TechSNAP Video

All Good Things | TechSNAP 430

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 29 May 2020 00:20:00 +0200

It's a storage showdown as Jim and Wes bust some performance myths about RAID and ZFS.

Plus our favorite features from Fedora 32, and why Wes loves DNF.

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Curious About Caddy | TechSNAP 429

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 15 May 2020 00:20:00 +0200

Jim and Wes take the latest release of the Caddy web server for a spin, investigate Intel's Comet Lake desktop CPUs, and explore the fight over 5G between the US Military and the FCC.

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RAID Reality Check | TechSNAP 428

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 01 May 2020 00:21:00 +0200

We dive deep into the world of RAID, and discuss how to choose the right topology to optimize performance and resilience.

Plus Cloudflare steps up its campaign to secure BGP, and why you might want to trade in cron for systemd timers.

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Gigahertz Games | TechSNAP 427

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 00:20:00 +0200

Jim finally gets his hands on an AMD Ryzen 9 laptop, some great news about Wi-Fi 6e, and our take on FreeBSD on the desktop.

Plus Intel's surprisingly overclockable laptop CPU, why you shouldn't freak out about 5G, and the incredible creativity of the Demoscene.

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Storage Stories | TechSNAP 426

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 03 Apr 2020 00:21:00 +0200

We take a look at Cloudflare's impressive Linux disk encryption speed-ups, and explore how zoned storage tools like dm-zoned and zonefs might help mitigate the downsides of Shingled Magnetic Recording.

Plus we celebrate WireGuard's inclusion in the Linux 5.6 kernel, and fight some exFAT FUD.

Links:

WireGuard VPN makes it to 1.0.0—and into the next Linux kernel — It's a good day for WireGuard users—DKMS builds will soon be behind us.
Linux 5.6 Is The Most Exciting Kernel In Years With So Many New Features
fs: New zonefs file system — zonefs is a very simple file system exposing each zone of a zoned block device as a file. This is intended to simplify implementation of application zoned block device raw access support by allowing switching to the well known POSIX file API rather than relying on direct block device file ioctls and read/write.
Ama-ZNS! Zonefs File-System Will Land with Linux® 5.6
What is Zoned Storage and the Zoned Storage Initiative? — Zoned Storage is a new paradigm in storage motivated by the incredible explosion of data. Our data-driven society is increasingly dependent on data for every-day life and extreme scale data management is becoming a necessity.
Linux Kernel Support - ZonedStorage.io
dm-zoned — The dm-zoned device mapper target exposes a zoned block device as a regular block device.
Device Mapper - ZonedStorage.io
What are PMR and SMR hard disk drives?
Beware of SMR drives in PMR clothing — WD and Seagate are both submarining Drive-managed SMR (DM-SMR) drives into channels, disguised as "normal" drives.
Beware of SMR drives in PMR clothing [Reddit]
The exFAT filesystem is coming to Linux—Paragon software’s not happy about it — When software and operating system giant Microsoft announced its support for inclusion of the exFAT filesystem directly into the Linux kernel back in August, it didn't get a ton of press coverage. But filesystem vendor Paragon Software clearly noticed this month's merge of the Microsoft-approved, largely Samsung-authored version of exFAT into the VFS for-next repository, which will in turn merge into Linux 5.7—and Paragon doesn't seem happy about it.
The New Microsoft exFAT File-System Driver Is Set To Land With Linux 5.7
Speeding up Linux disk encryption - The Cloudflare Blog — Encrypting data at rest is vital for Cloudflare with more than 200 data centres across the world. In this post, we will investigate the performance of disk encryption on Linux and explain how we made it at least two times faster for ourselves and our customers.
Add inline dm-crypt patch and xtsproxy Crypto API patch

Ryzen Gets Real | TechSNAP 425

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 20 Mar 2020 00:20:00 +0100

We take a look at AMD's upcoming line of Ryzen 4000 mobile CPUs, and share our first impressions of Ubuntu 20.04's approach to ZFS on root.

Plus Let's Encrypt's certificate validation mix-up, Intel's questionable new power supply design, and more.

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AMD Inside | TechSNAP 424

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 06 Mar 2020 00:20:00 +0100

Cloudflare recently embarked on an epic quest to choose a CPU for its next-generation server build, so we explore the importance of requests per watt, the benefits of full memory encryption, and why AMD won.

Plus Mozilla's rollout of DNS over HTTPS has begun, a big milestone for Let's Encrypt, and more.

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Hopeful for HAMR | TechSNAP 423

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 21 Feb 2020 18:10:00 +0100

We explore the potential of heat-assisted magnetic recording and get excited about a possibly persistent L2ARC.

Plus Jim's journeys with Clear Linux, and why Ubuntu 18.04.4 is a maintenance release worth talking about.

Links:

Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS: here's what's new — It's not as shiny and exciting as entirely new versions, of course, but it does pack in some worthwhile security and bugfix upgrades, as well as support for more and newer hardware.
18.04.4 - Ubuntu Wiki
MobaXterm — Enhanced terminal for Windows with X11 server, tabbed SSH client, network tools and much more.
Linux distro review: Intel’s own Clear Linux OS — There's not much question that Clear Linux is your best bet if you want to turn in the best possible benchmark numbers. The question not addressed here is, what's it like to run Clear Linux as a daily driver? We were curious, so we took it for a spin.
Clear Linux* Project — Clear Linux OS is an open source, rolling release Linux distribution optimized for performance and security, from the Cloud to the Edge, designed for customization, and manageability.
swupd — Documentation for Clear Linux* project
clr-boot-manager: Kernel & Boot Loader Management
Cannot compile zfs for 5.5-rc2 · Issue #9745 · zfsonlinux/zfs
Persistent L2ARC might be coming to ZFS on Linux — The primary ARC is kept in system RAM, but an L2ARC device can be created from one or more fast disks. In a ZFS pool with one or more L2ARC devices, when blocks are evicted from the primary ARC in RAM, they are moved down to L2ARC rather than being thrown away entirely. In the past, this feature has been of limited value, both because indexing a large L2ARC occupies system RAM which could have been better used for primary ARC and because L2ARC was not persistent across reboots.
Persistent L2ARC by gamanakis · Pull Request #9582 · zfsonlinux/zfs — This feature implements a light-weight persistent L2ARC metadata structure that allows L2ARC contents to be recovered after a reboot. This significantly eases the impact a reboot has on read performance on systems with large caches.
LINUX Unplugged 303: Stateless and Dateless — We visit Intel to figure out what Clear Linux is all about and explain a few tricks that make it unique.
LINUX Unplugged Blog: Clear Linux OS 2019
HAMR don’t hurt ’em: laser-assisted hard drives are coming in 2020 — Although the 2012 "just around the corner" HAMR drives seem to have been mostly vapor, the technology is a reality now. Seagate has been trialing 16TB HAMR drives with select customers for more than a year and claims that the trials have proved that its HAMR drives are "plug and play replacements" for traditional CMR drives, requiring no special care and having no particular poor use cases compared to the drives we're all used to.
HAMR Milestone: Seagate Achieves 16TB Capacity on Internal HAMR Test Units
Western Digital debuts 18TB and 20TB near-MAMR disk drives
Previously on TechSNAP 341: HAMR Time — We've got bad news for Wifi-lovers as the KRACK hack takes the world by storm; We have the details & some places to watch to make sure you stay patched. Plus, some distressing revelations about third party access to your personal information through some US mobile carriers. Then we cover the ongoing debate over HAMR, MAMR, and the future of hard drive technology & take a mini deep dive into the world of elliptic curve cryptography.

Multipath Musings | TechSNAP 422

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 07 Feb 2020 00:20:00 +0100

We take a look at a few exciting features coming to Linux kernel 5.6, including the first steps to multipath TCP.

Plus the latest Intel speculative execution vulnerability, and Microsoft's troubled history with certificate renewal.

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Firewall Fun | TechSNAP 421

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 24 Jan 2020 00:36:00 +0100

We explore the latest round of Windows vulnerabilities and Jim shares his journey adding OPNsense to his firewall family.

Plus a look back at Apollo-era audio that's still relevant today with the surprising story of the Quindar tones.

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Choose Your Own Compiler | TechSNAP 420

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 10 Jan 2020 00:20:00 +0100

Compiling the Linux kernel with Clang has never been easier, so we explore this alternative compiler and what it brings to the ecosystem.

Plus Debian's continued init system debate, and our frustrations over 5G reporting.

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Nebulous Networking | TechSNAP 419

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 27 Dec 2019 00:20:00 +0100

From classifying cats to colorizing old photos we share our top tips and tools for starting your machine learning journey. Plus, learn why Nebula is our favorite new VPN technology, and how it can help simplify and secure your network.

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5G Fundamentals | TechSNAP 418

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 13 Dec 2019 00:20:00 +0100

As the rollout of 5G finally arrives, we take some time to explain the fundamentals of the next generation of wireless technology.

Plus the surprising performance of eero's mesh Wi-Fi, some great news for WireGuard, and an update on the Librem 5.

Machine Learning Magic | TechSNAP 417

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 29 Nov 2019 00:25:00 +0100

We explore the rapid adoption of machine learning, its impact on computer architecture, and how to avoid AI snake oil.

Plus so-so SSD security, and a new wireless protocol that works best where the Wi-Fi sucks.

I.T. Phone Home | TechSNAP 416

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 15 Nov 2019 00:20:00 +0100

Ubiquiti's troublesome new telemetry, Jim's take on the modern Microsoft, and why Project Silica just might be the future of long term storage.

