocks=0, rtextents=0

Mounting there indeed works! Now, if we mount the filesystem with new and proper sunit/swidth settings using the older kernel, it should rewrite them on disk:

root@grml-2017-05 ~ # mount -t xfs -o sunit=512,swidth=512 ./sdd1.dd /mnt/
root@grml-2017-05 ~ # umount /mnt/

And indeed, mounting this rewritten filesystem then also works with newer kernels:

root@grml-2020-06 ~ # mount ./sdd1.rewritten /mnt/
root@grml-2020-06 ~ # xfs_info /root/sdd1.rewritten
meta-data=/dev/loop1             isize=2048   agcount=4, agsize=6272 blks
         =                       sectsz=4096  attr=2, projid32bit=1
         =                       crc=1        finobt=1, sparse=0, rmapbt=0
         =                       reflink=0
data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=25088, imaxpct=25
         =                       sunit=64    swidth=64 blks
naming   =version 2              bsize=4096   ascii-ci=0, ftype=1
log      =internal log           bsize=4096   blocks=1608, version=2
         =                       sectsz=4096  sunit=1 blks, lazy-count=1
realtime =none                   extsz=4096   blocks=0, rtextents=0
root@grml-2020-06 ~ # mount -t xfs                
/root/sdd1.rewritten on /mnt type xfs (rw,relatime,attr2,inode64,logbufs=8,logbsize=32k,sunit=512,swidth=512,noquota)

FTR: The sunit=512,swidth=512 from the xfs mount option is identical to xfs_info s output sunit=64,swidth=64 (because mount.xfs s sunit value is given in 512-byte block units, see man 5 xfs, and the xfs_info output reported here is in blocks with a block size (bsize) of 4096, so sunit = 512*512 := 64*4096 ). mkfs uses minimum and optimal sizes for stripe unit and stripe width; you can check this e.g. via (note that server2 with fixed firmware version reports proper values, whereas server3 with broken controller firmware reports non-sense):

synpromika@server2 ~ % for i in /sys/block/sd*/queue/ ; do printf "%s: %s %s\n" "$i" "$(cat "$i"/minimum_io_size)" "$(cat "$i"/optimal_io_size)" ; done
[...]
/sys/block/sdc/queue/: 262144 262144
/sys/block/sdd/queue/: 262144 262144
/sys/block/sde/queue/: 262144 262144
/sys/block/sdf/queue/: 262144 262144
/sys/block/sdg/queue/: 262144 262144
/sys/block/sdh/queue/: 262144 262144
/sys/block/sdi/queue/: 262144 262144
/sys/block/sdj/queue/: 262144 262144
/sys/block/sdk/queue/: 262144 262144
/sys/block/sdl/queue/: 262144 262144
/sys/block/sdm/queue/: 262144 262144
/sys/block/sdn/queue/: 262144 262144
[...]
synpromika@server3 ~ % for i in /sys/block/sd*/queue/ ; do printf "%s: %s %s\n" "$i" "$(cat "$i"/minimum_io_size)" "$(cat "$i"/optimal_io_size)" ; done
[...]
/sys/block/sdc/queue/: 524288 262144
/sys/block/sdd/queue/: 524288 262144
/sys/block/sde/queue/: 524288 262144
/sys/block/sdf/queue/: 524288 262144
/sys/block/sdg/queue/: 524288 262144
/sys/block/sdh/queue/: 524288 262144
/sys/block/sdi/queue/: 524288 262144
/sys/block/sdj/queue/: 524288 262144
/sys/block/sdk/queue/: 524288 262144
/sys/block/sdl/queue/: 524288 262144
/sys/block/sdm/queue/: 524288 262144
/sys/block/sdn/queue/: 524288 262144
[...]

This is the underlying reason why the initially created XFS partitions were created with incorrect sunit/swidth settings. The broken firmware of server1 and server3 was the cause of the incorrect settings they were ignored by old(er) xfs/kernel versions, but treated as an error by new ones. Make sure to also read the XFS FAQ regarding How to calculate the correct sunit,swidth values for optimal performance . We also stumbled upon two interesting reads in RedHat s knowledge base: 5075561 + 2150101 (requires an active subscription, though) and #1835947. Am I affected? How to work around it? To check whether your XFS mount points are affected by this issue, the following command line should be useful:

awk '$3 == "xfs" print $2 ' /proc/self/mounts   while read mount ; do echo -n "$mount " ; xfs_info $mount   awk '$0 ~ "swidth" gsub(/.*=/,"",$2); gsub(/.*=/,"",$3); print $2,$3 '   awk '  if ($1 > $2) print "impacted"; else print "OK" ' ; done

If you run into the above situation, the only known solution to get your original XFS partition working again, is to boot into an older kernel version again (4.17 or older), mount the XFS partition with correct sunit/swidth settings and then boot back into your new system (kernel version wise). Lessons learned

document everything and ensure to have all relevant information available (including actual times of changes, used kernel/package/firmware/ versions. The thorough documentation was our most significant asset in this case, because we had all the data and information we needed during the emergency handling as well as for the post mortem/RCA)
if something changes unexpectedly, dig deeper
know who to ask, a network of experts pays off
including timestamps in your shell makes reconstruction easier (the more people and documentation involved, the harder it gets to wade through it)
keep an eye on changelogs/release notes
apply regular updates and don t forget invisible layers (e.g. BIOS, controller/disk firmware, IPMI/OOB (ILO/RAC/IMM/ ) firmware)
apply regular reboots, to avoid a possible delta becoming bigger (which makes debugging harder)

Thanks: Darshaka Pathirana, Chris Hofstaedtler and Michael Hanscho. Looking for help with your IT infrastructure? Let us know!

Previously: v5.8 Linux v5.9 was released in October, 2020. Here s my summary of various security things that I found interesting: seccomp user_notif file descriptor injection
Sargun Dhillon added the ability for SECCOMP_RET_USER_NOTIF filters to inject file descriptors into the target process using SECCOMP_IOCTL_NOTIF_ADDFD. This lets container managers fully emulate syscalls like open() and connect(), where an actual file descriptor is expected to be available after a successful syscall. In the process I fixed a couple bugs and refactored the file descriptor receiving code. zero-initialize stack variables with Clang
When Alexander Potapenko landed support for Clang s automatic variable initialization, it did so with a byte pattern designed to really stand out in kernel crashes. Now he s added support for doing zero initialization via CONFIG_INIT_STACK_ALL_ZERO, which besides actually being faster, has a few behavior benefits as well. Unlike pattern initialization, which has a higher chance of triggering existing bugs, zero initialization provides safe defaults for strings, pointers, indexes, and sizes. Like the pattern initialization, this feature stops entire classes of uninitialized stack variable flaws. common syscall entry/exit routines
Thomas Gleixner created architecture-independent code to do syscall entry/exit, since much of the kernel s work during a syscall entry and exit is the same. There was no need to repeat this in each architecture, and having it implemented separately meant bugs (or features) might only get fixed (or implemented) in a handful of architectures. It means that features like seccomp become much easier to build since it wouldn t need per-architecture implementations any more. Presently only x86 has switched over to the common routines. SLAB kfree() hardening
To reach CONFIG_SLAB_FREELIST_HARDENED feature-parity with the SLUB heap allocator, I added naive double-free detection and the ability to detect cross-cache freeing in the SLAB allocator. This should keep a class of type-confusion bugs from biting kernels using SLAB. (Most distro kernels use SLUB, but some smaller devices prefer the slightly more compact SLAB, so this hardening is mostly aimed at those systems.) new CAP_CHECKPOINT_RESTORE capability
Adrian Reber added the new CAP_CHECKPOINT_RESTORE capability, splitting this functionality off of CAP_SYS_ADMIN. The needs for the kernel to correctly checkpoint and restore a process (e.g. used to move processes between containers) continues to grow, and it became clear that the security implications were lower than those of CAP_SYS_ADMIN yet distinct from other capabilities. Using this capability is now the preferred method for doing things like changing /proc/self/exe. debugfs boot-time visibility restriction
Peter Enderborg added the debugfs boot parameter to control the visibility of the kernel s debug filesystem. The contents of debugfs continue to be a common area of sensitive information being exposed to attackers. While this was effectively possible by unsetting CONFIG_DEBUG_FS, that wasn t a great approach for system builders needing a single set of kernel configs (e.g. a distro kernel), so now it can be disabled at boot time. more seccomp architecture support
Michael Karcher implemented the SuperH seccomp hooks, Guo Ren implemented the C-SKY seccomp hooks, and Max Filippov implemented the xtensa seccomp hooks. Each of these included the ever-important updates to the seccomp regression testing suite in the kernel selftests. stack protector support for RISC-V
Guo Ren implemented -fstack-protector (and -fstack-protector-strong) support for RISC-V. This is the initial global-canary support while the patches to GCC to support per-task canaries is getting finished (similar to the per-task canaries done for arm64). This will mean nearly all stack frame write overflows are no longer useful to attackers on this architecture. It s nice to see this finally land for RISC-V, which is quickly approaching architecture feature parity with the other major architectures in the kernel. new tasklet API
Romain Perier and Allen Pais introduced a new tasklet API to make their use safer. Much like the timer_list refactoring work done earlier, the tasklet API is also a potential source of simple function-pointer-and-first-argument controlled exploits via linear heap overwrites. It s a smaller attack surface since it s used much less in the kernel, but it is the same weak design, making it a sensible thing to replace. While the use of the tasklet API is considered deprecated (replaced by threaded IRQs), it s not always a simple mechanical refactoring, so the old API still needs refactoring (since that CAN be done mechanically is most cases). x86 FSGSBASE implementation
Sasha Levin, Andy Lutomirski, Chang S. Bae, Andi Kleen, Tony Luck, Thomas Gleixner, and others landed the long-awaited FSGSBASE series. This provides task switching performance improvements while keeping the kernel safe from modules accidentally (or maliciously) trying to use the features directly (which exposed an unprivileged direct kernel access hole). filter x86 MSR writes
While it s been long understood that writing to CPU Model-Specific Registers (MSRs) from userspace was a bad idea, it has been left enabled for things like MSR_IA32_ENERGY_PERF_BIAS. Boris Petkov has decided enough is enough and has now enabled logging and kernel tainting (TAINT_CPU_OUT_OF_SPEC) by default and a way to disable MSR writes at runtime. (However, since this is controlled by a normal module parameter and the root user can just turn writes back on, I continue to recommend that people build with CONFIG_X86_MSR=n.) The expectation is that userspace MSR writes will be entirely removed in future kernels. uninitialized_var() macro removed
I made treewide changes to remove the uninitialized_var() macro, which had been used to silence compiler warnings. The rationale for this macro was weak to begin with ( the compiler is reporting an uninitialized variable that is clearly initialized ) since it was mainly papering over compiler bugs. However, it creates a much more fragile situation in the kernel since now such uses can actually disable automatic stack variable initialization, as well as mask legitimate unused variable warnings. The proper solution is to just initialize variables the compiler warns about. function pointer cast removals
Oscar Carter has started removing function pointer casts from the kernel, in an effort to allow the kernel to build with -Wcast-function-type. The future use of Control Flow Integrity checking (which does validation of function prototypes matching between the caller and the target) tends not to work well with function casts, so it d be nice to get rid of these before CFI lands. flexible array conversions
As part of Gustavo A. R. Silva s on-going work to replace zero-length and one-element arrays with flexible arrays, he has documented the details of the flexible array conversions, and the various helpers to be used in kernel code. Every commit gets the kernel closer to building with -Warray-bounds, which catches a lot of potential buffer overflows at compile time. That s it for now! Please let me know if you think anything else needs some attention. Next up is Linux v5.10.
2021, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

