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Whether you just downloaded Firefox, or you’ve been with us since the beginning, you are a vital part of helping us make the internet a better place. Here's a sneak peak at what's coming next!

If you love exploit mitigations, you may have heard of a new system call named mseal landing into the Linux kernel’s 6.10 release, providing a protection called “memory sealing.” Beyond notes from the authors, very little information about this mitigation exists. In this blog post, we’ll explain what this syscall is, including how it’s different from prior memory protection schemes and how it works in the kernel to protect virtual memory. We’ll also describe the particular exploit scenarios that mseal helps stop in Linux userspace, such as stopping malicious permissions tampering and preventing memory unmapping attacks.

Memory sealing allows developers to make memory regions immutable from illicit modifications during program runtime. When a virtual memory address (VMA) range is sealed, an attacker with a code execution primitive cannot perform subsequent virtual memory operations to change the VMA’s permissions or modify how it is laid out for their benefit.

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mseal digresses from prior memory protection schemes on Linux because it is a syscall tailored specifically for exploit mitigation against remote attackers seeking code execution rather than potentially local ones looking to exfiltrate sensitive secrets in-memory.

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From the disallowed operations, we can discern two particular exploit scenarios that memory sealing will prevent:

• Tampering with a VMA’s permissions. Notably, not allowing executable permissions to be set can stop the revival of shellcode-based attacks.
• “Hole-punching” through arbitrary unmapping/remapping of a memory region, mitigating data-only exploits that take advantage of refilling memory regions with attacker-controlled data.

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There are likely many other use cases and scenarios that we didn’t cover. After all, mseal is the newest kid on the block in the Linux kernel! As the glibc integration completes and matures, we expect to see improved iterations for the syscall to meet particular demands, including fleshing out the ultimate use of the flags parameter.

Drivers passing through San Francisco have a new roadside distraction to consider: billboards calling out businesses that don't cough up for the open source code that they use.

The signs are the work of the Open Source Pledge – a group that launched earlier this month. It asks businesses that make use of open source code to pledge $2,000 per developer to support projects that develop the code. So far, 25 companies have signed up – but project co-founder Chad Whitacre wants bigger firms to pay their dues, too.

Over the past 3 years the pace of development in APS has steadily fallen off as maintainers including myself have moved on to other things. I no longer have time and motivation to dedicate to this project, and in the absence of significant external contributions there is no-one else I can offer the project's stewardship to.

To that effect, I will be archiving the repository on Monday, October 14th 2024 at 7AM GST. In the situation that a serious and viable fork emerges, I will help them as much as I can with the transition. The criteria for what counts as "serious and viable" is entirely vibes-driven for now, and may become more specific in the future. In case I determine that a fork does not live up to my made up standard, they will have to come up with a slightly more creative name than "Android Password Store" and watch low 4 figures of cash wither away in OpenCollective's bank account.

Pull request #10974 introduces the @bitwarden/sdk-internal dependency which is needed to build the desktop client. The dependency contains a licence statement which contains the following clause:

You may not use this SDK to develop applications for use with software other than Bitwarden (including non-compatible implementations of Bitwarden) or to develop another SDK.

This violates freedom 0.

It is not possible to build desktop-v2024.10.0 (or, likely, current master) without removing this dependency.

We are excited to announce the launch of a dedicated fund aimed at providing financial assistance to Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FOSS/FLOSS) projects globally, with an annual commitment of $1 million. I will use the FOSS acronym in this post hereafter.

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For us, FLOSS/fund is about hacker goodwill, reciprocity, and common sense business strategy. We invite you to apply for funding. If you would like to understand the motivations behind this, a bit of storytelling lies ahead.

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To initiate and give this experiment a serious shot, FLOSS/fund will accept funding requests from projects through a publicly accessible funding.json file hosted on their respositories or websites. This file is not meant to convey everything there is to know—an impossible task—but to solicit interest and communicate enough to ensure discoverability which would not be possible otherwise. Refer to the funding.json docs to know more.

Applications that come through to the FLOSS/fund will be indexed and published on the dir.floss.fund directory / portal, making them publicly discoverable by anyone interested in supporting projects. This is going to be an interesting experiment. Fingers crossed!

Google is developing a Terminal app for Android that'll let you run Linux apps. It'll download and run Debian in a VM for you.

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Engineers at Google started work on a new Terminal app for Android a couple of weeks ago. This Terminal app is part of the Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) and contains a WebView that connects to a Linux virtual machine via a local IP address, allowing you to run Linux commands from the Android host. Initially, you had to manually enable this Terminal app using a shell command and then configure the Linux VM yourself. However, in recent days, Google began work on integrating the Terminal app into Android as well as turning it into an all-in-one app for running a Linux distro in a VM.

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Google is still working on improving the Terminal app as well as AVF before shipping this feature. AVF already supports graphics and some input options, but it’s preparing to add support for backing up and restoring snapshots, nested virtualization, and devices with an x86_64 architecture. It’s also preparing to add some settings pages to the Terminal app, which is pretty barebones right now apart from a menu to copy the IP address and stop the existing VM instance. The settings pages will let you resize the disk, configure port forwarding, and potentially recover partitions.