Links:

Sure, we made your Wi-Fi routers phone home with telemetry, says Ubiquiti. What of it? — Ubiquiti Networks is fending off customer complaints after emitting a firmware update that caused its UniFi wireless routers to quietly phone HQ with telemetry.
UI official: urgent, please answer | Ubiquiti Community
Update: UniFi Phone Home/Performance Data Collection | Ubiquiti Community
Possible example data
Latest firmware with changes
Microsoft’s Project Silica offers robust thousand-year storage | Ars Technica — Silica aims to replace both tape and optical archival discs as the media of choice for large-scale, (very) long duration cold storage.
Project Silica
The Future of Data Storage
Microsoft Ignite 2019
Microsoft Edge is coming to Linux. But will anybody use it? | Ars Technica — At Microsoft Ignite a slide announced that Microsoft's project to rebase its perennially unloved Edge browser on Google's open source project Chromium is well underway. Sharper-eyed attendees also noticed a promise for future Linux support.
Has Microsoft Changed?
This isn’t your father’s Microsoft

It's All About IOPS | TechSNAP 415

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 00:25:00 +0100

We share our simple approach to disk benchmarking and explain why you should always test your pain points.

Plus the basics of solid state disks and how to evaluate which model is right for you.

Links:

History of hard disk drives — Wikipedia
How to Buy the Right SSD: A Guide for 2019 — Tom's Hardware
The Development and History of Solid State Drives (SSDs)
Understanding IOPS, latency and storage performance
FIO cheat sheet — Jim's Blog

Rooting for ZFS | TechSNAP 414

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 04:35:00 +0200

We dive into Ubuntu 19.10's experimental ZFS installer and share our tips for making the most of ZFS on root.

Plus why you may want to skip Nest Wifi, and our latest explorations of long range wireless protocols.

The Coffee Shop Problem | TechSNAP 413

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 00:40:00 +0200

We peer into the future with a quick look at quantum supremacy, debate the latest DNS over HTTPS drama, and jump through the hoops of HTTP/3.

Plus when to use WARP, the secrets of Startpage, and the latest Ryzen release.

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Too Good To Be True | TechSNAP 412

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 00:20:00 +0200

It's TechSNAP story time as we head out into the field with Jim and put Sure-Fi technology to the test.

Plus an update on Wifi 6, an enlightening Chromebook bug, and some not-quite-quantum key distribution.

Links:

RF Chirp tech: Long distance, incredible penetration, low bandwidth | Ars Technica — Recently, I took the company's technology for a spin with a pair of hand-held demo communicators about the size of a kid's walkie-talkie. They don't do much—just light up with a signal strength reading on both devices, whenever a transmit button on either is pressed—but that's enough to get a good indication of whether the tech will work to solve a given problem.
Wi-Fi 6 Is Officially Here: Certification Program Begins — Finally, along with the launch of the certification program itself, the Wi-Fi Alliance has already certified its first dozen devices.
Say hello to 802.11ax: Wi-Fi 6 device certification begins today | Ars Technica — Today, the Wi-Fi Alliance launched its Wi-Fi Certified 6 program, which means that the standard has been completely finalized, and device manufacturers and OEMs can begin the process of having the organization certify their products to carry the Wi-Fi 6 branding.
Someone sent us 21 more pictures of the leaked Pixel 4 XL - The Verge
iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max: Hands-on with Apple’s new phones | Ars Technica
Some Chromebooks mistakenly declared themselves end-of-life last week | Ars Technica — A lot of Chromebook and Chromebox users don't realize this, but all ChromeOS devices have an expiration date. Google's original policy was for devices to be supported for five years, but the company has recently extended that time to 6.5 years.
LINUX Unplugged 318: Manjaro Levels Up
Fear the Man in the Middle? This company wants to sell quantum key distribution | Ars Technica
Gentle intro to Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) – Lahiru Madushanka
The Super-Secure Quantum Cable Hiding in the Holland Tunnel - Bloomberg — Banks and governments are testing quantum key distribution technology to guard their closest secrets.
Quantum Key Distribution - QKD — This paper provides an overview of quantum key distribution targeted towards the computer science community. A brief description of the relevant principles from quantum mechanics is provided before surveying the most prominent quantum key distribution protocols present in the literature.
TechSNAP 403: Keeping Systems Simple
Linux Headlines — Linux and open source headlines every weekday, in under 3 minutes.

Mobile Security Mistakes | TechSNAP 411

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 06 Sep 2019 00:20:00 +0200

We take a look at a few recent zero-day vulnerabilities for iOS and Android and find targeted attacks, bad assumptions, and changing markets.

Plus what to expect from USB4 and an upcoming Linux scheduler speed-up for AMD's Epyc CPUs.

Links:

Google says hackers have put ‘monitoring implants’ in iPhones for years | Technology | The Guardian — Their location was uploaded every minute; their device’s keychain, containing all their passwords, was uploaded, as were their chat histories on popular apps including WhatsApp, Telegram and iMessage, their address book, and their Gmail database.
Project Zero: A very deep dive into iOS Exploit chains found in the wild — We discovered exploits for a total of fourteen vulnerabilities across the five exploit chains: seven for the iPhone’s web browser, five for the kernel and two separate sandbox escapes.
Project Zero: In-the-wild iOS Exploit Chain 1 — This exploit provides evidence that these exploit chains were likely written contemporaneously with their supported iOS versions; that is, the exploit techniques which were used suggest that this exploit was written around the time of iOS 10. This suggests that this group had a capability against a fully patched iPhone for at least two years.
Project Zero: In-the-wild iOS Exploit Chain 3 — It’s difficult to understand how this error could be introduced into a core IPC library that shipped to end users. While errors are common in software development, a serious one like this should have quickly been found by a unit test, code review or even fuzzing.
Project Zero: JSC Exploits — In this post, we will take a look at the WebKit exploits used to gain an initial foothold onto the iOS device and stage the privilege escalation exploits. All exploits here achieve shellcode execution inside the sandboxed renderer process (WebContent) on iOS.
Project Zero: Implant Teardown — There is no visual indicator on the device that the implant is running. There's no way for a user on iOS to view a process listing, so the implant binary makes no attempt to hide its execution from the system. The implant is primarily focused on stealing files and uploading live location data. The implant requests commands from a command and control server every 60 seconds.The implant has access to all the database files (on the victim’s phone) used by popular end-to-end encryption apps like Whatsapp, Telegram and iMessage.
iPhone Hackers Caught By Google Also Targeted Android And Microsoft Windows, Say Sources — Multiple sources with knowledge of the situation said that Google’s own Android operating system and Microsoft Windows PCs were also targeted in a campaign that sought to infect the computers and smartphones of the Uighur ethnic group in China.
Google's Shocking Decision To Ignore A Critical Android Vulnerability In Latest Security Update — Despite immediately acknowledging the vulnerability and confirming in June that it will be fixed, Google had not provided an estimated time frame for the patch.
Android Zero-Day Bug Opens Door to Privilege Escalation Attack, Researchers Warn | Threatpost — “In the unlikely event an attacker succeeds in exploiting this bug, they would effectively have complete control over the target device,” he told Threatpost. Once an attacker obtains escalated privileges, “it means they could completely take over a device if they can convince a user to install and run their application,”
Why 'Zero Day' Android Hacking Now Costs More Than iOS Attacks | WIRED — "During the last few months, we have observed an increase in the number of iOS exploits, mostly Safari and iMessage chains, being developed and sold by researchers from all around the world. The zero-day market is so flooded by iOS exploits that we've recently started refusing some them"
Linux 5.4 Kernel To Bring Improved Load Balancing On AMD EPYC Servers — The scheduler topology improvement by SUSE's Matt Fleming changes the behavior as currently it turns out for EPYC hardware the kernel has failed to properly load balance across NUMA nodes on different sockets.
USB4 is coming soon and will (mostly) unify USB and Thunderbolt | Ars Technica — The USB Implementers Forum published the official USB4 protocol specification. If your initial reaction was "oh no, not again," don't worry—the new spec is backward-compatible with USB 2 and USB 3, and it uses the same USB Type-C connectors that modern USB 3 devices do.

Epyc Encryption | TechSNAP 410

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 00:10:00 +0200

It's CPU release season and we get excited about AMD's new line of server chips. Plus our take on AMD's approach to memory encryption, and our struggle to make sense of Intel's Comet Lake line.

Also, a few Windows worms you should know about, the end of the road for EV certs, and an embarrassing new Bluetooth attack.

Links:

A detailed look at AMD’s new Epyc “Rome” 7nm server CPUs | Ars Technica — The short version of the story is, Epyc "Rome" is to the server what Ryzen 3000 was to the desktop—bringing significantly improved IPC, more cores, and better thermal efficiency than either its current-generation Intel equivalents or its first-generation Epyc predecessors.
AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked — Ever since the Opteron days, AMD's market share has been rounded to zero percent, and with its first generation of EPYC processors using its new Zen microarchitecture, that number skipped up a small handful of points, but everyone has been waiting with bated breath for the second swing at the ball. AMD's Rome platform solves the concerns that first gen Naples had, plus this CPU family is designed to do many things: a new CPU microarchitecture on 7nm, offer up to 64 cores, offer 128 lanes of PCIe 4.0, offer 8 memory channels, and offer a unified memory architecture based on chiplets.
AMD EPYC Rome Still Conquering Cascadelake Even Without Mitigations - Phoronix — Out of curiosity, I've run some unmitigated benchmarks for the various relevant CPU speculative execution vulnerabilities on both the Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 Cascadelake and AMD EPYC 7742 Rome processors for seeing how the performance differs.
Intel’s line of notebook CPUs gets more confusing with 14nm Comet Lake | Ars Technica — Going by Intel's numbers, Comet Lake looks like a competent upgrade to its predecessor Whiskey Lake. The interesting question—and one largely left unanswered by Intel—is why the company has decided to launch a new line of 14nm notebook CPUs less than a month after launching Ice Lake, its first 10nm notebook CPUs.
A look at the Windows 10 exploit Google Zero disclosed this week | Ars Technica — On Tuesday, Tavis Ormandy of Google's Project Zero released an exploit kit called ctftool, which uses and abuses Microsoft's Text Services Framework in ways that can effectively get anyone root—er, system that is—on any unpatched Windows 10 system they're able to log in to
Patch new wormable vulnerabilities in Remote Desktop Services (CVE-2019-1181/1182) – Microsoft Security Response Center — Today Microsoft released a set of fixes for Remote Desktop Services that include two critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities, CVE-2019-1181 and CVE-2019-1182. Like the previously-fixed ‘BlueKeep’ vulnerability (CVE-2019-0708), these two vulnerabilities are also ‘wormable’, meaning that any future malware that exploits these could propagate from vulnerable computer to vulnerable computer without user interaction.
KNOB Attack — TL;DR: The specification of Bluetooth includes an encryption key negotiation protocol that allows to negotiate encryption keys with 1 Byte of entropy without protecting the integrity of the negotiation process. A remote attacker can manipulate the entropy negotiation to let any standard compliant Bluetooth device negotiate encryption keys with 1 byte of entropy and then brute force the low entropy keys in real time.
Troy Hunt: Extended Validation Certificates are (Really, Really) Dead — With both browsers auto-updating for most people, we're about 10 weeks out from no more EV and the vast majority of web users no longer seeing something they didn't even know was there to begin with! Oh sure, you can still drill down into the certificate and see the entity name, but who's really going to do that? You and I, perhaps, but we're not exactly in the meat of the browser demographics.
Google wants to reduce lifespan for HTTPS certificates to one year | ZDNet — Scott Helme argues that the security benefits of shorter SSL certificate lifespans have nothing to do with phishing or malware sites, but instead with the SSL certificate revocation process. Helme claims that this process is broken and that bad SSL certificates continue to live on for years after being mississued and revoked.

Privacy Perspectives | TechSNAP 409

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 00:20:00 +0200

We examine why it's so difficult to protect your privacy online and discuss browser fingerprinting, when to use a VPN, and the limits of private browsing.

Plus Apple's blaring bluetooth beacons and Facebook's worrying plans for WhatsApp.

Apollo's ARC | TechSNAP 408

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 26 Jul 2019 00:25:00 +0200

We take a look at the amazing abilities of the Apollo Guidance Computer and Jim breaks down everything you need to know about the ZFS ARC.

Plus an update on ZoL SIMD acceleration, your feedback, and an interesting new neuromorphic system from Intel.

Links:

ZFS On Linux Has Figured Out A Way To Restore SIMD Support On Linux 5.0+ — Those running ZFS On Linux (ZoL) on post-5.0 (and pre-5.0 supported LTS releases) have seen big performance hits to the ZFS encryption performance in particular. That came due to upstream breaking an interface used by ZFS On Linux and admittedly not caring about ZoL due to it being an out-of-tree user. But now several kernel releases later, a workaround has been devised.
ZFS On Linux Runs Into A Snag With Linux 5.0
NixOS Takes Action After 1.2GB/s ZFS Encryption Speed Drops To 200MB/s With Linux 5.0+ — A NixOS developer reports that the functions no longer exported by Linux 5.0+ and previously used by ZoL for AVX/AES-NI support end up dropping the ZFS data-set encryption performance to 200MB/s where as pre-5.0 kernels ran around 1.2GB/s
Linux 5.0 compat: SIMD compatibility · zfsonlinux/zfs@e5db313 — Restore the SIMD optimization for 4.19.38 LTS, 4.14.120 LTS, and 5.0 and newer kernels. This is accomplished by leveraging the fact that by definition dedicated kernel threads never need to concern themselves with saving and restoring the user FPU state. Therefore, they may use the FPU as long as we can guarantee user tasks always restore their FPU state before context switching back to user space.
no SIMD acceleration · Issue #8793 · zfsonlinux/zfs — 4.14.x, 4.19.x, 5.x all have no SIMD acceleration, it is like a turtle. very slow.
Chris's Wiki :: ZFS on Linux still has annoying issues with ARC size — One of the frustrating things about operating ZFS on Linux is that the ARC size is critical but ZFS's auto-tuning of it is opaque and apparently prone to malfunctions, where your ARC will mysteriously shrink drastically and then stick there.
Software woven into wire, Core rope and the Apollo Guidance Computer — One of the first computers to use integrated circuits, the Apollo Guidance Computer was lightweight enough and small enough to fly in space. An unusual feature that contributed to its small size was core rope memory, a technique of physically weaving software into high-density storage.
Virtual Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) software — Since you are looking at this README file, you are in the "master" branch of the repository, which contains source-code transcriptions of the original Project Apollo software for the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) and Abort Guidance System (AGS), as well as our software for emulating the AGC, AGS, and some of their peripheral devices (such as the display-keyboard unit, or DSKY).
The Underappreciated Power of the Apollo Computer - The Atlantic — Without the computers on board the Apollo spacecraft, there would have been no moon landing, no triumphant first step, no high-water mark for human space travel. A pilot could never have navigated the way to the moon, as if a spaceship were simply a more powerful airplane. The calculations required to make in-flight adjustments and the complexity of the thrust controls outstripped human capacities.
Brains scale better than CPUs. So Intel is building brains | Ars Technica — Neuromorphic engineering—building machines that mimic the function of organic brains in hardware as well as software—is becoming more and more prominent. The field has progressed rapidly, from conceptual beginnings in the late 1980s to experimental field programmable neural arrays in 2006, early memristor-powered device proposals in 2012, IBM's TrueNorth NPU in 2014, and Intel's Loihi neuromorphic processor in 2017. Yesterday, Intel broke a little more new ground with the debut of a larger-scale neuromorphic system, Pohoiki Beach, which integrates 64 of its Loihi chips.
Dancing Demon - YouTube — Written in 1979 by Leo Christopherson for the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I computer. This is the best game ever for at that time.

Problematic Privileges | TechSNAP 407b

Jupiter Broadcasting — Mon, 22 Jul 2019 03:05:00 +0200

Wes takes a quick look at a container escape proof-of-concept and reviews Docker security best practices.

Links:

Understanding Docker container escapes | Trail of Bits Blog — Linux cgroups are one of the mechanisms by which Docker isolates containers. The PoC abuses the functionality of the notifyonrelease.
Felix Wilhelm on Twitter — Quick and dirty way to get out of a privileged k8s pod or docker container by using cgroups release_agent feature.

Old School Outages | TechSNAP 407

Jupiter Broadcasting — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 22:10:00 +0200

Jim shares his Nagios tips and Wes chimes in with some modern tools as we chat monitoring in the wake of some high-profile outages.

Plus we turn our eye to hardware and get excited about the latest Ryzen line from AMD.

SACK Attack | TechSNAP 406

Jupiter Broadcasting — Sun, 23 Jun 2019 18:23:00 +0200

A new vulnerability may be the next 'Ping of Death'; we explore the details of SACK Panic and break down what you need to know.

Plus Firefox zero days targeting Coinbase, the latest update on Rowhammer, and a few more reasons it's a great time to be a ZFS user.

Links:

SACK Panic Security Bulletin — Netflix has identified several TCP networking vulnerabilities in FreeBSD and Linux kernels. The vulnerabilities specifically relate to the Maximum Segment Size (MSS) and TCP Selective Acknowledgement (SACK) capabilities. The most serious, dubbed “SACK Panic,” allows a remotely-triggered kernel panic on recent Linux kernels.
Ubuntu SACK Panic Guidance — You should update your kernel to the versions specified below in the Updates section and reboot. Alternatively, Canonical Livepatch updates will be available to mitigate these two issues without the need to reboot.
Red Hat SACK Panic Advisory — Red Hat customers running affected versions of these Red Hat products are strongly recommended to update them as soon as errata are available. Customers are urged to apply the available updates immediately and enable the mitigations as they feel appropriate.
RFC 2018 - TCP Selective Acknowledgment Options — TCP may experience poor performance when multiple packets are lost from one window of data. With the limited information available from cumulative acknowledgments, a TCP sender can only learn about a single lost packet per round trip time. An aggressive sender could choose to retransmit packets early, but such retransmitted segments may have already been successfully received. A Selective Acknowledgment (SACK) mechanism, combined with a selective repeat retransmission policy, can help to overcome these limitations.
Ping of Death — In a nutshell, it is possible to crash, reboot or otherwise kill a large number of systems by sending a ping of a certain size from a remote machine.
Firefox zero-day was used in attack against Coinbase employees, not its users | ZDNet — A recent Firefox zero-day that has made headlines across the tech news world this week was actually used in attacks against Coinbase employees, and not the company's users.
Mozilla fixes second Firefox zero-day exploited in the wild | ZDNet — Mozilla has released a second security update this week to patch a second zero-day that was being exploited in the wild to attack Coinbase employees and other cryptocurrency organizations.
RAMBleed — RAMBleed is a side-channel attack that enables an attacker to read out physical memory belonging to other processes. The implications of violating arbitrary privilege boundaries are numerous, and vary in severity based on the other software running on the target machine. As an example, in our paper we demonstrate an attack against OpenSSH in which we use RAMBleed to leak a 2048 bit RSA key.
Digging into the new features in OpenZFS post-Linux migration | Ars Technica — One of the most important new features in 0.8 is Native ZFS Encryption. Until now, ZFS users have relied on OS-provided encrypted filesystem layers either above or below ZFS. While this approach does work, it presented difficulties.
Allan Jude on Twitter — Once the FreeBSDs are upstreamed, everything is changing to 'OpenZFS', including the github organization currently know as 'zfsonlinux'.
ZFS on Linux Releases
Linux Academy is hiring!

Update Uncertainty | TechSNAP 405

Jupiter Broadcasting — Tue, 11 Jun 2019 20:20:00 +0200

We explore the risky world of exposed RDP, from the brute force GoldBrute botnet to the dangerously worm-able BlueKeep vulnerability.