Previously: v5.7 Linux v5.8 was released in August, 2020. Here s my summary of various security things that caught my attention: arm64 Branch Target Identification
Dave Martin added support for ARMv8.5 s Branch Target Instructions (BTI), which are enabled in userspace at execve() time, and all the time in the kernel (which required manually marking up a lot of non-C code, like assembly and JIT code). With this in place, Jump-Oriented Programming (JOP, where code gadgets are chained together with jumps and calls) is no longer available to the attacker. An attacker s code must make direct function calls. This basically reduces the usable code available to an attacker from every word in the kernel text to only function entries (or jump targets). This is a low granularity forward-edge Control Flow Integrity (CFI) feature, which is important (since it greatly reduces the potential targets that can be used in an attack) and cheap (implemented in hardware). It s a good first step to strong CFI, but (as we ve seen with things like CFG) it isn t usually strong enough to stop a motivated attacker. High granularity CFI (which uses a more specific branch-target characteristic, like function prototypes, to track expected call sites) is not yet a hardware supported feature, but the software version will be coming in the future by way of Clang s CFI implementation. arm64 Shadow Call Stack
Sami Tolvanen landed the kernel implementation of Clang s Shadow Call Stack (SCS), which protects the kernel against Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) attacks (where code gadgets are chained together with returns). This backward-edge CFI protection is implemented by keeping a second dedicated stack pointer register (x18) and keeping a copy of the return addresses stored in a separate shadow stack . In this way, manipulating the regular stack s return addresses will have no effect. (And since a copy of the return address continues to live in the regular stack, no changes are needed for back trace dumps, etc.) It s worth noting that unlike BTI (which is hardware based), this is a software defense that relies on the location of the Shadow Stack (i.e. the value of x18) staying secret, since the memory could be written to directly. Intel s hardware ROP defense (CET) uses a hardware shadow stack that isn t directly writable. ARM s hardware defense against ROP is PAC (which is actually designed as an arbitrary CFI defense it can be used for forward-edge too), but that depends on having ARMv8.3 hardware. The expectation is that SCS will be used until PAC is available. Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer infrastructure added
Marco Elver landed support for the Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer, which is a new debugging infrastructure to find data races in the kernel, via CONFIG_KCSAN. This immediately found real bugs, with some fixes having already landed too. For more details, see the KCSAN documentation. new capabilities
Alexey Budankov added CAP_PERFMON, which is designed to allow access to perf(). The idea is that this capability gives a process access to only read aspects of the running kernel and system. No longer will access be needed through the much more powerful abilities of CAP_SYS_ADMIN, which has many ways to change kernel internals. This allows for a split between controls over the confidentiality (read access via CAP_PERFMON) of the kernel vs control over integrity (write access via CAP_SYS_ADMIN). Alexei Starovoitov added CAP_BPF, which is designed to separate BPF access from the all-powerful CAP_SYS_ADMIN. It is designed to be used in combination with CAP_PERFMON for tracing-like activities and CAP_NET_ADMIN for networking-related activities. For things that could change kernel integrity (i.e. write access), CAP_SYS_ADMIN is still required. network random number generator improvements
Willy Tarreau made the network code s random number generator less predictable. This will further frustrate any attacker s attempts to recover the state of the RNG externally, which might lead to the ability to hijack network sessions (by correctly guessing packet states). fix various kernel address exposures to non-CAP_SYSLOG
I fixed several situations where kernel addresses were still being exposed to unprivileged (i.e. non-CAP_SYSLOG) users, though usually only through odd corner cases. After refactoring how capabilities were being checked for files in /sys and /proc, the kernel modules sections, kprobes, and BPF exposures got fixed. (Though in doing so, I briefly made things much worse before getting it properly fixed. Yikes!) RISCV W^X detection
Following up on his recent work to enable strict kernel memory protections on RISCV, Zong Li has now added support for CONFIG_DEBUG_WX as seen for other architectures. Any writable and executable memory regions in the kernel (which are lovely targets for attackers) will be loudly noted at boot so they can get corrected. execve() refactoring continues
Eric W. Biederman continued working on execve() refactoring, including getting rid of the frequently problematic recursion used to locate binary handlers. I used the opportunity to dust off some old binfmt_script regression tests and get them into the kernel selftests. multiple /proc instances
Alexey Gladkov modernized /proc internals and provided a way to have multiple /proc instances mounted in the same PID namespace. This allows for having multiple views of /proc, with different features enabled. (Including the newly added hidepid=4 and subset=pid mount options.) set_fs() removal continues
Christoph Hellwig, with Eric W. Biederman, Arnd Bergmann, and others, have been diligently working to entirely remove the kernel s set_fs() interface, which has long been a source of security flaws due to weird confusions about which address space the kernel thought it should be accessing. Beyond things like the lower-level per-architecture signal handling code, this has needed to touch various parts of the ELF loader, and networking code too. READ_IMPLIES_EXEC is no more for native 64-bit
The READ_IMPLIES_EXEC flag was a work-around for dealing with the addition of non-executable (NX) memory when x86_64 was introduced. It was designed as a way to mark a memory region as well, since we don t know if this memory region was expected to be executable, we must assume that if we need to read it, we need to be allowed to execute it too . It was designed mostly for stack memory (where trampoline code might live), but it would carry over into all mmap() allocations, which would mean sometimes exposing a large attack surface to an attacker looking to find executable memory. While normally this didn t cause problems on modern systems that correctly marked their ELF sections as NX, there were still some awkward corner-cases. I fixed this by splitting READ_IMPLIES_EXEC from the ELF PT_GNU_STACK marking on x86 and arm/arm64, and declaring that a native 64-bit process would never gain READ_IMPLIES_EXEC on x86_64 and arm64, which matches the behavior of other native 64-bit architectures that correctly didn t ever implement READ_IMPLIES_EXEC in the first place. array index bounds checking continues
As part of the ongoing work to use modern flexible arrays in the kernel, Gustavo A. R. Silva added the flex_array_size() helper (as a cousin to struct_size()). The zero/one-member into flex array conversions continue with over a hundred commits as we slowly get closer to being able to build with -Warray-bounds. scnprintf() replacement continues
Chen Zhou joined Takashi Iwai in continuing to replace potentially unsafe uses of sprintf() with scnprintf(). Fixing all of these will make sure the kernel avoids nasty buffer concatenation surprises. That s it for now! Let me know if there is anything else you think I should mention here. Next up: Linux v5.9.

2021, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

Prompted by tweets from Lesley and Dave, I thought about KVM switches again and came up with a rather cheap solution to my individual situation (YMMY, as usual). As I've written last year, my desk has one monitor, keyboard and mouse and two computers. Since writing that post I got a new (bigger) monitor, but also an USB switch again (a DIGITUS USB 3.0 Sharing Switch) - this time one that doesn't freak out my dock \o/ However, having to switch the used computer in two places (USB and monitor) is rather inconvenient, but also getting an KVM switch that can do 4K@60Hz was out of question. Luckily, hackers gonna hack, everything, and not only receipt printers ( ). There is a tool called ddcutil that can talk to your monitor and change various settings. And udev can execute commands when (USB) devices connect You see where this is going? After installing the package (available both in Debian and Fedora), we can inspect our system with ddcutil detect. You might have to load the i2c_dev module (thanks Philip!) before this works -- it seems to be loaded automatically on my Fedora, but you never know .