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If you’re wondering why you’d want to run Linux apps on Android, then this feature is probably not for you. Google added Linux support to Chrome OS so developers with Chromebooks can run Linux apps that are useful for development. For example, Linux support on Chrome OS allows developers to run the Linux version of Android Studio, the recommended IDE for Android app development, on Chromebooks. It also lets them run Linux command line tools safely and securely in a container.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/1225458

Powered by the latest Linux 6.11 kernel series, Ubuntu 24.10 features the latest and greatest GNOME 47 desktop environment for the Ubuntu Desktop flavor with additional patches for Mutter and GNOME Shell to enhance stability and performance. In addition, the Ubuntu Dock now visualizes Snap refreshes and includes better handling for PWAs installed via the Chromium Snap.

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Under the hood, Ubuntu 24.10 comes with an updated toolchain that includes GCC 14.2, GNU Binutils 2.43.1, GNU C Library 2.40, LLVM 19, Rust 1.80, Go 1.23, OpenSSL 3.3, systemd 256.5, Netplan 1.1, and .NET 8. The Ubuntu Desktop installer was also updated with support for local file paths for autoinstall import.

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Ubuntu 24.10 will be supported for only nine months, until July 2025. If you’re looking for long-term support, you should download and install Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat), which is supported until at least 2029.

Official Website: Ubuntu 24.10 (Oracular Oriole)

The Linux Mint 22.1 distribution was slated for release in December 2024 with a revamped Cinnamon theme and better package management.

Slated for release in December 2024, near the Christmas holidays, Linux Mint 22.1 will ship with the soon-to-be-released Cinnamon 6.4 desktop environment featuring a revamped theme that’s much darker and contrasted than before, rounded elements, redesigned dialogs, and a gap between the applets and the panel.

More from the Mint Monthly News: September 2024

The transition towards Aptkit and Captain is now finished. Starting with Linux Mint 22.1, set to be released this December, none of our projects will depend on aptdaemon, synaptic, gdebi or apturl anymore.

Exploit of a combination of several bugs - Overhyped but not that severe - Fixes already available

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Canonical’s security team has acted immediately to quickly apply the patches which Michael Sweet (author and maintainer of CUPS) had already prepared for CUPS, cups-browsed, libcups-filters, libppd, and cups-filters (in the time from the first report until then I was some days off and I was also on the Open Source Summit Europe, thanks, Michael Sweet, for stepping in, also thanks to Zdenek Dohnal from Red Hat) to the appropriate in all supported Ubuntu versions, so that at the time of disclosure most fixes were already in place. They also reported in an Ubuntu blog. They tell users what to do, from turning off cups-browsed or at least its legacy CUPS browsing support to updating their systems as the fixes were already available. Thanks a lot to Seth Arnold, Marc Deslauriers, Diogo Sousa, Mark Esler, Luci Stanescu, and more.

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The X post really overhyped the vulnerability. Attacks from the internet are not very probable due to the fact that servers on the internet do not have cups-browsed and CUPS installed and CUPS/cups-browsed setups are there usually only in NAT-protected local networks with desktop machines and print servers. And the remote code execution is also rather restricted, as CUPS filters are not running as root, but as the system user “lp” which cannot even read user’s home directories. In addition, the remote code execution only happens when a user actually prints a job on the fake printer. Actually assigned scores ended up between 8.4 and 9.1.

There's been talk of this unauthenticated RCE vulnerability coming with a CVSS 9.9 rating but none of the technical details were publicly known until it was made public just now at the top of the hour. Simone Margaritelli discovered this vulnerability and has shared a write-up around this potentially very impactful Linux vulnerability.

This vulnerability, fortunately, doesn't affect the Linux kernel but rather CUPS... The print server commonly used on Linux systems and other platforms.

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From Attacking UNIX Systems via CUPS, Part I:

"A remote unauthenticated attacker can silently replace existing printers’ (or install new ones) IPP urls with a malicious one, resulting in arbitrary command execution (on the computer) when a print job is started (from that computer)."

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This remote code execution issue can be exploited across the public Internet via a UDP packet to port 631 without needing any authentication, assuming the CUPS port is open through your router/firewall. LAN attacks are also possible via spoofing zeroconf / mDNS / DNS-SD advertisements.

Besides CUPS being used on Linux distributions, it also affects some BSDs, Oracle Solaris, Google Chrome OS, and others.

As of writing there is no Linux fix available for this high profile security issue. In the meantime it's recommended to disable and remove the "cups-browsed" service, updating CUPS, or at least blocking all traffic to UDP port 631.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/1167059

COSMIC’s Alpha 2 release builds upon that work with functionality built out for Files, additional Settings pages, considerable infrastructure work for screen reader support+, and some highly requested window management features. System76 is ecstatic at the level of excitement and collaboration so far with alpha testers and early app & applet developers, and we look forward to seeing what comes from these new additions.

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The second COSMIC alpha will be released on September 26th. Those participating in Alpha 1 on Pop!_OS can simply update through the COSMIC App Store to transition. This alpha will be followed by monthly alpha releases until all core features have been built out.

More coverage:

• COSMIC DE Alpha 2 Released, This is What’s New

• COSMIC Alpha 2 Released with Bluetooth Settings, Much-Improved File Manager

• Cosmic Desktop Alpha 2: BIG PROGRESS for a month of work!