Hanno's blog

The free software community was recently shattered by two security bugs called Heartbleed and Shellshock. While technically these bugs where quite different I think they still share a lot.

Heartbleed hit the news in April this year. A bug in OpenSSL that allowed to extract privat keys of encrypted connections. When a bug in Bash called Shellshock hit the news I was first hesistant to call it bigger than Heartbleed. But now I am pretty sure it is. While Heartbleed was big there were some things that alleviated the impact. It took some days till people found out how to practically extract private keys - and it still wasn't fast. And the most likely attack scenario - stealing a private key and pulling off a Man-in-the-Middle-attack - seemed something that'd still pose some difficulties to an attacker. It seemed that people who update their systems quickly (like me) weren't in any real danger.

Shellshock was different. It's astonishingly simple to use and real attacks started hours after it became public. If circumstances had been unfortunate there would've been a very real chance that my own servers could've been hit by it. I usually feel the IT stuff under my responsibility is pretty safe, so things like this scare me.

What OpenSSL and Bash have in common

Shortly after Heartbleed something became very obvious: The OpenSSL project wasn't in good shape. The software that pretty much everyone in the Internet uses to do encryption was run by a small number of underpaid people. People trying to contribute and submit patches were often ignored (I know that, I tried it). The truth about Bash looks even grimmer: It's a project mostly run by a single volunteer. And yet almost every large Internet company out there uses it. Apple installs it on every laptop. OpenSSL and Bash are crucial pieces of software and run on the majority of the servers that run the Internet. Yet they are very small projects backed by few people. Besides they are both quite old, you'll find tons of legacy code in them written more than a decade ago.

People like to rant about the code quality of software like OpenSSL and Bash. However I am not that concerned about these two projects. This is the upside of events like these: OpenSSL is probably much securer than it ever was and after the dust settles Bash will be a better piece of software. If you want to ask yourself where the next Heartbleed/Shellshock-alike bug will happen, ask this: What projects are there that are installed on almost every Linux system out there? And how many of them have a healthy community and received a good security audit lately?

Software installed on almost any Linux system

Let me propose a little experiment: Take your favorite Linux distribution, make a minimal installation without anything and look what's installed. These are the software projects you should worry about. To make things easier I did this for you. I took my own system of choice, Gentoo Linux, but the results wouldn't be very different on other distributions. The results are at at the bottom of this text. (I removed everything Gentoo-specific.) I admit this is oversimplifying things. Some of these provide more attack surface than others, we should probably worry more about the ones that are directly involved in providing network services.

After Heartbleed some people already asked questions like these. How could it happen that a project so essential to IT security is so underfunded? Some large companies acted and the result is the Core Infrastructure Initiative by the Linux Foundation, which already helped improving OpenSSL development. This is a great start and an example for an initiative of which we should have more. We should ask the large IT companies who are not part of that initiative what they are doing to improve overall Internet security.

Just to put this into perspective: A thorough security audit of a project like Bash would probably require a five figure number of dollars. For a small, volunteer driven project this is huge. For a company like Apple - the one that installed Bash on all their laptops - it's nearly nothing.

There's another recent development I find noteworthy. Google started Project Zero where they hired some of the brightest minds in IT security and gave them a single job: Search for security bugs. Not in Google's own software. In every piece of software out there. This is not merely an altruistic project. It makes sense for Google. They want the web to be a safer place - because the web is where they earn their money. I like that approach a lot and I have only one question to ask about it: Why doesn't every large IT company have a Project Zero?

Sparking interest

There's another aspect I want to talk about. After Heartbleed people started having a closer look at OpenSSL and found a number of small and one other quite severe issue. After Bash people instantly found more issues in the function parser and we now have six CVEs for Shellshock and friends. When a piece of software is affected by a severe security bug people start to look for more. I wonder what it'd take to have people looking at the projects that aren't in the spotlight.

I was brainstorming if we could have something like a "free software audit action day". A regular call where an important but neglected project is chosen and the security community is asked to have a look at it. This is just a vague idea for now, if you like it please leave a comment.