$ sudo ddcutil detect
Invalid display
   I2C bus:             /dev/i2c-4
   EDID synopsis:
      Mfg id:           BOE
      Model:
      Serial number:
      Manufacture year: 2017
      EDID version:     1.4
   DDC communication failed
   This is an eDP laptop display. Laptop displays do not support DDC/CI.
Invalid display
   I2C bus:             /dev/i2c-5
   EDID synopsis:
      Mfg id:           AOC
      Model:            U2790B
      Serial number:
      Manufacture year: 2020
      EDID version:     1.4
   DDC communication failed
Display 1
   I2C bus:             /dev/i2c-7
   EDID synopsis:
      Mfg id:           AOC
      Model:            U2790B
      Serial number:
      Manufacture year: 2020
      EDID version:     1.4
   VCP version:         2.2

The first detected display is the built-in one in my laptop, and those don't support DDC anyways. The second one is a ghost (see ddcutil#160) which we can ignore. But the third one is the one we can (and will control). As this is the only valid display ddcutil found, we don't need to specify which display to talk to in the following commands. Otherwise we'd have to add something like --display 1 to them. A ddcutil capabilities will show us what the monitor is capable of (or what it thinks, I've heard some give rather buggy output here) -- we're mostly interested in the "Input Source" feature (Virtual Control Panel (VCP) code 0x60):

$ sudo ddcutil capabilities
 
   Feature: 60 (Input Source)
      Values:
         0f: DisplayPort-1
         11: HDMI-1
         12: HDMI-2

Seems mine supports it, and I should be able to switch the inputs by jumping between 0x0f, 0x11 and 0x12. You can see other values defined by the spec in ddcutil vcpinfo 60 --verbose, some monitors are using wrong values for their inputs . Let's see if ddcutil getvcp agrees that I'm using DisplayPort now:

$ sudo ddcutil getvcp 0x60
VCP code 0x60 (Input Source                  ): DisplayPort-1 (sl=0x0f)

And try switching to HDMI-1 using ddcutil setvcp:

$ sudo ddcutil setvcp 0x60 0x11

Cool, cool. So now we just need a way to trigger input source switching based on some event There are three devices connected to my USB switch: my keyboard, my mouse and my Yubikey. I do use the mouse and the Yubikey while the laptop is not docked too, so these are not good indicators that the switch has been turned to the laptop. But the keyboard is! Let's see what vendor and product IDs it has, so we can write an udev rule for it:

$ lsusb
 
Bus 005 Device 006: ID 17ef:6047 Lenovo ThinkPad Compact Keyboard with TrackPoint

Okay, so let's call ddcutil setvcp 0x60 0x0f when the USB device 0x17ef:0x6047 is added to the system:

ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR idVendor =="17ef", ATTR idProduct =="6047", RUN+="/usr/bin/ddcutil setvcp 0x60 0x0f"

$ sudo vim /etc/udev/rules.d/99-ddcutil.rules
$ sudo udevadm control --reload

And done! Whenever I connect my keyboard now, it will force my screen to use DisplayPort-1. On my workstation, I deployed the same rule, but with ddcutil setvcp 0x60 0x11 to switch to HDMI-1 and my cheap not-really-KVM-but-in-the-end-KVM-USB-switch is done, for the price of one USB switch (~30 ). Note: if you want to use ddcutil with a Lenovo Thunderbolt 3 Dock (or any other dock using Displayport Multi-Stream Transport (MST)), you'll need kernel 5.10 or newer, which fixes a bug that prevents ddcutil from talking to the monitor using I C.

As a reader of Planet Debian I see a bunch of updates at the start of each month about what people are up to in terms of their Free Software activities. I m not generally active enough in the Free Software world to justify a monthly report, but I did a report of my Free Software Activities for 2019 and thought I d do another for 2020. I ended up not doing as much as last year; I put a lot of that down to fatigue about the state of the world and generally not wanting to spend time on the computer at the end of the working day.

Conferences 2020 was unsurprisingly not a great year for conference attendance. I was fortunate enough to make it to FOSDEM and CopyleftConf 2020 - I didn t speak at either, but had plenty of interesting hallway track conversations as well as seeing some good talks. I hadn t been planning to attend DebConf20 due to time constraints, but its move to an entirely online conference meant I was able to attend a few talks at least. I have to say I don t like virtual conferences as much as the real thing; it s not as easy to have the casual chats at them, and it s also harder to carve out the exclusive time when you re at home. That said I spoke at NIDevConf this year, which was also fully virtual. It s not a Free Software focussed conference, but there s a lot of crossover in terms of technologies and I spoke on my experiences with Go, some of which are influenced by my packaging experiences within Debian.

Debian Most of my contributions to Free software happen within Debian. As part of the Data Protection Team I responded to various inbound queries to that team. Some of this involved chasing up other project teams who had been slow to respond - folks, if you re running a service that stores personal data about people then you need to be responsive to requests about it. The Debian Keyring was possibly my largest single point of contribution. We re in a roughly 3 month rotation of who handles the keyring updates, and I handled 2020.02.02, 2020.03.24, 2020.06.24, 2020.09.24 + 2020.12.24 For Debian New Members I m mostly inactive as an application manager - we generally seem to have enough available recently. If that changes I ll look at stepping in to help, but I don t see that happening. I continue to be involved in Front Desk, having various conversations throughout the year with the rest of the team, but there s no doubt Mattia and Pierre-Elliott are the real doers at present. In terms of package uploads I continued to work on gcc-xtensa-lx106, largely doing uploads to deal with updates to the GCC version or packaging (5, 6 + 7). sigrok had a few minor updates, libsigkrok 0.5.2-2, libsigrokdecode 0.5.3-2 as well as a new upstream release of Pulseview 0.4.2-1 and a fix to cope with change to QT 0.4.2-2. Due to the sigrok-firmware requirement on sdcc I also continued to help out there, updating to 4.0.0+dfsg-1 and doing some fixups in 4.0.0+dfsg-2. Despite still not writing an VHDL these days I continue to try and make sure ghdl is ok, because I found it a useful tool in the past. In 2020 that meant a new upstream release, 0.37+dfsg-1 along with a couple of more minor updates (0.37+dfsg-2 + 0.37+dfsg-3. libcli had a new upstream release, 1.10.4-1, and I did a long overdue update to sendip to the latest upstream release, 2.6-1 having been poked about an outstanding bug by the Reproducible Builds folk. OpenOCD is coming up to 4 years since its last stable release, but I did a snapshot upload to Debian experimental (0.10.0+g20200530-1) and a subsequent one to unstable (0.10.0+g20200819-1). There are also moves to produce a 0.11.0 release and I uploaded 0.11.0~rc1-1 as a result. libjaylink got a bump as a result (0.2.0-1) after some discussion with upstream.

OpenOCD On the subject of OpenOCD I ve tried to be a bit more involved upstream. I m not familiar enough with the intricacies of JTAG/SWD/the various architectures supported to contribute to the core, but I pushed the config for my HIE JTAG adapter upstream and try and review patches that don t require in depth hardware knowledge.

Linux I ve been contributing to the Linux kernel for a number of years now, mostly just minor bits here and there for issues I hit. This year I spent a lot of time getting support for the MikoTik RB3011 router upstreamed. That included the basic DTS addition, fixing up QCA8K to support SGMII CPU connections, adding proper 802.1q VLAN support to QCA8K and cleaning up an existing QCOM ADM driver that s required for the NAND. There were a number of associated bugfixes/minor changes found along the way too. It can be a little frustrating at times going round the review loop with submitting things upstream, but I do find it quite satisfying when it all comes together and I have no interest in weird vendor trees that just bitrot over time.

Software in the Public Interest I haven t sat on the board of SPI since 2015 but I was still acting as the primary maintainer of the membership website (with Martin Michlmayr as the other active contributor) and hosting it on my own machine. I managed to finally extricate myself from this role in August. I remain a contributing member.

Personal projects 2020 finally saw another release (0.6.0, followed swiftly by 0.6.1 to allow the upload of 0.6.1-1 to Debian) of onak. This release finally adds various improvements to deal with the hostility shown to the OpenPGP keyserver network in recent years, including full signature verification as an option. I fixed an oversight in my Digoo/1-wire temperature decoder and a bug that turned up on ARM but not MIPS in my mqtt-arp code. I should probably package it for Debian (even if I don t upload it), as I m running it on my RB3011 now.

As a followup to the previous post, here's an update on the iOS 14 USB tethering problem on Linux. After some investigation, Matti Vuorela found that reducing the USB packet size by two bytes would actually fix the issue. A small patch was later commited to the Linux kernel and found its way to Linux and distributions stable releases. On Debian stable you'll need to upgrade to Buster 10.7 to get the fix.

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Benda XU (orv)
Joseph Nahmias (jello)
Marcos Fouces (marcos)
Hayashi Kentaro (kenhys)
James Valleroy (jvalleroy)
Helge Deller (deller)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Ricardo Ribalda Delgado
Pierre Gruet
Henry-Nicolas Tourneur
Alo s Micard
J r me Lebleu
Nis Martensen
Stephan Lachnit
Felix Salfelder
Aleksey Kravchenko
tienne Mollier

Congratulations!