Plus the importance of automatic updates, and Jim's new backup box.

Prefork Pitfalls | TechSNAP 404

Jupiter Broadcasting — Sat, 25 May 2019 18:20:00 +0200

We turn our eye to web server best practices, from the basics of CDNs to the importance of choosing the right multi-processing module.

Plus the right way to setup PHP, the trouble with benchmarking, and when to choose NGiNX.

Links:

Jim's Blog: Installing WordPress on Apache the modern way — It’s been bugging me for a while that there are no correct guides to be found about using modern Apache 2.4 or above with the Event or Worker MPMs. We’re going to go ahead and correct that lapse today, by walking through a brand-new WordPress install on a new Ubuntu 18.04 VM.
Apache Performance Tuning — Apache 2.x is a general-purpose webserver, designed to provide a balance of flexibility, portability, and performance. Although it has not been designed specifically to set benchmark records, Apache 2.x is capable of high performance in many real-world situations.
Tuning Your Apache Server
worker - Apache HTTP Server Version 2.4 — This Multi-Processing Module (MPM) implements a hybrid multi-process multi-threaded server. By using threads to serve requests, it is able to serve a large number of requests with fewer system resources than a process-based server.
event - Apache HTTP Server Version 2.4 — The event Multi-Processing Module (MPM) is designed to allow more requests to be served simultaneously by passing off some processing work to the listeners threads, freeing up the worker threads to serve new requests.
PHP-FPM — PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with some additional features useful for sites of any size, especially busier sites.
FastCGI overview — FastCGI is a way to have CGI scripts execute time-consuming code (like opening a database) only once, rather than every time the script is loaded. In technical terms, FastCGI is a language independent, scalable, open extension to CGI that provides high performance without the limitations of server specific APIs.
Alexa Top 500 Global Sites
What Is a CDN? How Does a CDN work? — A content delivery network (CDN) refers to a geographically distributed group of servers which work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content.
W3 Total Cache – WordPress plugin — W3 Total Cache improves the SEO and user experience of your site by increasing website performance, reducing load times via features like content delivery network (CDN) integration and the latest best practices.
krakjoe/apcu: APCu - APC User Cache — APCu is an in-memory key-value store for PHP. Keys are of type string and values can be any PHP variables.
PHP: APCu - Manual
Introduction to Varnish — Varnish HTTP Cache — Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Varnish Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300 - 1000x, depending on your architectur
ab - Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool — ab is a tool for benchmarking your Apache Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) server. It is designed to give you an impression of how your current Apache installation performs. This especially shows you how many requests per second your Apache installation is capable of serving.
HTTP(S) Benchmark Tools
jimsalterjrs/network-testing — This is a small collection of GPLv3-licensed tools to assist an intrepid researcher in testing the performance of networks, wired or wireless.

Keeping Systems Simple | TechSNAP 403

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 10 May 2019 21:10:00 +0200

We’re back from LinuxFest Northwest with an update on all things WireGuard, some VLAN myth busting, and the trade-offs of highly available systems.

Links:

TechSNAP Episode 390: What’s Up with WireGuard
WireGuard Sent Out Again For Review — WireGuard lead developer Jason Donenfeld has sent out the ninth version of the WireGuard secure network tunnel patches for review. If this review goes well and lands in net-next in the weeks ahead, this long-awaited VPN improvement could make it into the mainline Linux 5.2 kernel.
CloudFlare announces Warp VPN — Using Cloudflare’s existing network of servers, Internet users all over the world will be able to connect to Warp VPN through the 1.1.1.1 app. In the same vein, Warp VPN will not significantly increase battery usage by using an efficient protocol called WireGuard.
CloudFlare Launches "BoringTun" As Rust-Written WireGuard User-Space Implementation - Phoronix — CloudFlare took to creating BoringTun as they wanted a user-space solution as not to have to deal with kernel modules or satisfying certain kernel versions. They also wanted cross platform support and for their chosen implementation to be very fast, these choices which led them to writing a Rust-based solution.
cloudflare/boringtun — BoringTun is an implementation of the WireGuard® protocol designed for portability and speed.
VPN protocol WireGuard now has an official macOS app — You can already download the WireGuard app on Android and iOS, but today’s release is all about macOS.
WireGuard Windows Pre-Alpha — I've been mostly absent these last weeks, due to being completely absorbed in Windows programming. I think we're finally getting to the state where we might really benefit from testing of the "pre-alpha".
Wintun – Layer 3 TUN Driver for Windows — Wintun is a very simple and minimal TUN driver for the Windows kernel, which provides userspace programs with a simple network adapter for reading and writing packets. It is akin to Linux's /dev/net/tun and BSD's /dev/tun.
WireGuard for Kubernetes: Introducing Gravitational Wormhole — Wormhole is a Kubernetes network plugin that combines the simplicity of flannel with encrypted networking from WireGuard.
gravitational/wormhole: Wireguard based overlay network CNI plugin for kubernetes
NetworkManager 1.16 — NetworkManager 1.16 is a big feature release bringing support for WireGuard VPN tunnels
Portal Cloud - Subspace — Subspace is an open source WireGuard® VPN server that supports connecting all of your devices to help secure your internet access.
subspacecloud/subspace — A simple WireGuard VPN server GUI
jimsalterjrs/wg-admin — Simple CLI utilities to manage a WireGuard server
5 big misconceptions about virtual LANs — In the real world, VLANs are anything but simple.
High Availability vs. Fault Tolerance vs. Disaster Recovery — You need IT infrastructure that you can count on even when you run into the rare network outage, equipment failure, or power issue. When your systems run into trouble, that’s where one or more of the three primary availability strategies will come into play: high availability, fault tolerance, and/or disaster recovery.
High Availability: Concepts and Theory — Running server operations using clusters of either physical or virtual computers is all about improving both reliability and performance over and above what you could expect from a single, high-powered server.
RPO and RTO: Understanding the Differences — Recovery time objective refers to how much time an application can be down without causing significant damage to the business. Recovery point objectives refer to your company’s loss tolerance: the amount of data that can be lost before significant harm to the business occurs.
JupiterBroadcasting/Talks — Public repository of crew talks, slides, and additional resources.
Command Line Threat Hunting — That viruses and malware are Windows problems is a misnomer that is often propagated through the Linux community and it's an easy one to believe until you start noticing strange behavior on your system. What do you do next? Join Ell Marquez and Tony Lambert in discussing a common sense approach to threat detection using only command line tools.
Fear the Man in the Middle? This company wants to sell quantum key distribution — For now, Quantum XChange has only said about a dozen companies are part of the pilot. But with the appetite for quantum solutions in the US increasing—the National Quantum Initiative was just signed into law at the end of 2018 to advance the tech—this could be an opportune time to enter the market, so long as the service lives up to its billing.

Snapshot Sanity | TechSNAP 402

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 16:55:00 +0200

We continue our take on ZFS as Jim and Wes dive in to snapshots, replication, and the magic on copy on write.

Plus some handy tools to manage your snapshots, rsync war stories, and more!

Links:

sanoid: Policy-driven snapshot management and replication tools. — Sanoid is a policy-driven snapshot management tool for ZFS filesystems. When combined with the Linux KVM hypervisor, you can use it to make your systems functionally immortal.
Syncoid — Sanoid also includes a replication tool, syncoid, which facilitates the asynchronous incremental replication of ZFS filesystems.
Copy-on-write - Wikipedia
ZFS Paper
The Magic Behind APFS: Copy-On-Write — The brand-new Apple File System (APFS) that landed with macOS High Sierra brings a handful of important new features that rely on a technique called copy-on-write (CoW).
Chapter 19. The Z File System (ZFS)

Everyday ZFS | TechSNAP 401

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 22:35:00 +0200

Jim and Wes sit down to bust some ZFS myths and share their tips and tricks for getting the most out of the ultimate filesystem.

Plus when not to use ZFS, the surprising way your disks are lying to you, and more!

Links:

ZFS - Ubuntu Wiki — ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed and implemented by a team at Sun Microsystems led by Jeff Bonwick and Matthew Ahrens.
Performance tuning - OpenZFS — Make sure that you create your pools such that the vdevs have the correct alignment shift for your storage device's size. if dealing with flash media, this is going to be either 12 (4K sectors) or 13 (8K sectors).

Supply Chain Attacks | TechSNAP 400

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 28 Mar 2019 20:25:00 +0100

We break down the ASUS Live Update backdoor and explore why these kinds of supply chain attacks are on the rise.

Plus an update from the linux vendor firmware service, your feedback, and more!