That's it. I refrain from having discussions whether bugs like Heartbleed or Shellshock disprove the "many eyes"-principle that free software advocates like to cite, because I think these discussions are a pointless waste of time. I'd like to discuss how to improve things. Let's start.

Here's the promised list of Gentoo packages in the standard installation:

bzip2
gzip
tar
unzip
xz-utils
nano
ca-certificates
mime-types
pax-utils
bash
build-docbook-catalog
docbook-xml-dtd
docbook-xsl-stylesheets
openjade
opensp
po4a
sgml-common
perl
python
elfutils
expat
glib
gmp
libffi
libgcrypt
libgpg-error
libpcre
libpipeline
libxml2
libxslt
mpc
mpfr
openssl
popt
Locale-gettext
SGMLSpm
TermReadKey
Text-CharWidth
Text-WrapI18N
XML-Parser
gperf
gtk-doc-am
intltool
pkgconfig
iputils
netifrc
openssh
rsync
wget
acl
attr
baselayout
busybox
coreutils
debianutils
diffutils
file
findutils
gawk
grep
groff
help2man
hwids
kbd
kmod
less
man-db
man-pages
man-pages-posix
net-tools
sed
shadow
sysvinit
tcp-wrappers
texinfo
util-linux
which
pambase
autoconf
automake
binutils
bison
flex
gcc
gettext
gnuconfig
libtool
m4
make
patch
e2fsprogs
udev
linux-headers
cracklib
db
e2fsprogs-libs
gdbm
glibc
libcap
ncurses
pam
readline
timezone-data
zlib
procps
psmisc
shared-mime-info

While I got along well with my Thinkpad T61 laptop, for quite some time I had the plan to get a new one soon. It wasn't an easy decision and I looked in detail at the models available in recent months. I finally decided to buy one of Lenovo's Thinkpad X1 Carbon laptops in its 2014 edition. The X1 Carbon was introduced in 2012, however a completely new variant which is very different from the first one was released early 2014. To distinguish it from other models it is the 20A7 model.

Judging from the first days of use I think I made the right decision. I hadn't seen the device before I bought it because it seems rarely shops keep this device in stock. I assume this is due to the relatively high price.

I was a bit worried because Lenovo made some unusual decisions for the keyboard, however having used it for a few days I don't feel that it has any severe downsides. The most unusual thing about it is that it doesn't have normal F1-F12 keys, instead it has what Lenovo calls an adaptive keyboard: A touch sensitive line which can display different kinds of keys. The idea is that different applications can have their own set of special keys there. However, just letting them display the normal F-keys works well and not having "real" keys there doesn't feel like a big disadvantage. Beside that Lenovo removed the Caps lock and placed Pos1/End there, which is a bit unusual but also nothing I worried about. I also hadn't seen any pictures of the German keyboard before I bought the device. The ^/°-key is not where it's used to be (small downside), but the </>/| key is where it belongs(big plus, many laptop vendors get that wrong).

Good things:
* Lightweight, Ultrabook, no unnecessary stuff like CD/DVD drive
* High resolution (2560x1440)
* Hardware is up-to-date (Haswell chipset)

Downsides:
* Due to ultrabook / integrated design easy changing battery, ram or HD
* No SD card reader
* Have some trouble getting used to the touchpad (however there are lots of possibilities to configure it, I assume by playing with it that'll get better)

It used to be the case that people wrote docs how to get all the hardware in a laptop running on Linux which I did my previous laptops. These days this usually boils down to "run a recent Linux distribution with the latest kernels and xorg packages and most things will be fine". However I thought having a central place where I collect relevant information would be nice so I created one again. As usual I'm running Gentoo Linux.

For people who plan to run Linux without a dual boot it may be worth mentioning that there seem to be troublesome errors in earlier versions of the BIOS and the SSD firmware. You may want to update them before removing Windows. On my device they were already up-to-date.