Show https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/b4061a10fc29010a610ff2b5b20160d7335e69bf/drivers/hid/hid-samsung.c#L113-L118 to a friend. Oops 'eh? Yep, Linux has been backdoored. Well, or not. Konstantin Ryabitsev explains it nicely in a cgit mailing list email:

It is common for git hosting environments to configure all forks of the same repo to use an "object storage" repository. For example, this is what allows git.kernel.org's 600+ forks of linux.git to take up only 10GB on disk as opposed to 800GB. One of the side-effects of this setup is that any object in the shared repository can be accessed from any of the forks, which periodically confuses people into believing that something terrible has happened.

The hack was discussed on Github in Dec 2018 when it was discovered. I forgot about it again but Konstantin's mail brought the memory back and I think it deserves more attention. I'm sure putting some illegal content into a fork and sending a made up "blob" URL to law enforcement would go quite far. Good luck explaining the issue. "Yes this is my repo" but "no, no that's not my data" ... "yes, it is my repo but not my data" ... "no we don't want that data either, really" ... "but, but there is nothing we can do, we host on github...¹". Update 05.11.20 Nate Friedman (CEO of Github) promises

[..] we are going to make it much more obvious when you're viewing an orphaned commit.

For context: The source code of Github (the product) had been leaked as a commit to Github's own DMCA repository. The repository has turned into a playground since Github took down the hosting for youtube-dl as the result of a DMCA complaint. 14.11.20 Seems Github now adds a warning to commits that are not in a reachable branch Github commit warning message

Actually there is something you can do. Making a repo private takes it out of the shared "object storage". You can make it public again afterwards. Seems to work at least for now.

It's a bit of a long shot, but maybe someone on Planet Debian or elsewhere can help us reach the right people at Apple. Starting with iOS 14, something apparently changed on the way USB tethering (also called Personal Hotspot) is set up, which broke it for people using Linux. The driver in use is ipheth, developped in 2009 and included in the Linux kernel in 2010. The kernel driver negotiates over USB with the iOS device in order to setup the link. The protocol used by both parties to communicate don't really seemed documented publicly, and it seems the protocol has evolved over time and iOS versions, and the Linux driver hasn't been kept up to date. On macOS and Windows the driver apparently comes with iTunes, and Apple engineers obviously know how to communicate with iOS devices, so iOS 14 is supported just fine. There's an open bug on libimobildevice (the set of userlands tools used to communicate with iOS devices, although the update should be done in the kernel), with some debugging and communication logs between Windows and an iOS device, but so far no real progress has been done. The link is enabled, the host gets an IP from the device, can ping the device IP and can even resolve name using the device DNS resolver, but IP forwarding seems disabled, no packet goes farther than the device itself. That means a lot of people upgrading to iOS 14 will suddenly lose USB tethering. While Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connection sharing still works, it's still suboptimal, so it'd be nice to fix the kernel driver and support the latest protocol used in iOS 14. If someone knows the right contact (or the right way to contact them) at Apple so we can have access to some kind of documentation on the protocol and the state machine to use, please reach us (either to the libimobile device bug or to my email address below). Thanks!

Previously: v5.6 Linux v5.7 was released at the end of May. Here s my summary of various security things that caught my attention: arm64 kernel pointer authentication
While the ARMv8.3 CPU Pointer Authentication (PAC) feature landed for userspace already, Kristina Martsenko has now landed PAC support in kernel mode. The current implementation uses PACIASP which protects the saved stack pointer, similar to the existing CONFIG_STACKPROTECTOR feature, only faster. This also paves the way to sign and check pointers stored in the heap, as a way to defeat function pointer overwrites in those memory regions too. Since the behavior is different from the traditional stack protector, Amit Daniel Kachhap added an LKDTM test for PAC as well. BPF LSM
The kernel s Linux Security Module (LSM) API provide a way to write security modules that have traditionally implemented various Mandatory Access Control (MAC) systems like SELinux, AppArmor, etc. The LSM hooks are numerous and no one LSM uses them all, as some hooks are much more specialized (like those used by IMA, Yama, LoadPin, etc). There was not, however, any way to externally attach to these hooks (not even through a regular loadable kernel module) nor build fully dynamic security policy, until KP Singh landed the API for building LSM policy using BPF. With this, it is possible (for a privileged process) to write kernel LSM hooks in BPF, allowing for totally custom security policy (and reporting). execve() deadlock refactoring
There have been a number of long-standing races in the kernel s process launching code where ptrace could deadlock. Fixing these has been attempted several times over the last many years, but Eric W. Biederman and Ernd Edlinger decided to dive in, and successfully landed the a series of refactorings, splitting up the problematic locking and refactoring their uses to remove the deadlocks. While he was at it, Eric also extended the exec_id counter to 64 bits to avoid the possibility of the counter wrapping and allowing an attacker to send arbitrary signals to processes they normally shouldn t be able to. slub freelist obfuscation improvements
After Silvio Cesare observed some weaknesses in the implementation of CONFIG_SLAB_FREELIST_HARDENED s freelist pointer content obfuscation, I improved their bit diffusion, which makes attacks require significantly more memory content exposures to defeat the obfuscation. As part of the conversation, Vitaly Nikolenko pointed out that the freelist pointer s location made it relatively easy to target too (for either disclosures or overwrites), so I moved it away from the edge of the slab, making it harder to reach through small-sized overflows (which usually target the freelist pointer). As it turns out, there were a few assumptions in the kernel about the location of the freelist pointer, which had to also get cleaned up. RISCV page table dumping
Following v5.6 s generic page table dumping work, Zong Li landed the RISCV page dumping code. This means it s much easier to examine the kernel s page table layout when running a debug kernel (built with PTDUMP_DEBUGFS), visible in /sys/kernel/debug/kernel_page_tables. array index bounds checking
This is a pretty large area of work that touches a lot of overlapping elements (and history) in the Linux kernel. The short version is: C is bad at noticing when it uses an array index beyond the bounds of the declared array, and we need to fix that. For example, don t do this:

int foo[5];
...
foo[8] = bar;

The long version gets complicated by the evolution of flexible array structure members, so we ll pause for a moment and skim the surface of this topic. While things like CONFIG_FORTIFY_SOURCE try to catch these kinds of cases in the memcpy() and strcpy() family of functions, it doesn t catch it in open-coded array indexing, as seen in the code above. GCC has a warning (-Warray-bounds) for these cases, but it was disabled by Linus because of all the false positives seen due to fake flexible array members. Before flexible arrays were standardized, GNU C supported zero sized array members. And before that, C code would use a 1-element array. These were all designed so that some structure could be the header in front of some data blob that could be addressable through the last structure member:

/* 1-element array */
struct foo  
    ...
    char contents[1];
 ;
/* GNU C extension: 0-element array */
struct foo  
    ...
    char contents[0];
 ;
/* C standard: flexible array */
struct foo  
    ...
    char contents[];
 ;
instance = kmalloc(sizeof(struct foo) + content_size);

Converting all the zero- and one-element array members to flexible arrays is one of Gustavo A. R. Silva s goals, and hundreds of these changes started landing. Once fixed, -Warray-bounds can be re-enabled. Much more detail can be found in the kernel s deprecation docs. However, that will only catch the visible at compile time cases. For runtime checking, the Undefined Behavior Sanitizer has an option for adding runtime array bounds checking for catching things like this where the compiler cannot perform a static analysis of the index values:

int foo[5];
...
for (i = 0; i < some_argument; i++)  
    ...
    foo[i] = bar;
    ...

It was, however, not separate (via kernel Kconfig) until Elena Petrova and I split it out into CONFIG_UBSAN_BOUNDS, which is fast enough for production kernel use. With this enabled, it's now possible to instrument the kernel to catch these conditions, which seem to come up with some regularity in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth drivers for some reason. Since UBSAN (and the other Sanitizers) only WARN() by default, system owners need to set panic_on_warn=1 too if they want to defend against attacks targeting these kinds of flaws. Because of this, and to avoid bloating the kernel image with all the warning messages, I introduced CONFIG_UBSAN_TRAP which effectively turns these conditions into a BUG() without needing additional sysctl settings. Fixing "additive" snprintf() usage
A common idiom in C for building up strings is to use sprintf()'s return value to increment a pointer into a string, and build a string with more sprintf() calls:

/* safe if strlen(foo) + 1 < sizeof(string) */
wrote  = sprintf(string, "Foo: %s\n", foo);
/* overflows if strlen(foo) + strlen(bar) > sizeof(string) */
wrote += sprintf(string + wrote, "Bar: %s\n", bar);
/* writing way beyond the end of "string" now ... */
wrote += sprintf(string + wrote, "Baz: %s\n", baz);

The risk is that if these calls eventually walk off the end of the string buffer, it will start writing into other memory and create some bad situations. Switching these to snprintf() does not, however, make anything safer, since snprintf() returns how much it would have written:

/* safe, assuming available <= sizeof(string), and for this example
 * assume strlen(foo) < sizeof(string) */
wrote  = snprintf(string, available, "Foo: %s\n", foo);
/* if (strlen(bar) > available - wrote), this is still safe since the
 * write into "string" will be truncated, but now "wrote" has been
 * incremented by how much snprintf() *would* have written, so "wrote"
 * is now larger than "available". */
wrote += snprintf(string + wrote, available - wrote, "Bar: %s\n", bar);
/* string + wrote is beyond the end of string, and availabe - wrote wraps
 * around to a giant positive value, making the write effectively 
 * unbounded. */
wrote += snprintf(string + wrote, available - wrote, "Baz: %s\n", baz);

So while the first overflowing call would be safe, the next one would be targeting beyond the end of the array and the size calculation will have wrapped around to a giant limit. Replacing this idiom with scnprintf() solves the issue because it only reports what was actually written. To this end, Takashi Iwai has been landing a bunch scnprintf() fixes. That's it for now! Let me know if there is anything else you think I should mention here. Next up: Linux v5.8.

