Links:

• Caddy offers TLS, HTTPS, and more in one dependency-free Go Web server
• Caddy 2
• Caddy v2 Improvements [slightly out of date]
• Proposal: Permanently change all proprietary licensing to open source · Issue #2786 · caddyserver/caddy
• Revert "Implement Caddy-Sponsors HTTP response header" by lol768 · Pull Request #1866 · caddyserver/caddy
• Intel’s 10th generation desktop CPUs have arrived—still on 14nm
• Intel Comet Lake 10th Gen CPU release date, specs, price, and performance
• 10th Gen Intel® Core™ Desktop Processors
• US military is furious at FCC over 5G plan that could interfere with GPS
• The Pentagon's fight to kill Ligado's 5G network
• FCC Approves Ligado L-Band Application to Facilitate 5G & IoT

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

Links:

• AMD Claims World’s Fastest Per-Core Performance with New EPYC Rome 7Fx2 CPUs
• AMD EPYC 7F52 Linux Performance - AMD 7FX2 CPUs Further Increasing The Fight Against Intel Xeon Review
• Understanding RAID: How performance scales from one disk to eight
• New Cloudflare tool can tell you if your ISP has deployed BGP fixes
• Is BGP safe yet?
• RPKI - The required cryptographic upgrade to BGP routing
• Why I Prefer systemd Timers Over Cron – Thomas Stringer
• systemd/Timers - ArchWiki
• systemd.time (Time format docs)
• systemd.timer (Unit docs)

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

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

Links:

• Critical Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows Operating Systems
• Win10 Crypto Vulnerability: Cheating in Elliptic Curve Billiards 2
• NSA discovers a serious flaw in Windows 10
• Exploiting CVE-2020-0601
• CVE-2020-0601 POC
• NSA Cybersecurity Advisory on CryptoAPI Flaw
• Why can’t I get to the internet on my new OPNsense install?! - Jim's Blog
• OPNsense: a true open source security platform and more
• There's An Actual Name And Reason For Those Beeps You Hear In Recordings Of Astronauts In Space
• Quindar Tones
• Cap'n Crunch Whistle and the Secrets of the Little Blue Box

Links:

• Introducing Nebula, the open source global overlay network from Slack
• nebula: A scalable overlay networking tool with a focus on performance, simplicity and security
• Nebula VPN routes between hosts privately, flexibly, and efficiently
• How to set up your own Nebula mesh VPN, step by step
• LINUX Unplugged 329: Flat Network Truthers
• Cloudy with a chance of neurons: The tools that make neural networks work
• Welcome To Colaboratory
• ImageColorizer Notebook
• DeOldify: A Deep Learning based project for colorizing and restoring old images (and video!)

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

Links:

• T-Mobile launches 600MHz 5G across the US, but no one can use it yet
• Study confirms AT&T’s fake 5G E network is no faster than Verizon, T-Mobile or Sprint 4G
• 5G on the horizon: Here’s what it is and what’s coming
• Can 5G replace everybody’s home broadband?
• The Snapdragon 865 will make phones worse in 2020, thanks to mandatory 5G
• Librem 5 backers have begun receiving their Linux phones
• Amazon’s inexpensive Eero mesh Wi-Fi kit is shockingly good
• WireGuard VPN is a step closer to mainstream adoption

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

Links:

• “Where the Wi-Fi sucks” is where a new wireless protocol does its magic
• Ubiquiti’s new “Amplifi Alien” is a mesh-capable Wi-Fi 6 router
• Self-encrypting deception: weaknesses in the encryption of solid state drives
• Securely erase a solid-state drive
• Solid state drive/Memory cell clearing - ArchWiki
• The Deep Learning Revolution and Its Implications for Computer Architecture and Chip Design
• Intel Core i9-10980XE—a step forward for AI, a step back for everything else
• How to recognize AI snake oil

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.

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.

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.

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

Links:

• Apple bleee. Everyone knows What Happens on Your iPhone – hexway — If Bluetooth is ON on your Apple device everyone nearby can understand current status of your device, get info about battery, device name, Wi-Fi status, buffer availability, OS version and even get your mobile phone number
• Facebook Plans on Backdooring WhatsApp - Schneier on Security — In Facebook's vision, the actual end-to-end encryption client itself such as WhatsApp will include embedded content moderation and blacklist filtering algorithms. These algorithms will be continually updated from a central cloud service, but will run locally on the user's device, scanning each cleartext message before it is sent and each encrypted message after it is decrypted.
• Signal — Privacy that fits in your pocket.
• xkcd: Security — Turns out it's a $5 wrench, even better!
• Jim Salter on Twitter — I wonder why #privacy wonks aren't talking about browser fingerprinting more frequently? Privacy Badger, Ghostery, etc don't do a damn thing to prevent or mitigate Canvas / WebGL #fingerprinting.
• Browser Fingerprinting: What Is It and What Should You Do About It? - PixelPrivacy — Browser fingerprinting is a powerful method that websites use to collect information about your browser type and version, as well as your operating system, active plugins, timezone, language, screen resolution and various other active settings.
• Canvas Fingerprinting - BrowserLeaks.com — The technique is based on the fact that the same canvas image may be rendered differently in different computers. This happens for several reasons. At the image format level – web browsers uses different image processing engines, image export options, compression level, the final images may got different checksum even if they are pixel-identical. At the system level – operating systems have different fonts, they use different algorithms and settings for anti-aliasing and sub-pixel rendering.
• WebGL Browser Report - WebGL Fingerprinting - WebGL 2 Test - BrowserLeaks.com — WebGL Browser Report checks WebGL support in your web browser, produce WebGL Device Fingerprinting, and shows the other WebGL and GPU capabilities more or less related web browser identity.
• AmIUnique — Device fingerprinting or browser fingerprinting is the systematic collection of information about a remote device, for identification purposes. Client-side scripting languages allow the development of procedures to collect very rich fingerprints: browser and operating system type and version, screen resolution, architecture type, lists of fonts, plugins, microphone, camera, etc.
• Panopticlick — Panopticlick will analyze how well your browser and add-ons protect you against online tracking techniques. We’ll also see if your system is uniquely configured—and thus identifiable—even if you are using privacy-protective software. However, we only do so with your explicit consent, through the TEST ME button below.
• How private is your browser’s Private mode? Research into porn suggests “not very” | Ars Technica — This leaves browser fingerprinting as a method to tie your profiles together—and unfortunately, Incognito mode doesn't appear to help.
• Privacy Tools - Encryption Against Global Mass Surveillance — You are being watched. Private and state-sponsored organizations are monitoring and recording your online activities. privacytools.io provides services, tools and knowledge to protect your privacy against global mass surveillance.
• ‘Fingerprinting’ to Track Us Online Is on the Rise. Here’s What to Do. - The New York Times — Fingerprinting involves looking at the many characteristics of your mobile device or computer, like the screen resolution, operating system and model, and triangulating this information to pinpoint and follow you as you browse the web and use apps. Once enough device characteristics are known, the theory goes, the data can be assembled into a profile that helps identify you the way a fingerprint would.
• Digital 'Fingerprinting' Is The Next Generation Tracking Technology | The Takeaway | WNYC Studios — This growing technology is almost invisible, making it impossible for users to opt-out of the tracking system. As it becomes more popular, tech companies are developing new ways to try and protect consumers from this form of tracking. But is it going to work?
• New Warning Issued Over Google's Chrome Ad-Blocking Plans — The plans, dubbed Manifest V3, represent a major transformation to Chrome extensions including a revamp of the permissions system. As a result, modern ad blockers such as uBlock Origin—which uses Chrome’s webRequest API to block ads before they’re downloaded–won’t work.
• Comment on Chrome extension manifest v3 proposal by gorhill — The blocking ability of the webRequest API is still deprecated, and Google Chrome's limited matching algorithm will be the only one possible, and with limits dictated by Google employees. It's annoying that they keep saying "the webRequest API is not deprecated" as if developers have been worried about this -- and as if they want to drown the real issue in a fabricated one nobody made.
• CanvasBlocker
• Ghostery
• Disconnect

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!
• Mozilla teases $5-per-month ad-free news subscription — Mozilla has started teasing an ad-free news subscription service, which, for $5 per month, would offer ad-free browsing, audio readouts, and cross-platform syncing of news articles from a number of websites.

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

Links:

• Errata Security: Almost One Million Vulnerable to BlueKeep Vuln (CVE-2019-0708) — Microsoft announced a vulnerability in it's "Remote Desktop" product that can lead to robust, wormable exploits. I scanned the Internet to assess the danger. I find nearly 1-million devices on the public Internet that are vulnerable to the bug.
• Even the NSA is urging Windows users to patch BlueKeep (CVE-2019-0708) | ZDNet — "[The] NSA is concerned that malicious cyber actors will use the vulnerability in ransomware and exploit kits containing other known exploits, increasing capabilities against other unpatched systems.
• Prevent a worm by updating Remote Desktop Services (CVE-2019-0708) – MSRC — This vulnerability is pre-authentication and requires no user interaction. In other words, the vulnerability is ‘wormable’, meaning that any future malware that exploits this vulnerability could propagate from vulnerable computer to vulnerable computer in a similar way as the WannaCry malware spread across the globe in 2017
• BlueKeep - everyone agrees, you should patch PCs running legacy versions of Windows — I have this horrible feeling that the only way we’re going to wake the world up to the need to patch their ageing versions of Windows against the BlueKeep vulnerability is to wait until a malicious worm begins to spread around the world.
• CVE-2019-0708 | Remote Desktop Services Remote Code Execution Vulnerability — A remote code execution vulnerability exists in Remote Desktop Services – formerly known as Terminal Services – when an unauthenticated attacker connects to the target system using RDP and sends specially crafted requests. This vulnerability is pre-authentication and requires no user interaction. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could execute arbitrary code on the target system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights.
• Customer guidance for CVE-2019-0708 | Remote Desktop Services Remote Code Execution Vulnerability — Microsoft is aware that some customers are running versions of Windows that no longer receive mainstream support. That means those customers will not have received any security updates to protect their systems from CVE-2019-0708, which is a critical remote code execution vulnerability.
• Forget BlueKeep: Beware the GoldBrute | Threatpost — In the past few days, GoldBrute (named after the Java class it uses) has attempted to brute-force Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) connections for 1.5 million Windows systems and counting, according to Morphus Labs chief research officer Renato Marinho. The botnet is actively scanning the internet for machines with RDP exposed, and trying out weak or reused passwords to see if it can gain access to the systems.
• The GoldBrute botnet — The latest round of bad news emerged last week when Morphus Labs’ researcher Renato Marinho announced the discovery of an aggressive brute force campaign against 1.5 million RDP servers by a botnet called ‘GoldBrute’.
• Ubuntu Automatic Updates — The unattended-upgrades package can be used to automatically install updated packages, and can be configured to update all packages or just install security updates.
• AutoUpdates - Fedora Project Wiki — You must decide whether to use automatic DNF or YUM updates on each of your machines.
• It's time to block Windows Automatic Updating | Computerworld — Those of you who feel it’s important to install Windows and Office patches the moment they come out – I salute you. The Windows world needs more cannon fodder.
• Windows 10's Ugly Updates Just Got Uglier. Here's How To Stay Safe by Disabling Automatic Updates — Stay safe by disabling automatic updates? How is that possible? As a general rule of thumb, I’d never recommend disabling updates because security patches are essential. But the situation with Windows 10 has become intolerable. Microsoft continues to fail and continues to release update after update that they know, or should know, has serious problems.
• Jim's New Rig — I build, sell, and manage much bigger and meaner systems than this all the time. But this one's MINE! 12 hot swap bays, Ryzen 7 2700 w/ ECC RAM, quiet enough to share an office with, and the trays can take either HDD or SSD with no adapter needed.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Links:

• Chris Goes to MeetBSD
• ​Linus Torvalds talks about coming back to work on Linux | ZDNet — BPF has actually been really useful, and the real power of it is how it allows people to do specialized code that isn't enabled until asked for.
• The Kernel Report - Jonathan Corbet
• BPF - the forgotten bytecode — All this changed in 1993 when Steven McCanne and Van Jacobson published the paper introducing a better way of filtering packets in the kernel, they called it "The BSD Packet Filter" (BPF)
• The BSD Packet Filter
• eBPF: Past, Present, and Future — The Extended Berkeley Packet Filter, or eBPF, has rapidly been adopted into a number of Linux kernel systems since its introduction into the Linux kernel in late 2014. Understanding eBPF, however, can be difficult as many try to explain it via a use of eBPF as opposed to its design. Indeed eBPF's name indicates that it is for packet filtering even though it now has uses which have nothing to do with networking.
• Using eBPF in Kubernetes — Cilium is a networking project that makes heavy use of eBPF superpowers to route and filter network traffic for container-based systems. By using eBPF, Cilium can dynamically generate and apply rules—even at the device level with XDP—without making changes to the Linux kernel itself
• Why is the kernel community replacing iptables with BPF? — The Linux kernel community recently announced bpfilter, which will replace the long-standing in-kernel implementation of iptables with high-performance network filtering powered by Linux BPF, all while guaranteeing a non-disruptive transition for Linux users.
• bpftrace (DTrace 2.0) for Linux 2018 — Created by Alastair Robertson, bpftrace is an open source high-level tracing front-end that lets you analyze systems in custom ways. It's shaping up to be a DTrace version 2.0: more capable, and built from the ground up for the modern era of the eBPF virtual machine.
• The bpftrace One-Liner Tutorial
• BCC - Tools for BPF-based Linux IO analysis, networking, monitoring, and more — BCC is a toolkit for creating efficient kernel tracing and manipulation programs, and includes several useful tools and examples.
• Linux eBPF Tracing Tools — This page shows examples of performance analysis tools using enhancements to BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) which were added to the Linux 4.x series kernels, allowing BPF to do much more than just filtering packets. These enhancements allow custom analysis programs to be executed on Linux dynamic tracing, static tracing, and profiling events.
• eBPF Vulnerability (CVE-2017-16995): When the Doorman Becomes the Backdoor
• Ultimate Plumber — Ultimate Plumber is a tool for writing Linux pipes with instant live preview
• BSD Now 073: Pipe Dreams — Interview w/ David Maxwell about Pipecut, text processing, and commandline wizardry.

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

Special Guest: Martin Wimpress.

Links:

• I’m teaching email security to Democratic campaigns. It’s as bad as 2016.
• Botched CIA Communications System Helped Blow Cover of Chinese Agents
• NSA-Designed Speck Algorithm to Be Removed From Linux 4.20
• Vulnerability Affects All OpenSSH Versions Released in the Past Two Decades
• Wireshark can be crashed via malicious packet trace files
• Service provider story about tracking down TCP RSTs
• The case of the 500-mile email
• Diffy: A cloud-centric triage tool for digital forensics and incident response
• An intensive introduction to Cryptography
• The Manga Guide to Cryptography | No Starch Press