Links:

Joren Verspeurt on Twitter — The explanation you gave for unsupervised wasn't correct, that was just using a net that was trained in a supervised way. Unsupervised learning doesn't involve labels at all. A good example: clustering. You say "there are x clusters" and it learns a way of grouping similar items.
Hackers Hijacked ASUS Software Updates to Install Backdoors on Thousands of Computers — The researchers estimate half a million Windows machines received the malicious backdoor through the ASUS update server, although the attackers appear to have been targeting only about 600 of those systems.
Malicious updates for ASUS laptops — A threat actor modified the ASUS Live Update Utility, which delivers BIOS, UEFI, and software updates to ASUS laptops and desktops, added a back door to the utility, and then distributed it to users through official channels.
Asus Live Update Patch Now Availabile — Asus has emitted a non-spyware-riddled version of Live Update for people to install on its notebooks, which includes extra security features to hopefully detect any future tampering.
ASUS response to the recent media reports regarding ASUS Live Update tool attack by Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups — ASUS has also implemented a fix in the latest version (ver. 3.6.8) of the Live Update software, introduced multiple security verification mechanisms to prevent any malicious manipulation in the form of software updates or other means, and implemented an enhanced end-to-end encryption mechanism. At the same time, we have also updated and strengthened our server-to-end-user software architecture to prevent similar attacks from happening in the future.
The Messy Truth About Infiltrating Computer Supply Chains — The Defense Intelligence Agency believed that China’s capability at exploiting the BIOS “reflects a qualitative leap forward in exploitation that is difficult to detect”
Inside the Unnerving CCleaner Supply Chain Attack — Security researchers at Cisco Talos and Morphisec made a worst nightmare-type disclosure: the ubiquitous computer cleanup tool CCleaner had been compromised by hackers for more than a month. The software updates users were downloading from CCleaner owner Avast—a security company itself—had been tainted with a malware backdoor. The incident exposed millions of computers and reinforced the threat of so-called digital supply chain attacks, situations where trusted, widely distributed software is actually infected by malicious code.
ShadowPad: How Attackers hide Backdoor in Software used by Hundreds of Large Companies around the World — ShadowPad is an example of how dangerous and wide-scale a successful supply-chain attack can be. Given the opportunities for reach and data collection it gives to the attackers, most likely it will be reproduced again and again with some other widely used software component.
Gaming industry still in the scope of attackers in Asia — Yet again, new supply-chain attacks recently caught the attention of ESET Researchers. This time, two games and one gaming platform application were compromised to include a backdoor.
Microsoft Security Intelligence Report Volume 24 is now available — Software supply chain attacks are another trend that Microsoft has been tracking for several years. One supply chain tactic used by attackers is to incorporate a compromised component into a legitimate application or update package, which then is distributed to the users via the software. These attacks can be very difficult to detect because they take advantage of the trust that users have in their software vendors. The report includes several examples, including the Dofoil campaign, which illustrates how wide-reaching these types of attacks are and what we are doing to prevent and respond to them.
Microsoft Security Intelligence Report Volume 24
Supply Chain Attacks Spiked 78 Percent in 2018
Supply Chain Security: A Talk by Bunnie Huang — I recently gave an invited talk about supply chain security at BlueHat IL 2019. I was a bit surprised at the level of interest it received, so I thought I’d share it here for people who might have missed it.
Attack inception: Compromised supply chain within a supply chain poses new risk — The plot twist: The app vendor’s systems were unaffected. The compromise was traceable instead to a second software vendor that hosted additional packages used by the app during installation. This turned out be an interesting and unique case of an attack involving “the supply chain of the supply chain”.
Supply Chain Attacks and Secure Software Updates — In general, a supply chain attack involves first hacking a trusted third party who provides a product or service to your target, and then using your newly acquired, privileged position to compromise your intended target.
Bad USB, Very Bad USB — The best defense for this type of attack is to only use devices that do not have reprogrammable firmware. Outside of this, it is important to only use USB drives that you trust completely, because after plugging in an untrusted device, you will never know if there is an invisible threat running on your computer.
Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson
LVFS Project Announcement - The Linux Foundation — The Linux Foundation welcomes the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) as a new project. LVFS is a secure website that allows hardware vendors to upload firmware updates. It’s used by all major Linux distributions to provide metadata for clients, such as fwupdmgr, GNOME Software and KDE Discover.
LVFS: Vendor Status
Two new supply-chain attacks come to light in less than a week — Called “Colourama,” the package looked similar to Colorama, which is one of the top-20 most-downloaded legitimate modules in the Python repository. The doppelgänger Colourama package contained most of the legitimate functions of the legitimate module, with one significant difference: Colourama added code that, when run on Windows servers, installed a Visual Basic script.
Malicious code found in npm package event-stream downloaded 8 million times in the past 2.5 months

Ethics in AI | TechSNAP 399

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 19:36:00 +0100

Machine learning promises to change many industries, but with these changes come dangerous new risks. Join Jim and Wes as they explore some of the surprising ways bias can creep in and the serious consequences of ignoring these problems.

Links:

Microsoft’s neo-Nazi sexbot was a great lesson for makers of AI assistants — What started out as an entertaining social experiment—get regular people to talk to a chatbot so it could learn while they, hopefully, had fun—became a nightmare for Tay’s creators. Users soon figured out how to make Tay say awful things. Microsoft took the chatbot offline after less than a day.
Microsoft's Zo chatbot is a politically correct version of her sister Tay—except she’s much, much worse — A few months after Tay’s disastrous debut, Microsoft quietly released Zo, a second English-language chatbot available on Messenger, Kik, Skype, Twitter, and Groupme.
How to make a racist AI without really trying | ConceptNet blog — Some people expect that fighting algorithmic racism is going to come with some sort of trade-off. There’s no trade-off here. You can have data that’s better and less racist. You can have data that’s better because it’s less racist. There was never anything “accurate” about the overt racism that word2vec and GloVe learned.
Microsoft warned investors that biased or flawed AI could hurt the company’s image — Notably, this addition comes after a research paper by MIT Media Lab graduate researcher Joy Buolamwini showed in February 2018 that Microsoft’s facial recognition algorithm’s was less accurate for women and people of color. In response, Microsoft updated its facial recognition models, and wrote a blog post about how it was addressing bias in its software.
AI bias: It is the responsibility of humans to ensure fairness — Amazon recently pulled the plug on its experimental AI-powered recruitment engine when it was discovered that the machine learning technology behind it was exhibiting bias against female applicants.
California Police Using AI Program That Tells Them Where to Patrol, Critics Say It May Just Reinforce Racial Bias — “The potential for bias to creep into the deployment of the tools is enormous. Simply put, the devil is in the data,” Vincent Southerland, executive director of the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at NYU School of Law, wrote for the American Civil Liberties Union last year.
A.I. Could Worsen Health Disparities — A recent study found that some facial recognition programs incorrectly classify less than 1 percent of light-skinned men but more than one-third of dark-skinned women. What happens when we rely on such algorithms to diagnose melanoma on light versus dark skin?
Responsible AI Practices — These questions are far from solved, and in fact are active areas of research and development. Google is committed to making progress in the responsible development of AI and to sharing knowledge, research, tools, datasets, and other resources with the larger community. Below we share some of our current work and recommended practices.
The Ars Technica System Guide, Winter 2019: The one about the servers — The Winter 2019 Ars System Guide has returned to its roots: showing readers three real-world system builds we like at this precise moment in time. Instead of general performance desktops, this time around we're going to focus specifically on building some servers.
Introduction to Python Development at Linux Academy — This course is designed to teach you how to program using Python. We'll cover the building blocks of the language, programming design fundamentals, how to use the standard library, third-party packages, and how to create Python projects. In the end, you should have a grasp of how to program.

Proper Password Procedures | TechSNAP 398

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 28 Feb 2019 18:08:00 +0100

We reveal the shady password practices that are all too common at many utility providers, and hash out why salts are essential to proper password storage.

Plus the benefits of passphrases, and what you can do to keep your local providers on the up and up.

Links:

Plain wrong: Millions of utility customers’ passwords stored in plain text | Ars Technica — In September of 2018, an anonymous independent security researcher (who we'll call X) noticed that their power company's website was offering to email—not reset!—lost account passwords to forgetful users. Startled, X fed the online form the utility account number and the last four phone number digits it was asking for. Sure enough, a few minutes later the account password, in plain text, was sitting in X's inbox.
The LinkedIn Hack: Understanding Why It Was So Easy to Crack the Passwords | — LinkedIn stated that after the initial 2012 breach, they added enhanced protection, most likely adding the “salt” functionality to their passwords. However, if you have not changed your password since 2012, you do not have the added protection of a salted password hash. You may be asking yourself–what on earth are hashing and salting and how does this all work?
How Developers got Password Security so Wrong — As time has gone on; developers have continued to store passwords insecurely, and users have continued to set them weakly. Despite this, no viable alternative has been created for password security.
Adding Salt to Hashing: A Better Way to Store Passwords — A salt is added to the hashing process to force their uniqueness, increase their complexity without increasing user requirements, and to mitigate password attacks like rainbow tables.
Why Do Developers Get Password Storage Wrong? A Qualitative Usability Study — We were interested in exploring two particular aspects: Firstly, do developers get things wrong because they do not think about security and thus do not include security features (but could if they wanted to)? Or do they write insecure code because the complexity of the task is too great for them? Secondly, a common suggestion to increase security is to offer secure defaults.
OWASP Password Storage Cheatsheet — This article provides guidance on properly storing passwords, secret question responses, and similar credential information.
Secure Salted Password Hashing - How to do it Properly — If you're a web developer, you've probably had to make a user account system. The most important aspect of a user account system is how user passwords are protected. User account databases are hacked frequently, so you absolutely must do something to protect your users' passwords if your website is ever breached. The best way to protect passwords is to employ salted password hashing. This page will explain why it's done the way it is.
Plain Text Offenders — We’re tired of websites abusing our trust and storing our passwords in plain text, exposing us to danger. Here we put websites we believe to be practicing this to shame.
Cybersecurity 101: Why you need to use a password manager | TechCrunch — Think of a password manager like a book of your passwords, locked by a master key that only you know.
On the Security of Password Managers - Schneier on Security — There's new research on the security of password managers, specifically 1Password, Dashlane, KeePass, and Lastpass. This work specifically looks at password leakage on the host computer. That is, does the password manager accidentally leave plaintext copies of the password lying around memory?
LinuxFest Northwest 2019 — It's the 20th anniversary of LinuxFest Northwest! Come join your favorite Jupiter Broadcasting hosts at the Pacific Northwest's premier Linux event.
SCALE 17x — The 17th annual Southern California Linux Expo – will take place on March. 7-10, 2019, at the Pasadena Convention Center. SCaLE 17x expects to host 150 exhibitors this year, along with nearly 130 sessions, tutorials and special events.
Jupiter Broadcasting Meetups — The best place to find out when Jupiter Broadcasting has a meetup near you! Also stay tuned for upcoming virtual study groups.