2020, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

Introducing cryptsetup-suspend Today, we're introducing `cryptsetup-suspend`, whose job is to protect the content of your harddrives while the system is sleeping. TL;DR:

You can lock your encrypted harddrives during suspend mode by installing `cryptsetup-suspend`

For `cryptsetup-suspend` to work properly, at least Linux kernel 5.6 is required

We hope that in a bright future, everything will be available out-of-the-box in Debian and it's derivatives

Before: After:

What does this mean and why should you care about it? If you don't use full-disk encryption, don't read any further. Instead, think about, what will happen if you lose your notebook on the train, a random person picks it up and browses through all your personal pictures, e-mails, and tax records. Then encrypt your system and come back. If you believe full-disk encryption is necessary, you might know that it only works when your machine is powered off. Once you turn on the machine and decrypt your harddrive, your encryption key stays in RAM and can potentially be extracted by malicious software or physical access. Even if these attacks are non-trivial, it's enough to worry about. If an attacker is able to extract your disk encryption keys from memory, they're able to read the content of your disk in return. Sadly, in 2020, we hardly power off our laptops anymore. The sleep mode, also known as "suspend mode", is just too convenient. Just close the lid to freeze the system state and lift it anytime later in order to continue. Well, convenience usually comes with a cost: during suspend mode, your system memory is kept powered, all your data - including your encryption keys - stays there, waiting to be extracted by a malicious person. Unfortunately, there are practical attacks to extract the data of your powered memory. Cryptsetup-suspend expands the protection of your full-disk encryption to all those times when your computer sleeps in suspend mode. Cryptsetup-suspend utilizes the suspend feature of LUKS volumes and integrates it with your Debian system. Encryption keys are evicted from memory before suspend mode and the volumes have to be re-opened after resuming - potentially prompting for the required passphrases. By now, we have a working prototype which we want to introduce today. We did quite some testing, both on virtualized and bare-metal Debian and Ubuntu systems, with and without graphical stack, so we dare to unseal and set free the project and ask you - the community - to test, review, criticize and give feedback. Here's a screencast of `cryptsetup-suspend` in action:

State of the implementation: where are we? If you're interested in the technical details, here's how `cryptsetup-suspend` works internally. It basically consists of three parts:

`cryptsetup-suspend`: A C program that takes a list of LUKS devices as arguments, suspends them via `luksSuspend` and suspends the system afterwards. Also, it tries to reserve some memory for decryption, which we'll explain below.

`cryptsetup-suspend-wrapper`: A shell wrapper script which works the following way:

Extract the initramfs into a ramfs

Run (systemd) pre-suspend scripts, stop udev, freeze almost all cgroups

Chroot into the ramfs and run `cryptsetup-suspend`

Resume initramfs devices inside chroot after resume

Resume non-initramfs devices outside chroot

Thaw groups, start udev, run (systemd) post-suspend scripts

Unmount the ramfs

A systemd unit drop-in file overriding the `Exec` property of `systemd-suspend.service` so that it invokes the script `cryptsetup-suspend-wrapper`.

Reusing large parts of the existing cryptsetup-initramfs implementation has some positive side-effects: Out-of-the-box, we support all LUKS block device setups that have been supported by the Debian cryptsetup packages before. Freezing most processes/cgroups is necessary to prevent possible race-conditions and dead-locks after the system resumes. Processes will try to access data on the locked/suspended block devices eventually leading to buffer overflows and data loss.

Technical challenges and caveats

Dead-locks at suspend: In order to prevent possible dead-locks between suspending the encrypted LUKS disks and suspending the system, we have to tell the Linux kernel to not `sync()` before going to sleep. A corresponding patch got accepted upstream in Linux 5.6. See section What about the kernel patch? below for details.

Race conditions at resume: Likewise, there's a risk of race conditions between resuming the system and unlocking the encypted LUKS disks. We went with freezing as many processes as possible as a counter measurement. See last part of section State of the implementation: where are we? for details.

Memory management: Memory management is definitely a challenge. Unlocking disks might require a lot of memory (if key derivation function is argon2i) and the swap device most likely is locked at that time. See section All that matters to me is the memories! below for details.

systemd dependency: Our implementation depends on systemd. It uses a unit drop-in file for `systemd-suspend.service` for hooking into the system suspend process and depends on systemds cgroup management to freeze and thaw processes. If you're using a different init system, sorry, you're currently out of luck.

What about the kernel patch? The problem is simple: the Linux kernel suspend implementation enforces a final filesystem sync() before the system goes to sleep in order to prevent potential data loss. While that's sensible in most scenarios, it may result in dead-locks in our situation, since the block device that holds the filesystem is already suspended. The `fssync()` call will block forever as it waits for the block device to finish the `sync()` operation. So we need a way to conditionally disable this `sync()` call in the Linux kernel resume function. That's what our patch does, by introducing a run-time switch at `/sys/power/sync_on_suspend`, but it only got accepted into the Linux kernel recently and was first released with Linux kernel 5.6. Since release 4.3, the Linux kernel at least provides a build-time flag to disable the `sync()`: `CONFIG_SUSPEND_SKIP_SYNC` (that was called `SUSPEND_SKIP_SYNC` first and renamed to `CONFIG_SUSPEND_SKIP_SYNC` in kernel release 4.9). Enabling this flag at build-time protects you against the dead locks perfectly well. But while that works on an individual basis, it's a non-option for the distribution Linux kernel defaults. In most cases you still want the `sync()` to happen, except if you have user-space code that takes care of the `sync()` just before suspending your system - just like our `cryptsetup-suspend` implementation does. So in order to properly test `cryptsetup-suspend`, you're strongly advised to run Linux kernel 5.6 or newer. Fortunately, Linux 5.6 is available in `buster-backports` thanks to the Debian Kernel Team.

All that matters to me is the memories! One of the tricky parts is memory management. Since version 2, LUKS uses argon2i as default key derivation function. Argon2i is a memory-hard hash function and LUKS2 assigns the minimum of half of your systems memory or 1 GB to unlocking your device. While this is usually unproblematic during system boot - there's not much in the system memory anyway - it can become problematic when suspending. When cryptsetup tries to unlock a device and wants 1 GB of memory for this, but everything is already occupied by your browser and video player, there's only two options what to do:

Kill a process to free some memory

Move some of the data from memory to swap space

The first option is certainly not what you expect when suspending your system. The second option is impossible, because swap is located on your harddrive which we have locked before. Our current solution is to allocate the memory after freezing the other processes, but before locking the disks. At this time, the system can still move data to swap, but it won't be accessed anymore. We then release the memory just in time for cryptsetup to claim it again. The implementation of this is still subject to change.

What's missing: A proper user interface As mentioned before, we consider `cryptsetup-suspend` usable, but it certainly still has bugs and shortcomings. The most obvious one is lack of a proper user interface. Currently, we switch over to a tty command-line interface to prompt for passphrases when unlocking the LUKS devices. It certainly would be better to replace this with a graphical user interface later, probably by using plymouth or something alike. Unfortunately, it seems rather impossible to spawn a real graphical environment for the passphrase prompt. That would imply to load the full graphical stack into the ramfs, raising the required amount of memory significantly. Lack of memory is currently our biggest concern and source of trouble. We'd definitely appreciate to learn about your ideas how to improve the user experience here.

Let's get practical: how to use TL;DR: On Debian Bullseye (Testing), all you need to do is to install the `cryptsetup-suspend` package from experimental. It's not necessary to upgrade the other cryptsetup packages. On Debian Buster, cryptsetup packages from backports are required.

First, be sure that you're running Linux kernel 5.6 or newer. For Buster systems, it's available in buster-backports.

Second, if you're on Debian Buster, install the cryptsetup 2:2.3.3-2~bpo10+1 packages from buster-backports.

Third, install the `cryptsetup-suspend` package from experimental. Beware that `cryptsetup-suspend` depends on `cryptsetup-initramfs (>= 2:2.3.3-1~)`. Either you need the cryptsetup packages from `testing/unstable`, or the backports from `buster-backports`.

Now that you have the `cryptsetup-suspend` package installed, everything should be in place: Just send your system to sleep. It should switch to a virtual text terminal before going to sleep, ask for a passphrase to unlock your encrypted disk(s) after resume and switch back to your former working environment (most likely your graphical desktop environment) afterwards.

Security considerations Suspending LUKS devices basically means to remove the corresponding encryption keys from system memory. This protects against all sort of attacks trying to read them from there, e.g. cold-boot attacks. But, `cryptsetup-suspend` only protects the encryption keys of your LUKS devices. Most likely there's more sensitive data in system memory, like all kinds of private keys (e.g. OpenPGP, OpenSSH) or documents with sensitive content. We hope that the community will help improve this situation by providing useful pre-/post-suspend scripts. A positive example is KeepassXC, which is able to lock itself when going to suspend mode.

