The sudo tty bug and procps

There have been recent reports of a security bug in sudo (CVE-2017-1000367) where you can fool sudo into thinking what controlling terminal it is running on to bypass its security checks.  One of the first things I thought of was, is procps vulnerable to the same bug? Sure, it wouldn’t be a security bypass, but it would be a normal sort of bug. A lot of programs  in procps have a concept of a controlling terminal, or the TTY field for either viewing or filtering, could they be fooled into thinking the process had a different controlling terminal?

Was I going to be in the same pickle as the sudo maintainers? The meat between the stat parsing sandwich? Can I find any more puns related somehow to the XKCD comic?

TLDR: No.

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WordPress 4.7.2

When WordPress originally announced their latest security update, there were three security fixes. While all security updates can be serious, they didn’t seem too bad. Shortly after, they updated their announcement with a fourth and more serious security problem.

I have looked after the Debian WordPress package for a while. This is the first time I have heard people actually having their sites hacked almost as soon as this vulnerability was announced.

If you are running WordPress 4.7 or 4.7.1, your website is vulnerable and there are bots out there looking for it. You should immediately upgrade to 4.7.2 (or, if there is a later 4.7.x version to that).  There is now updated Debian wordpress version 4.7.2 packages for unstable, testing and stable backports.

For stable, you are on a patched version 4.1 which doesn’t have this specific vulnerability (it was introduced in 4.7) but you should be using 4.1+dfsg-1+deb8u12 which has the fixes found in 4.7.1 ported back to 4.1 code.

axdigi resurrected

Seems funny to talk about 20 year old code that was a stop-gap measure to provide a bridging function the kernel had not (as yet) got, but here it is, my old bridge code.

When I first started getting involved in Free Software, I was also involved with hamradio. In 1994 I release my first Free Software, or Open Source program called axdigi.  This program allowed you to “digipeat”. This was effectively source route bridging across hamradio packet networks. The code I used for this was originally network sniffer code to debug my PackeTwin kernel driver but  got frustrated at there being no digipeating function within Linux, so I wrote axdigi which is about 200 lines.

The funny thing is, back then I thought it would be a temporary solution until digipeating got put into the kernel, which it temporarily did then got removed.

Recently some people asked me about axdigi and where there is an “official” place where the code lives. The answer is really the last axdigi was 0.02 written in July 1995. It seems strange to resurrect 20 year old code but it is still in use; though it does show its age.  I’ve done some quick work on getting rid of the compiler warnings but there is more to do.

So now axdigi has a nice shiny new home on GitHub, at https://github.com/csmall/axdigi

Changing Jabber IDs

I’ve shuffled some domains around, using less of enc.com.au and more of my new domain dropbear.xyz The website should work with both, but the primary domain is dropbear.xyz

 

Another change is my Jabber ID which used to be csmall at enc but now is same username at dropbear.xyz I think I have done all the required changes in prosody for it to work, even with a certbot certificate!