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

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

Links:

• Firefox continues push to bring DNS over HTTPS by default for US users - The Mozilla Blog
• The Facts: Mozilla’s DNS over HTTPs (DoH)
• Security/DOH-resolver-policy - MozillaWiki
• HTTPS for all: Let’s Encrypt reaches one billion certificates issued | Ars Technica
• Let’s Encrypt Has Issued a Billion Certificates - Let’s Encrypt - Free SSL/TLS Certificates
• Let’s Encrypt: A History - The Morning Paper
• Apple drops a bomb on long-life HTTPS certificates: Safari to snub new security certs valid for more than 13 months • The Register
• Ballot SC22: Reduce Certificate Lifetimes
• Google Chrome’s fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side
• Microsoft shares a roadmap for the new Microsoft Edge
• Microsoft Edge: Top Feedback Summary for March 4
• Download Microsoft Edge Insider Channels
• Flaw in billions of Wi-Fi devices left communications open to eavesdropping | Ars Technica
• kr00k: A serious vulnerability deep inside Wi-Fi encryption
• Kr00k Paper
• Technical Details of Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers
• An EPYC trip to Rome: AMD is Cloudflare’s 10th-generation Edge server CPU
• Cloudflare’s Gen X: Servers for an Accelerated Future
• Impact of Cache Locality
• Gen X Performance Tuning
• Securing Memory at EPYC Scale
• Intel promises Full Memory Encryption in upcoming CPUs | Ars Technica

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

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.