Related and similar projects

Systemd Homed: systemd recently got a new feature to manage home directories. It brings support for encrypting your home directory within a LUKS2 container and for suspending the LUKS2 container during system sleep. It all is limited to systemd home directories though and doesn't help with other LUKS devices.

There's several earlier `luks-suspend-*` implementations. Unfortunately, neither of them deal with all the Technical challenges and caveats we discovered. Still we'd like to mention some of them:

debian-luks-suspend

go-luks-suspend

arch-luks-suspend

Links

Our Linux kernel patch: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=c052bf82c6b00ca27aab0859addc4b3159dfd3a4

The `debian/experimental` branch of our Debian cryptsetup packaging repository, containing `cryptsetup-suspend` related changes: https://salsa.debian.org/cryptsetup-team/cryptsetup/-/tree/debian/experimental

`cryptsetup-suspend` manpage: https://salsa.debian.org/cryptsetup-team/cryptsetup/-/blob/debian/experimental/debian/doc/cryptsetup-suspend.xml

Feedback and Comments We'd be more than happy to learn about your thoughts on cryptsetup-suspend. For specific issues, don't hesitate to open a bugreport against cryptsetup-suspend. You can also reach us via mail - see the next section for contact addresses. Last but not least, comments below the blogpost work as well.

Authors

Tim (tim at systemli.org)

Jonas (jonas at freesources.org)

Better late than never as we say thanks to the work of Daniel Leidert and Jorge Maldonado Ventura, we managed to complete the update of my book for Debian 10 Buster.

You can get the electronic version on debian-handbook.info or the paperback version on lulu.com. Or you can just read it online. Translators are busy updating their translations, with German and Norvegian Bokmal leading the way

One comment Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

Here s my (seventh) monthly update about the activities I ve done in the F/L/OSS world.

Debian

It s been 14 months since I ve started contributing to Debian. And 4 months since I ve been a Debian Developer. And in this beautiful time, I had this opprotunity to do and learn lots of new and interesting things. And most importantly, meet and interact with lots of lovely people!
Debian is `$home`.

Uploads:

libgit2 (0.28.5+dfsg.1-1) - new upstream version.

ruby-ffi-compiler (1.0.1-1) - NEW (#955497).

rake (13.0.1-3/4) - using `--gem-install layout` and fixing autopkgtest.

mcollective (2.12.5+dfsg-1) - new upstream version.

ruby-guard (2.16.2-1) - fix regression caused by pry s upload (#954724).

ruby-pry-byebug (3.9.0-1) - fix regression caused by pry s upload (#954572).

ruby-ahoy-matey (3.0.2-1) - new upstream version.

ruby-http-parser (1.2.1-1) - NEW (#955589).

ruby-http-parser.rb (0.6.0-5) - Drop `Conflicts` field.

golang-github-awalterschulze-gographviz (2.0.1-1) - new upstream version.

ruby-ffi-yajl (2.3.1-3) - fix build in `ARM` $arch.

ruby-http (4.4.1-1) - new upstream version ((#890075 and #858140).

ruby-twitter (7.0.0-1) - new upstream version.

ruby-rack (2.1.1-2) - migration to unstable.

ruby-rack-oauth2 (1.11.0-1) - fix FTBFS.

ruby-crb-blast (0.6.9-4) - fix regression caused by ruby-bio (#954536).

ruby-sassc-rails (2.1.2-5) - Add `Breaks+Replaces` for ruby-sass-rails (#952682 and #954544).

libdbd-firebird-perl (1.32-1) - new upstream version.

ruby-minitest-global-expectations (1.0.1-1) - NEW (#956051).

golang-github-cheekybits-genny (1.0.0-1) - NEW (#956128).

node-clipboard (2.0.6+ds-1~bpo10+1) - backporting to buster.

micro (2.0.2-3) - use `cut -d'-' -f1` to just show upstream version.

golang-github-go-errors-errors (1.0.1-4) - fix build and autopkgtest (#954521).

micro (2.0.2-3~bpo10+1) - backporting to buster.

libgit2 (1.0.0+dfsg.1-1) - new upstream version.

micro (2.0.3-1) - add support for +LINE:COL flag syntax for cursor position (#953427).

Other $things:

Attended Ruby team meeting. Logs here.

Attended Perl team LHF. Report here.

Sponsored a lot of uploads for William Desportes and Adam Cecile.

Mentoring for newcomers.

FTP Trainee reviewing.

Moderation of -project mailing list.

Applied for DUCI project for Google Summer of Code 2020.

Ruby2.7 Migration:

Ruby2.7 was recently released on 25th December, 2019. Santa s gift. Believe it or not. We, the Debian Ruby team, have been trying hard to make it migrate to testing. And it finally happened. The default version in testing is ruby2.7. Here s the news! \o/
Here s what I worked on this month for this transition.

Upstream: Opened several issues and proposed patches (in the form of PRs):

Issue #35 against `encryptor` for Ruby2.7 test failures.

Issue #28 against `image_science` for removing relative paths.

Issue #106 against `ffi-yajl` for Ruby2.7 test failures.

PR #5 against `aggregate` for simply using `require`.

PR #6 against `aggregate` for modernizing CI and adding Ruby 2.5 and 2.7 support.

Issue #13 against `espeak-ruby` for Ruby2.7 test failures.

Issue #4 against `tty-which` for test failures in general.

Issue #11 against `packable` for Ruby2.7 test failures. PR #12 has been proposed.

Issue #10 against `growl` for test failures and proposed an initial patch.

Downstream: I fixed and uploaded the following packages in Debian:

puppet-beaker (4.21.0-1) - new upstream version and fix FTBFS (#956595 and #954614).

ruby-fakeweb (1.3.0+git20170806+dfsg1-2) - fix autopkgtest (#952042).

puppet-lint (2.4.2-2) - fix FTBFS for Ruby2.7 migration.

ruby-hoe (3.22.1+dfsg1-1) - new upstream version and fix FTBFS (#952041).

rake-compiler (1.0.5-2) - fix FTBFS.

ruby-aggregate (0.2.2-3) - fix autopkgtest.

facter (3.11.0-4) - fix autopkgtest (#955582).

Debian LTS

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success.
This was my seventh month as a Debian LTS paid contributor. I was assigned 24.00 hours and worked on the following things:

CVE Fixes and Announcements:

Issued DLA 2178-1, fixing CVE-2020-11728 and CVE-2020-11729, for awl.
For Debian 8 Jessie , these problems have been fixed in version 0.55-1+deb8u1.

Issued DLA 2179-1, fixing CVE-2020-10968, CVE-2020-10969, CVE-2020-11111, CVE-2020-11112, CVE-2020-11113, CVE-2020-11619, and CVE-2020-11620, for jackson-databind.
For Debian 8 Jessie , these problems have been fixed in version 2.4.2-2+deb8u14.

Issued DLA 2180-1, fixing CVE-2020-11736, for file-roller.
For Debian 8 Jessie , this problem has been fixed in version 3.14.1-1+deb8u2.

Issued DLA 2190-1, fixing CVE-2020-10663, for ruby-json.
For Debian 8 Jessie , this problem has been fixed in version 1.8.1-1+deb8u1.

Other LTS Work:

Triaged jackson-databind, libconvert-asn1-perl, file-roller, awl, dom4j, and openvpn.

Mark CVE-2013-7488/libconvert-asn1-perl as no-dsa for Jessie.

Mark CVE-2020-11810/openvpn as no-dsa for Jessie.

Ping ntp s upstream for relevant commits.

Mark CVE-2019-16782/ruby-rack as no-dsa for Jessie.

Attended first LTS meeting. Logs here.

General discussion on LTS mailing list.

Other(s)

Sometimes it gets hard to categorize work/things into a particular category.
That s why I am writing all of those things inside this category.
This includes two sub-categories and they are as follows.

Personal: This month I could get the following things done:

Most importantly, I finally migrated to a new website. Huge UI imporvement! \o/
From Jekyll to Hugo, it was not easy. But it was worth it! Many thanks to Luiz for writing hugo-coder, Clement, and Samyak!
If you find any flaws, issues and pull requests are welcomed at utkarsh2102/utkarsh2102.com

Wrote battery-alert, a mini-project of my own to show battery alerts at <10% and >90%.
Written in shell, it brings me all the satisfaction as it has saved my life on many occasions.
And guess what? It has more users than just myself!
Reviews and patches are welcomed \o/

Mentored in HackOn Hackathon. Thanks to Manvi for reaching out!
It was fun to see people developing some really nice projects.

Thanks to Ray and John, I became a GitLab Hero!
(I am yet to figure out my role and responibility though)

Atteneded Intro Sec Con and had the most fun!
Heard Ian s keynote and attended other talks and learned how to use WireShark!

Open Source: Again, this contains all the things that I couldn t categorize earlier.
Opened several issues and pull requests:

Issue #297 against `hugo-coder`, asking to enable RSS feed for blogs.

PR #316 for `hugo-coder` for fixing the above issue myself.

Issue #173 against `arbre` for requesting a release.

Issue #104 against `combustion`, asking to relax dependency on rubocop. Fixed in this commit.

Issue #16 against `ffi-compiler` for requesting to fix homepage and license.