Quality Tools | TechSNAP 397

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 14 Feb 2019 21:15:00 +0100

Join Jim and Wes as they battle bufferbloat, latency spikes, and network hogs with some of their favorite tools for traffic shaping, firewalling, and QoS.

Plus the importance of sane defaults and why netdata belongs on every system.

Links:

Why you want QoS - Netdata Documentation — One of the features the Linux kernel has, but it is rarely used, is its ability to apply QoS on traffic. Even most interesting is that it can apply QoS to both inbound and outbound traffic.

Floating Point Problems | TechSNAP 396

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 20:50:00 +0100

Jim and Wes are joined by OpenZFS developer Richard Yao to explain why the recent drama over Linux kernel 5.0 is no big deal, and how his fix for the underlying issue might actually make things faster.

Plus the nitty-gritty details of vectorized optimizations and kernel preemption, and our thoughts on the future of the relationship between ZFS and Linux.

Special Guest: Richard Yao.

Links:

LinuxFest Northwest 2019 — Join a bunch of JB hosts and community celebrating the 20th anniversary!
Choose Linux — The show that captures the excitement of discovering Linux.
Linux 5.0: kernelfpu{begin,end} no longer exported — The latest kernels removed the old compatibility headers.
ZFS On Linux Landing Workaround For Linux 5.0 Kernel Support — So while these symbols are important for SIMD vectorized checksums for ZFS in the name of performance, with Linux 5.0+ they are not going to be exported for use by non-GPL modules. ZFS On Linux developer Tony Hutter has now staged a change that would disable vector instructions on Linux 5.0+ kernels.
Re: x86/fpu: Don't export __kernelfpu{begin,end}() — My tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existant. Sun explicitly did not want their code to work on Linux, so why would we do extra work to get their code to work properly?
The future of ZFS in FreeBSD — This state of affairs has led to a general agreement among the stakeholders that I have spoken to that it makes sense to rebase FreeBSD's ZFS on ZoL. Brian Behlendorf has graciously encouraged me to add FreeBSD support directly so that we might all have a singleshared code base.
Dephix: Kickoff to The Future — OpenZFS has grown over the last decade, and delivering our application on Linux provides great OpenZFS support while enabling higher velocity adoption of new environments.
The future of ZFS on Linux [zfs-discuss] — Do you realize that we don’t actually need the symbols that the kernel removed. It All they do is save/restore of register state while turning off/on preemption. Nothing stops us from doing that ourselves. It is possible to implement our own substitutes using code from either Illumos or FreeBSD or even write our own.

Honestly, I am beginning to think that my attempt to compromise with mainline gave the wrong impression. I am simply tired of this behavior by them and felt like reaching out to put an end to it. In a few weeks, we will likely be running on Linux 5.0 as if those symbols had never been removed because we will almost certainly have our own substitutes for them. Having to bloat our code because mainline won’t give us access to trivial functionality is annoying, but it is not the end of the world.
LINUX Unplugged Episode 284: Free as in Get Out
BSD Now 279: Future of ZFS
BSD Now 157: ZFS, The “Universal” File-system

The ACME Era | TechSNAP 395

Jupiter Broadcasting — Sun, 20 Jan 2019 20:50:00 +0100

We welcome Jim to the show, and he and Wes dive deep into all things Let’s Encrypt.

The history, the clients, and the from-the-field details you'll want to know.

Links:

Let’s Encrypt and CertBot – JRS Systems
Automatic Certificate Management Environment (ACME) — The surprisingly readable IETF draft.
How It Works - Let's Encrypt
ACME Client Implementations
Certbot — Certbot is EFF's tool to obtain certs from Let's Encrypt.
acme-nginx: python acme client for nginx — A particularly simple client that is useful for understanding the protocol details.
Caddy - The HTTP/2 Web Server with Automatic HTTPS
mod_md: Let's Encrypt (ACME) support for Apache httpd
Traefik - The Cloud Native Edge Router
Looking Forward to 2019 - Let's Encrypt — We’re now serving more than 150 million websites while maintaining a stellar security and compliance track record. Most importantly though, the Web went from 67% encrypted page loads to 77% in 2018, according to statistics from Mozilla. This is an incredible rate of change!
Let's Encrypt ACME v2 API Announcements — Now that the draft standard is in last-call and the pace of major changes has slowed, we’re able to release a “v2” API that is much closer to what will become the final ACME RFC.
Let's Encrypt disables TLS-SNI-01 validation — The researcher noticed that "at least two" large hosting providers host many users on the same IP address and users are able to upload certificates for arbitrary names without proving they have control of a domain.
A Technical Deep Dive on Using Certbot to Secure your Mailserver from the EFF — With the most recent release of Certbot v0.29.1, we’ve added some features which make it much easier to use with both Sendmail and Exim.

All About Azure | TechSNAP 394

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 10 Jan 2019 04:00:00 +0100

Wes is joined by a special guest to take a look back on the growth and development of Azure in 2018 and discuss some of its unique strengths.

Special Guest: Chad M. Crowell.

Links:

Under the sea, Microsoft tests a datacenter that’s quick to deploy, could provide internet connectivity for years
An Azure Infrastructure Year in Review
Azure File Sync now generally available
Microsoft's Newest OS is Based on Linux
Azure Sphere
What is Azure Stack?
Azure Outage Proves the Hard Way Availability Zones are a Good Idea
Microsoft Azure Infrastructure and Deployment on Linux Academy — In this course, we will cover an introduction to the Azure portal, followed by how to build infrastructure and deploy that infrastructure in real world scenarios.
Chad Crowell on Twitter

Back to our /roots | TechSNAP 393

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 04:05:00 +0100

In a special new year’s episode we take a moment to reflect on the show’s past, its future, and say goodbye to an old friend.

Links:

Jim Salter — Jim Salter (@jrssnet) is an author, public speaker, small business owner, mercenary sysadmin, and father of three—not necessarily in that order. He got his first real taste of open source by running Apache on his very own dedicated FreeBSD 3.1 server back in 1999, and he's been a fierce advocate of FOSS ever since.
Jim Salter on Twitter
Dropbox Flaws | TechSNAP | 1
PSN Breech Details | TechSNAP 3
2089 Days Uptime | TechSNAP 300

Keeping up with Kubernetes | TechSNAP 392

Jupiter Broadcasting — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 19:05:00 +0100

A security vulnerability in Kubernetes causes a big stir, but we’ll break it all down and explain what went wrong.

Plus the biggest stories out of Kubecon, and serverless gets serious.

Links:

Everything that was announced at KubeCon
CNCF to Host etcd — The Cloud Native Computing Foundation Technical Oversight Committee voted to accept etcd as an incubation-level hosted project.
Introduction to Knative — Knative is a framework from the folks at Google and Pivotal focused on “serverless” style event driven functions.
IBM Embraces Knative to Drive Serverless Standardization — Knative is not the first open-source functions-as-a-service effort that IBM has backed. Back in 2016, IBM announced the OpenWhisk effort, which is now run as an open-source project at the Apache Software Found.
How Google Is Improving Kubernetes Container Security — "We go beyond what's in open source and put additional restrictions in place to secure users"
Demystifying Kubernetes CVE-2018-1002105 — With a specially crafted request, users that are authorized to establish a connection through the Kubernetes API server to a backend server can then send arbitrary requests over the same connection directly to that backend, authenticated with the Kubernetes API server’s TLS credentials used to establish the backend connection.
The silent CVE in the heart of Kubernetes apiserver
Crossplane: An Open Source Multicloud Control Plane
security.christmas — This year we will prepare you for the Christmas celebration, by giving you small presents of knowledge every day, which will teach you about the world of security.
Introducing the Helm Hub — This hub provides a means for you to find charts hosted in many distributed repositories hosted by numerous people and organizations.

Firecracker Fundamentals | TechSNAP 391

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 29 Nov 2018 14:05:00 +0100

We break down Firecracker Amazon’s new open source kvm powered, virtual machine monitor, and explore what makes it different from the options on the market now.

Plus some good news for OpenBGP and the wider internet community, and a handy tool for inspecting docker images.

Links:

Firecracker – Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Computing — Firecracker is an open source virtualization technology that is purpose-built for creating and managing secure, multi-tenant containers and functions-based services.
Firecracker — Firecracker is an open source virtualization technology that is purpose-built for creating and managing secure, multi-tenant containers and functions-based services.
Firecracker Design Docs
Firecracker Roadmap
QEMU — QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer.
Qemu : Security vulnerabilities
VENOM Vulnerability — VENOM, CVE-2015-3456, is a security vulnerability in the virtual floppy drive code used by many computer virtualization platforms. This vulnerability may allow an attacker to escape from the confines of an affected virtual machine (VM) guest and potentially obtain code-execution access to the host.
s2n — s2n is a C99 implementation of the TLS/SSL protocols that is designed to be simple, small, fast, and with security as a priority.
OpenBGPD - Adding Diversity to the Route Server Landscape — Thanks to the RIPE NCC Community Project Fund we were able to revive the OpenBGPD daemon and bring more diversity to the Route Server landscape.
OpenBGPD — OpenBGPD is a FREE implementation of the Border Gateway Protocol, Version 4. It allows ordinary machines to be used as routers exchanging routes with other systems speaking the BGP protocol.
LSI Questions from Anton
ServeTheHome
Sennheiser Headset Software Could Allow Man-in-the-Middle SSL Attacks — When users have been installing Sennheiser's HeadSetup software, little did they know that the software was also installing a root certificate into the Trusted Root CA Certificate store. To make matters worse, the software was also installing an encrypted version of the certificate's private key that was not as secure as the developers may have thought.
evilginx2: Standalone man-in-the-middle attack framework used for phishing login credentials along with session cookies, allowing for the bypass of 2-factor authentication
dive: A tool for exploring each layer in a docker image

What’s Up with WireGuard | TechSNAP 390

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 22 Nov 2018 10:50:00 +0100

WireGuard has a lot of buzz around it and for many good reasons. We’ll explain what WireGuard is specifically, what it can do, and maybe more importantly, what it can’t.