Issue #57 against `gographviz` for requesting a release.

Issue #14 against `crb-blast`, suggesting compatability with bio 2.0.x.

Issue #58 against `uniform_notifier` for asking to drop the use of ruby-growl.

PR #2072 for `polybar`, adding installation instructions on Debian systems.

Until next time.
`:wq` for today.

Get the Champagne ready, we have released the final images of TeX Live 2020.

Due to COVID-19, DVD production will be delayed, but we have decided to release the current image and update the net installer. The .iso image is available on CTAN, and the net installer will pull all the newest stuff. Currently we are working on getting those packages updated during the freeze to the newest level in TeX Live. Before providing the full list of changes, here a few things I would like to pick out:

LuaHBTeX: lualatex is now based on LuaHBTeX, meaning that one can use the HarfBuzz renderer which in particular for complicated scripts (Tibetan, Bengali, ) works better than the Lua-based renderer. Note that luatex itself remains normal LuaTeX, only the luaLAtex one uses LuaHBTeX.
Versioned containers: this is a change under the hood we have been working on slowly over the last half year. Many distributions had problems with the changing content of our package containers (foobar.tar.xz while the name never changed. We have now changed all the infrastructure and TeX Live Manager to work with versioned containers foobar.rNNNNN.tar.xz. This should help quite some distributors!
Haranoaji ( ): the default font for Japanese text was for long time the IPAex fonts, one of the few free fonts available. With 2020 we have switched to Haranoaji font family, which provides better support for JIS90/04 charsets, and more weights.

Most of the above features have been available already either via tlpretest or via regular updates, but are now fully released on the DVD version. Thanks goes to all the developers, builders, the great CTAN team, and everyone who has contributed to this release! Finally, here are the changes as listed in the master TeX Live documentation: General:

The \input primitive in all TeX engines, including tex, now also accepts a group-delimited lename argument, as a system-dependent extension. The usage with a standard space/token-delimited lename is completely unchanged. The group-delimited argument was previously implemented in LuaTeX; now it is available in all engines. ASCII double quote characters ( ) are removed from the lename, but it is otherwise left unchanged after tokenization. This does not currently a ect LaTeX s \input command, as that is a macro rede nition of the standard \input primitive.
New option cnf-line for kpsewhich, tex, mf, and all other engines, to support arbitrary con guration settings on the command line.
The addition of various primitives to various engines in this and previous years is intended to result in a common set of functionality available across all engines (LaTeX News #31).

epTeX, eupTeX: New primitives \Uchar, \Ucharcat, \current(x)spacingmode, \ifincsname; revise \fontchar?? and \iffontchar. For eupTeX only: \currentcjktoken. LuaTeX: Integration with HarfBuzz library, available as new engines luahbtex (used for lualatex) and luajithbtex. New primitives: \eTeXgluestretchorder, \eTeXglueshrinkorder. pdfTeX: New primitive \pdfmajorversion; this merely changes the version number in the PDF output; it has no e ect on any PDF content. \pdfximage and similar now search for image les in the same way as \openin. pTeX: New primitives \ifjfont, \iftfont. Also in epTeX, upTeX, eupTeX. XeTeX: Fixes for \Umathchardef, \XeTeXinterchartoks, \pdfsavepos. Dvips: Output encodings for bitmap fonts, for better copy/paste capabilities (https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb40-2/tb125rokicki-type3search.pdf). MacTeX: MacTeX and x86_64-darwin now require 10.13 or higher (High Sierra, Mojave, and Catalina); x86_64-darwinlegacy supports 10.6 and newer. MacTeX is notarized and command line programs have hardened runtimes, as now required by Apple for install packages. BibDesk and TeX Live Utility are not in MacTeX because they are not notarized, but a README le lists urls where they can be obtained. tlmgr and infrastructure:

Automatically retry (once) packages that fail to download.
New option tlmgr check texmfdbs, to to check consistency of ls-R les and !! speci cations for each tree.
Use versioned lenames for the package containers, as in tlnet/archive/pkgname.rNNN.tar.xz; should be invisible to users, but a notable change in distribution.
catalogue-date information no longer propagated from the TeX Catalogue, since it was often unrelated to package updates.

Join me in the rabbit hole of git repository verification, and how we could improve it.

Problem statement As part of my work on automating install procedures at Tor, I ended up doing things like:

git clone REPO
./REPO/bootstrap.sh

... something eerily similar to the infamous curl pipe bash method which I often decry. As a short-term workaround, I relied on the SHA-1 checksum of the repository to make sure I have the right code, by running this both on a "trusted" (ie. "local") repository and the remote, then visually comparing the output:

$ git show-ref master
9f9a9d70dd1f1e84dec69a12ebc536c1f05aed1c refs/heads/master

One problem with this approach is that SHA-1 is now considered as flawed as MD5 so it can't be used as an authentication mechanism anymore. It's also fundamentally difficult to compare hashes for humans. The other flaw with comparing local and remote checksums is that we assume we trust the local repository. But how can I trust that repository? I can either:

audit all the code present and all the changes done to it after
or trust someone else to do so

The first option here is not practical in most cases. In this specific use case, I have audited the source code -- I'm the author, even -- what I need is to transfer that code over to another server. (Note that I am replacing those procedures with Fabric, which makes this use case moot for now as the trust path narrows to "trust the SSH server" which I already had anyways. But it's still important for my fellow Tor developers who worry about trusting the git server, especially now that we're moving to GitLab.) But anyways, in most cases, I do need to trust some other fellow developer I collaborate with. To do this, I would need to trust the entire chain between me and them:

the git client
the operating system
the hardware
the network (HTTPS and the CA cartel, specifically)
then the hosting provider (and that hardware/software stack)
and then backwards all the way back to that other person's computer

I want to shorten that chain as much as possible, make it "peer to peer", so to speak. Concretely, it would eliminate the hosting provider and the network, as attackers.

OpenPGP verification My first reaction is (perhaps perversely) to "use OpenPGP" for this. I figured that if I sign every commit, then I can just check the latest commit and see if the signature is good. The first problem here is that this is surprisingly hard. Let's pick some arbitrary commit I did recently:

commit b3c538898b0ed4e31da27fc9ca22cb55e1de0000
Author: Antoine Beaupr  <anarcat@debian.org>
Date:   Mon Mar 16 14:37:28 2020 -0400
    fix test autoloading
    pytest only looks for file names matching  test  by default. We inline
    tests inside the source code directly, so hijack that.
diff --git a/fabric_tpa/pytest.ini b/fabric_tpa/pytest.ini
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..71004ea
--- /dev/null
+++ b/fabric_tpa/pytest.ini
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+[pytest]
+# we inline tests directly in the source code
+python_files = *.py

That's the output of git log -p in my local repository. I signed that commit, yet git log is not telling me anything special. To check the signature, I need something special: --show-signature, which looks like this:

commit b3c538898b0ed4e31da27fc9ca22cb55e1de0000
gpg: Signature faite le lun 16 mar 2020 14:37:53 EDT
gpg:                avec la clef RSA 7B164204D096723B019635AB3EA1DDDDB261D97B
gpg: Bonne signature de  Antoine Beaupr  <anarcat@orangeseeds.org>  [ultime]
gpg:                 alias  Antoine Beaupr  <anarcat@torproject.org>  [ultime]
gpg:                 alias  Antoine Beaupr  <anarcat@anarc.at>  [ultime]
gpg:                 alias  Antoine Beaupr  <anarcat@koumbit.org>  [ultime]
gpg:                 alias  Antoine Beaupr  <anarcat@debian.org>  [ultime]
Author: Antoine Beaupr  <anarcat@debian.org>
Date:   Mon Mar 16 14:37:28 2020 -0400
    fix test autoloading
    pytest only looks for file names matching  test  by default. We inline
    tests inside the source code directly, so hijack that.

Can you tell if this is a valid signature? If you speak a little french, maybe you can! But even if you would, you are unlikely to see that output on your own computer. What you would see instead is:

commit b3c538898b0ed4e31da27fc9ca22cb55e1de0000
gpg: Signature made Mon Mar 16 14:37:53 2020 EDT
gpg:                using RSA key 7B164204D096723B019635AB3EA1DDDDB261D97B
gpg: Can't check signature: No public key
Author: Antoine Beaupr  <anarcat@debian.org>
Date:   Mon Mar 16 14:37:28 2020 -0400
    fix test autoloading
    pytest only looks for file names matching  test  by default. We inline
    tests inside the source code directly, so hijack that.

Important part:

Can't check signature: No public key. No public
key

. Because of course you would see that. Why would you have my key lying around, unless you're me. Or, to put it another way, why would that server I'm installing from scratch have a copy of my OpenPGP certificate? Because I'm a Debian developer, my key is actually part of the 800 keys in the debian-keyring package, signed by the APT repositories. So I have a trust path. But that won't work for someone who is not a Debian developer. It will also stop working when my key expires in that repository, as it already has on Debian buster (current stable). So I can't assume I have a trust path there either. One could work with a trusted keyring like we do in the Tor and Debian project, and only work inside that project, that said. But I still feel uncomfortable with those commands. Both git log and git show will happily succeed (return code 0 in the shell) even though the signature verification failed on the commits. Same with git pull and git merge, which will happily push your branch ahead even if the remote has unsigned or badly signed commits. To actually verify commits (or tags), you need the git verify-commit (or git verify-tag) command, which seems to do the right thing:

$ LANG=C.UTF-8 git verify-commit b3c538898b0ed4e31da27fc9ca22cb55e1de0000
gpg: Signature made Mon Mar 16 14:37:53 2020 EDT
gpg:                using RSA key 7B164204D096723B019635AB3EA1DDDDB261D97B
gpg: Can't check signature: No public key
[1]$

At least it fails with some error code (1, above). But it's not flexible: I can't use it to verify that a "trusted" developer (say one that is in a trusted keyring) signed a given commit. Also, it is not clear what a failure means. Is a signature by an expired certificate okay? What if the key is signed by some random key in my personal keyring? Why should that be trusted?