Special Guest: Jim Salter.

Links:

How to easily configure WireGuard — At its core, all WireGuard does is create an interface from one computer to another.
Jessie Frazelle's Blog: Installing and Using Wireguard, obviously with containers — What is cool about Wireguard is it integrates into the Linux networking stack.
WireGuard Didn't Make it To The Mainline Linux Kernel This Cycle — The code continues to be improved upon but looks like it came up just short of making it into this current development cycle.
WireGuard VPN review: A new type of VPN offers serious advantages — Fewer lines of code, simpler setup, and better algorithms make a strong case.
The Current Status of WireGuard VPNs - Are We There Yet?
Using a free VPN? Why not skip the middleman and just send your data to President Xi?
Feedback from Cody
NRE Labs — NRE Labs is a no-strings-attached, community-centered initiative to bring the skills of automation within reach for everyone
Introduction to Antidote — Antidote is an open-source project aimed at making automated network operations more accessible with fast, easy and fun learning.
StackStorm — From simple if/then rules to complicated workflows, StackStorm lets you automate DevOps your way.
wireguard-private-networking: Build your own multi server private network using wireguard and ansible
Algo: Set up a personal IPSEC or WireGuard VPN in the cloud

The Future of HTTP | TechSNAP 389

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 15:05:00 +0100

Wes is joined by special guest Jim Salter to discuss Google's recent BGP outage and the future of HTTP.

Plus the latest router botnet, why you should never go full UPnP, and the benefits of building your own home router.

Special Guest: Jim Salter.

Links:

Google goes down after major BGP mishap routes traffic through China — Google lost control of several million of its IP addresses for more than an hour on Monday in an event that intermittently made its search and other services unavailable to many users.
Internet Vulnerability Takes Down Google
China has been 'hijacking the vital internet backbone of western countries'
RPKI - The required cryptographic upgrade to BGP routing
HTTP/3 — The protocol that's been called HTTP-over-QUIC for quite some time has now changed name and will officially become HTTP/3.
HTTP/3: Come for the speed, stay for the security
The Road to QUIC
Botnet pwns 100,000 routers using ancient security flaw — Researchers have stumbled on another large botnet that’s been quietly hijacking home routers while nobody was paying attention
BCMPUPnP_Hunter: A 100k Botnet Turns Home Routers to Email Spammers
From Zero to ZeroDay Journey: Router Hacking
The Ars guide to building a Linux router from scratch

The One About eBPF | TechSNAP 388

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 25 Oct 2018 15:30:00 +0200

We explain what eBPF is, how it works, and its proud BSD production legacy.

eBPF is a technology that you’re going to be hearing more and more about. It powers low-overhead custom analysis tools, handles network security in a containerized world, and powers tools you use every day.

Private Cloud Building Blocks | TechSNAP 387

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 11 Oct 2018 18:19:00 +0200

We bring in Amy Marrich to break down the building blocks of OpenStack. There are nearly an overwhelming number of ways to manage your infrastructure, and we learn about one of the original tools.

Plus a few warm up stories, a war story, and more.

What Makes Google Cloud Different | TechSNAP 386

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 04 Oct 2018 17:01:00 +0200

We bring on our Google Cloud expert and explore the fundamentals, demystify some of the magic, and ask what makes Google Cloud different.

Plus how Google hopes Roughtime will solve one of the web’s biggest problems, some great emails, and more!

3 Things to Know About Kubernetes | TechSNAP 385

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 27 Sep 2018 16:47:00 +0200

Kubernetes expert Will Boyd joins us to explain the top 3 things to know about Kubernetes, when it’s the right tool for the job, and building highly available production grade clusters.

Plus the privacy improvements that could be coming to HTTPS, and a new SSH auditing tool hits the open source scene.

Interplanetary Peers | TechSNAP 384

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:36:00 +0200

Jon the Nice Guy joins Wes to discuss all things IPFS. We'll explore what it does, how it works, and why it might be the best hope for a decentralized internet.

Plus, Magecart strikes again, Alpine has package problems, and why you shouldn't trust Western Digital's MyCloud.

The Power of Shame | TechSNAP 383

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 14 Sep 2018 07:47:00 +0200

TechSNAP progenitor and special guest Allan Jude joins us to talk mobile security, hand out some SSH tips and tricks, and discuss why security shaming works so well.

Plus, how Mozilla is protecting their GitHub repos, a check-in on Equifax, and some great picks.

Domestic Disappointments | TechSNAP 382

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 07:10:00 +0200

We’re joined by a special guest to discuss the failures of campaign security, the disastrous consequences of a mismanaged firewall, and the suspicious case of Speck.

Plus the latest vulnerabilities in Wireshark and OpenSSH, the new forensic hotness from Netflix, and some great introductions to cryptography.

Here Comes Cloud DNS | TechSNAP 381

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 08:51:00 +0200

To make DNS more secure we must move it to the cloud...at least that’s what Mozilla and Google suggest. We breakdown DNS-over-HTTPS, why it requires a “cloud” component, and the advantages it has over traditional DNS.

Plus new active attacks against Apache Struts and a Windows 10 zero-day exposed on Twitter.

Terminal Fault | TechSNAP 380

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 16 Aug 2018 18:16:00 +0200

Microsoft’s making radical changes to Windows 10, and a new type of speculative execution attack on Intel’s processors is targeting cloud providers.

SegmentSmack is Whack | TechSNAP 379

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 10 Aug 2018 16:39:00 +0200

Take down a Linux or FreeBSD box with just 2kpps of traffic, own Homebrew in 30 minutes, and infiltrate an entire network via the Inkjet printers.

It’s a busy TechSNAP week.

Two-Factor Fraud | TechSNAP 378

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 18:41:00 +0200

Reddit’s Two Factor procedures fail, while Google’s prevents years of attacks. We’ll look at the different approaches, and discuss the fundamental weakness of Reddit’s approach.

Plus a Spectre attack over the network, BGP issues take out Telegram, and more!

Linux Under Pressure | TechSNAP 377

Jupiter Broadcasting — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 12:49:00 +0200

Some new tools will give you better insights into your system under extreme load, and we flash back to the days of AOL and discuss the new way social hackers are spreading malware.

Plus the death of a TLD, the return of SamSam, and more!

Google Don’t Front | TechSNAP 376

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 26 Jul 2018 21:07:00 +0200

Google and Amazon recently shutdown Domain Fronting. Their abrupt change has created a building backlash.

We’ll explain what Domain Fronting is, how activists can use it to avoid censorship, and why large organizations are compelled to disable it.

Plus how road navigation systems can be spoofed with $223 in hardware, and another bad Bluetooth bug.

Surprise Root Access | TechSNAP 375

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 20:50:00 +0200

Google's Cloud Platform suffers an outage, and iPhones in India get owned after a very specific attack.

Plus how a malware author built a massive 18,000 strong Botnet in one day, and Cisco finds more "undocumented" root passwords.

Quantum Resistant Encryption | TechSNAP 374

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 07:24:00 +0200

Good progress is being made on post-quantum resilient computing. We’ll explain how they’re achieving it, the risks facing traditional cryptography.

Plus how bad defaults led to the theft of military Drone docs, new attacks against LTE networks, more!

FreeBSD Already Does That | TechSNAP 373

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 05 Jul 2018 07:57:00 +0200

Allan Jude and Wes sit-down for a special live edition of the TechSNAP program.

Joined by Jed and Jeff they have a wide ranging organic conversation.

Logs and Metrics and Traces, Oh My! | TechSNAP 372

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 14 Jun 2018 17:25:00 +0200

Netflix has learned the hard way how to utilize all the logs, we cover their lessons in their journey to build a fully observable system.

Plus the Lazy State FPU bug that cropped up this week, backdoored Docker images, your questions, and more!

They Never Learn | TechSNAP 271

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 08 Jun 2018 09:30:00 +0200

Microsoft puts a data center under the ocean, and they might be onto something. The Zip Slip vulnerability sneaks into your software, and VPNFilter turns out to be more complicated than first known.

Plus the mass exploit of Drupalgeddon2 continues, we break down why, a batch of questions, and more.

Hidden in Plain Sight | TechSNAP 370

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 15:23:00 +0200

We explain how the much hyped VPNFilter malware actually works, and its rather surprising sophistication. Plus a clear break down of the recent Kubernetes news, how a 40 year old tel-co protocol is being abused today, and a Git vulnerability you should k

Another Pass at Bypass | TechSNAP 369

Jupiter Broadcasting — Wed, 23 May 2018 14:31:00 +0200

We’ll explain how Speculative Store Bypass works, and the new mitigation techniques that are inbound.

Plus this week’s security news has a bit of a theme, and we share some great war stories sent into the show.

EFail Explained | TechSNAP 368

Jupiter Broadcasting — Wed, 16 May 2018 17:08:00 +0200

The EFail hype train has hit hypersonic speed, we’ll tap the breaks and explain who disclosed it, what it is, what it’s not, our recommendations, and early reactions.

Plus things to consider when deciding on-premises vs a cloud deployment, and the all business gadget from 1971 that kicked off the consumer electronics revolution.

FreeNAS Uber Build | TechSNAP 367

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 10 May 2018 18:46:00 +0200

Our FreeNAS build is complete and Allan’s back to cover the final details. Plus the new GPU attack against Android phones, and a perfect example of poor IoT security.

Catching up with Allan | TechSNAP 366

Jupiter Broadcasting — Wed, 02 May 2018 19:29:00 +0200

We catch up with Allan Jude and he shares stories of hunting network bottlenecks, memories of old firewalls, and some classic ZFS updates.

Plus the vulnerabilities found in Volkswagen cars, and the lengths a security research went to create the ultimate honeypot laptop.