` that's the main reason i've been reluctant to sign git commits. i haven't heard anyone offer a better subsequent step. if torproject could outline something useful, then i'd be less averse to the practice. i'm also pretty sad that git remains stuck on sha1, esp. given the recent demonstrations. all the fancy strong signatures you can make in git won't matter if the underlying git repo gets changed out from under the signature due to sha1's weakness
In other words, even if git implements the arcane GnuPG dialect just so, and would allow us to setup the trust chain just right, and would give us meaningful and workable error messages, it still would fail because it's still stuck in SHA-1. There is work underway to fix that, but in February 2020, Jonathan Corbet described that work as being in a "relatively unstable state", which is hardly something I would like to trust to verify code. Also, when you clone a fresh new repository, you might get an entirely different repository, with a different root and set of commits. The concept of "validity" of a commit, in itself, is hard to establish in this case, because an hostile server could put you backwards in time, on a different branch, or even on an entirely different repository. Git will warn you about a different repository root with `warning: no common commits` but that's easy to miss. And complete branch switches, rebases and resets from upstream are hardly more noticeable: only a tiny plus sign (`+`) instead of a star (`*`) will tell you that a reset happened, along with a warning (`forced update`) on the same line. Miss those and your git history can be compromised.

Possible ways forward I don't consider the current implementation of OpenPGP signatures in git to be sufficient. Maybe, eventually, it will mature away from SHA-1 and the interface will be more reasonable, but I don't see that happening in the short term. So what do we do?

git evtag The git-evtag extension is a replacement for `git tag -s`. It's not designed to sign commits (it only verifies tags) but at least it uses a stronger algorithm (SHA-512) to checksum the tree, and will include everything in that tree, including blobs. If that sounds expensive to you, don't worry too much: it takes about 5 seconds to tag the Linux kernel, according to the author. Unfortunately, that checksum is then signed with GnuPG, in a manner similar to git itself, in that it exposes GnuPG output (which can be confusing) and is likely similarly vulnerable to mis-implementation of the GnuPG dialect as git itself. It also does not allow you to specify a keyring to verify against, so you need to trust GnuPG to make sense of the garbage that lives in your personal keyring (and, trust me, it doesn't). And besides, `git-evtag` is fundamentally the same as signed git tags: checksum everything and sign with GnuPG. The difference is it uses SHA-512 instead of SHA-1, but that's something git will eventually fix itself anyways.

kernel patch attestations The kernel also faces this problem. Linus Torvalds signs the releases with GnuPG, but patches fly all over mailing list without any form of verification apart from clear-text email. So Konstantin Ryabitsev has proposed a new protocol to sign git patches which uses SHA256 to checksum the patch metadata, commit message and the patch itself, and then sign that with GnuPG. It's unclear to me what this solves, if anything, at all. As dkg argues, it would seem better to add OpenPGP support to `git-send-email` and teach git tools to recognize that (e.g. `git-am`) at least if you're going to keep using OpenPGP anyways. And furthermore, it doesn't resolve the problems associated with verifying a full archive either, as it only attests "patches".

jcat Unhappy with the current state of affairs, the author of fwupd (Richard Hughes) wrote his own protocol as well, called jcat, which provides signed "catalog files" similar to the ones provided in Microsoft windows. It consists of a "gzip-compressed JSON catalog files, which can be used to store GPG, PKCS-7 and SHA-256 checksums for each file". So yes, it is yet again another wrapper to GnuPG, probably with all the flaws detailed above, on top of being a niche implementation, disconnected from git.

The Update Framework One more thing dkg correctly identified is:
`<dkg>` anarcat: even if you could do exactly what you describe, there are still some interesting wrinkles that i think would be problems for you. the big one: "git repo's latest commits" is a loophole big enough to drive a truck through. if your adversary controls that repo, then they get to decide which commits to include in the repo. (since every git repo is a view into the same git repo, just some have more commits than others)
In other words, unless you have a repository that has frequent commits (either because of activity or by a bot generating fake commits), you have to rely on the central server to decide what "the latest version" is. This is the kind of problems that binary package distribution systems like APT and TUF solve correctly. Unfortunately, those don't apply to source code distribution, at least not in git form: TUF only deals with "repositories" and binary packages, and APT only deals with binary packages and source tarballs. That said, there's actually no reason why git could not support the TUF specification. Maybe TUF could be the solution to ensure end-to-end cryptographic integrity of the source code itself. OpenPGP-signed tarballs are nice, and signed git tags can be useful, but from my experience, a lot of OpenPGP (or, more accurately, GnuPG) derived tools are brittle and do not offer clear guarantees, and definitely not to the level that TUF tries to address. This would require changes on the git servers and clients, but I think it would be worth it.

Other Projects

OpenBSD There are other tools trying to do parts of what GnuPG is doing, for example minisign and OpenBSD's signify. But they do not integrate with git at all right now. Although I did find a hack] to use signify with git, it's kind of gross...

Golang Unsurprisingly, this is a problem everyone is trying to solve. Golang is planning on hosting a notary which would leverage a "certificate-transparency-style tamper-proof log" which would be ran by Google (see the spec for details). But that doesn't resolve the "evil server" attack, if we treat Google as an adversary (and we should).

Python Python had OpenPGP going for a while on PyPI, but it's unclear if it ever did anything at all. Now the plan seems to be to use TUF but my hunch is that the complexity of the specification is keeping that from moving ahead.

Docker Docker and the container ecosystem has, in theory, moved to TUF in the form of Notary, "a project that allows anyone to have trust over arbitrary collections of data". In practice however, in my somewhat limited experience, setting up TUF and image verification in Docker is far from trivial.

Android and iOS Even in what is possibly one of the strongest models (at least in terms of user friendliness), mobile phones are surprisingly unclear about those kind of questions. I had to ask if Android had end-to-end authentication and I am still not clear on the answer. I have no idea of what iOS does.

Conclusion One of the core problems with everything here is the common usability aspect of cryptography, and specifically the usability of verification procedures. We have become pretty good at encryption. The harder part (and a requirement for proper encryption) is verification. It seems that problem still remains unsolved, in terms of usability. Even Signal, widely considered to be a success in terms of adoption and usability, doesn't properly solve that problem, as users regularly ignore "The security number has changed" warnings... So, even though they deserve a lot of credit in other areas, it seems unlikely that hardcore C hackers (e.g. git and kernel developers) will be able to resolve that problem without at least a little bit of help. And TUF seems like the state of the art specification around here, it would seem wise to start adopting it in the git community as well. Update: git 2.26 introduced a new `gpg.minTrustLevel` to "tell various signature verification codepaths the required minimum trust level", presumably to control how Git will treat keys in your keyrings, assuming the "trust database" is valid and up to date. For an interesting narrative of how "normal" (without PGP) git verification can fail, see also A Git Horror Story: Repository Integrity With Signed Commits.

Search Results: "orv"

6 January 2022

S1: CPU Stop and Cache Wipe The CPU caches are wiped and then the CPU is stopped, which the spec notes is equivalent to the WBINVD instruction followed by the STPCLK signal on x86. However, nothing is powered off.

S2: Processor Power off The system stops the processor and most system clocks (except the real time clock), then powers off the processor. Upon waking, the processor will not continue what it was doing before, but instead use its reset vector4.

S3: Suspend/Sleep (Suspend-to-RAM) Mostly equivalent to S2, but hardware ensures that only memory and whatever other hardware memory requires are powered.

S4: Hibernate (Suspend-to-Disk) In this state, all hardware is completely powered off and an image of the system is written to disk, to be restored from upon reapplying power. Writing the system image to disk can be handled by the operating system if supported, or by the firmware.

Linux Sleep States Linux has its own set of sleep states which mostly correspond with ACPI states.

Standby This is equivalent to ACPI S1.

Suspend-to-RAM This is equivalent to ACPI S3.

31 December 2021

4 August 2021

1 July 2021

27 May 2021

9 April 2021

5 April 2021

9 February 2021

18 January 2021

9 January 2021

19 December 2020

16 November 2020

28 October 2020

16 October 2020

21 September 2020

25 August 2020

Table of contents

Authors Tim (tim at systemli.org) Jonas (jonas at freesources.org)

24 July 2020

1 May 2020

Other $things: Attended Ruby team meeting. Logs here. Attended Perl team LHF. Report here. Sponsored a lot of uploads for William Desportes and Adam Cecile. Mentoring for newcomers. FTP Trainee reviewing. Moderation of -project mailing list. Applied for DUCI project for Google Summer of Code 2020.

Other(s) Sometimes it gets hard to categorize work/things into a particular category. That s why I am writing all of those things inside this category. This includes two sub-categories and they are as follows.

10 April 2020

18 March 2020