The Unfixable Exploit | TechSNAP 365

Jupiter Broadcasting — Wed, 25 Apr 2018 09:55:25 +0200

Hardware flaws that can’t be solved, human errors at the physical layer, and spoofing cellular networks with a $5 dongle.

The Case for Monitoring | TechSNAP 364

Jupiter Broadcasting — Wed, 18 Apr 2018 13:12:00 +0200

We cover the all the bases this week in our TechSNAP introduction to server monitoring.

Why you should monitor, what you should monitor, the basics of Nagios, the biggest drawbacks of Nagios, it’s alternatives, and our lessons learned from the trenches.

Tips from the Top | TechSNAP 363

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 12 Apr 2018 14:11:00 +0200

Getting started or getting ahead in IT is a moving target, so we’ve crowd sourced some of the best tips and advice to help.

Plus a tricky use of zero-width characters to catch a leaker, a breakdown of the new BranchScope attack, and a full post-mortem of the recent Travis CI outage.

Rebuilding it Better | TechSNAP 362

Jupiter Broadcasting — Wed, 04 Apr 2018 10:57:00 +0200

It’s a TechSNAP introduction to Terraform, a tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently.

Plus a recent spat of data leaks suggest a common theme, Microsoft’s self inflicted Total Meltdown flaw, and playing around with DNS Rebinding attacks for fun.

The Under Armour Hack Was Even Worse Than It Had To Be

Under Armour Inc (UAA.N) (UA.N) said on Thursday that data from some 150 million MyFitnessPal diet and fitness app accounts was compromised in February, in one of the biggest hacks in history, sending shares of the athletic apparel maker down 3 percent in after-hours trade.

Panerabread.com Leaks Millions of Customer Records

The data available in plain text from Panera’s site appeared to include records for any customer who has signed up for an account to order food online via panerabread.com.

No, Panera Bread Doesn’t Take Security Seriously

tl;dr: In August 2017, I reported a vulnerability to Panera Bread that allowed the full name, home address, email address, food/dietary preferences, username, phone number, birthday and last four digits of a saved credit card to be accessed in bulk for any user that had ever signed up for an account. This includes my own personal data! Despite an explicit acknowledgement of the issue and a promise to fix it, Panera Bread sat on the vulnerability and, as far as I can tell, did nothing about it for eight months. When Brian Krebs publicly broke the news, other news outlets emphasized the usual “We take your security very seriously, security is a top priority for us” prepared statement from Panera Bread. Worse still, the vulnerability was not fixed at all — which means the company either misrepresented its actual security posture to the media to save face or was not competent enough to determine this fact for themselves. This post establishes a canonical timeline so subsequent reporting doesn’t get confused.

Total Meltdown?

Meet the Windows 7 Meltdown patch from January. It stopped Meltdown but opened up a vulnerability way worse ... It allowed any process to read the complete memory contents at gigabytes per second, oh - it was possible to write to arbitrary memory as well.

Terraform

HashiCorp Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is an open source tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.

Terraforming 1Password

Compared to the JSON or YAML files used by CloudFormation, Terraform HCL is both a more powerful and a more readable language. Here is a small example of a snippet that defines a subnet for the application servers. As you can see, the Terraform code is a quarter of the size, more readable, and easier to understand.

Feedback

Whonow: A malicious DNS server for executing DNS Rebinding attacks on the fly

It’s All in the Logs | TechSNAP 361

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 09:16:00 +0200

Embarrassing flaws get exposed when the logs get reviewed, Atlanta city government gets shut down by Ransomware, and the cleverest little Android malware you’ll ever meet.

Plus we go from a hacked client to a Zero-day discovery, answer some questions, ask a few, and more!

Uh Oh! Unified Logs in High Sierra (10.13) Show Plaintext Password for APFS Encrypted External Volumes via Disk Utility.app

It may not be noticeable at first (apart from the highlighting I’ve added of course), but the text “frogger13” is the password I used on a newly created APFS formatted FileVault Encrypted USB drive with the volume name “SEKRET”. (The new class images have a WarGames theme, hence the shout-outs to classic video games!)

Thousands of servers found leaking 750MB worth of passwords and keys

Giovanni Collazo said a quick query on the Shodan search engine returned almost 2,300 Internet-exposed servers running etcd, a type of database that computing clusters and other types of networks use to store and distribute passwords and configuration settings needed by various servers and applications. etcd comes with a programming interface that responds to simple queries that by default return administrative login credentials without first requiring authentication. The passwords, encryption keys, and other forms of credentials are used to access MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, content management systems, and other types of production servers.

Atlanta city government systems down due to ransomware attack

FBI called in as some city services are interrupted, employees told to turn off PCs.

Android malware found inside apps downloaded 500,000 times

The malware was sneaked onto the Google Play store disguised as seven different apps -- six QR readers and one 'smart compass' -- and bypassed security checks by hiding its true intent with a combination of clever coding and delaying its initial burst of malicious activity.

From hacked client to 0day discovery

We will discover in this article how a recent incident response to a customer was handled and how we discovered an otherwise publicly unknown vulnerability that was never reported by the manufacturer which left thousands of users unprotected from this security flaw.

Feedback

AMD Flaws Explained | TechSNAP 360

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 22 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0100

We cut through the noise and explain in clear terms what’s really been discovered. The botched disclosure of flaws in AMD products has overshadowed the technical details of the vulnerabilities, and we aim to fix that..

Plus another DNS Rebinding attack is in the wild and stealing Ethereum, Microsoft opens up a new bug bounty program, Expedia gets hacked, and we perform a TechSNAP checkup.

Netflix’s Dark Capacity | TechSNAP 359

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 15 Mar 2018 16:57:00 +0100

Netflix has a few tricks we can learn from, and the story of clever malware that was operating undetected since 2012.

Plus we discuss Let's Encrypt’s Wildcard support and explain what ACME v2 is.

Then we detail the bad position Samba 4 admins are in, and the real cause of these recent 1.7Tbps DDoS attacks.

A Future Without Servers | TechSNAP 358

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 10:08:00 +0100

The term serverless gets thrown around a lot, but what does it really mean? What are the benefits & the drawbacks? It’s a TechSNAP introduction to Serverless Architecture.

Plus new research with ideas to dramatically improve private web browsing, the growing problem of tracking security vulnerabilities with CVE’s & much more!

The Return of Spectre | TechSNAP 357

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 14:35:00 +0100

New variants, bad patches, busted microcode & devastated performance. It’s a TechSNAP Meltdown & Spectre check up.

Plus Tesla gets hit by Monero Cryptojacking & a dating site that matches people based on their bad passwords…. So we gave it a go!

The Concern with Containers | TechSNAP 356

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 20:32:00 +0100

The problems containers can’t solve, nasty security flaws in Skype and Telegram & Cisco discovers they have a bigger issue on their hands then first realized.

Plus the latest jaw-dropping techniques to extract data from air-gapped systems.

Operation FreeNAS Rescue | TechSNAP 355

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 14:23:00 +0100

We save our FreeNAS Mini from the edge & perform an emergency migration to much larger hardware.

Plus 12 tips for secure authentication, the future of network security where there is no LAN, a botnet exploiting Android ADB & your questions.

Here Come the Script Kiddies | TechSNAP 354

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 21:34:00 +0100

AutoSploit has the security industry in a panic, so we give it a go. To our surprise we discover systems at the DOD, Amazon & other places vulnerable to this automated attack. We’ll tell you all about it & what these 400 lines of Python known as AutoSploit really do.

Plus injecting arbitrary waveforms into Alexa and Google Assistant commands, making WordPress bulletproof & how to detect and prevent excessive port scan attacks.

Too Many Containers | TechSNAP 353

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 18:31:00 +0100

We introduce you to Kubernetes, what problems it solves, why everyone is talking about it & where it came from. Also who shouldn’t be using Kubernetes & the problems you can run into when scaling it.

Plus how you can store files in others DNS resolver cache, Project Zero finds a new BitTorrent client flaw & more!

Stop Using apt-get | TechSNAP 352

Jupiter Broadcasting — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 22:28:00 +0100

And start using configuration management! Embrace reproducibility of systems & streamlined management with TechSNAP’s introduction to Configuration Management.

Plus the news of the week that could impact your systems, your feedback & more!

Performance Meltdown | TechSNAP 351

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 19:55:00 +0100

The types of workloads that will see the largest performance impacts from Meltdown, tools to test yourself & the outlook for 2018.

Plus a concise breakdown of Meltdown, Spectre & side-channel attacks like only TechSNAP can.

Then we run through the timeline of events & the scuttlebutt of so called coordinated disclosure. We also discuss yet another security issue in macOS High Sierra, a backdoor in popular storage appliances, your questions & more!

Trials of TLS | TechSNAP 350

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 29 Dec 2017 09:20:00 +0100

The trials and tribulations of the long journey to TLS 1.3 & the “middleware” that’s keeping us from having nice things. Plus a pack of Leaky S3 bucket stories & the data that was exposed.

Then we do a deep dive into some SMB fundamentals & practical tips to stay on top of suspicious network traffic.

All Natural Namespaces | TechSNAP 349

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 22 Dec 2017 00:11:00 +0100

Network Namespaces have been around for a while, but there may be be some very practical ways to use them that you’ve never considered. Wes does a deep dive into a very flexible tool.

Plus what might be the world’s most important killswitch, the real dollar values for stolen credentials & the 19 year old attack that’s back.

Server Neglect | TechSNAP 348

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 22 Dec 2017 00:02:00 +0100

Authors of one of the most infamous botnets of all time get busted, researchers discover keyloggers built into HP Laptops, the major HomeKit flaw no one is talking about & the new version of FreeNAS packs a lot of features for a point release.

Plus an update on the show and what to expect & we attempt something TechSNAP could never do as a video production, a live double FreeNAS upgrade!