I’m the administrator of kbin.life, a general purpose/tech orientated kbin instance.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Linux secure boot was a little weird last I checked. The kernel and modules don’t need to be secure boot signed. Most distros can use shim to pass secure boot and then take over the secure boot process.

    There are dkms kernel modules that are user compiled. These are signed using a machine owner key. So the machine owner could for sure compile their own malicious version and still be in a secure boot context.





  • But this is the crucial thing. It wasn’t in the repository. It was in the tarball. It’s a very careful distinction because, people generally reviewed the repository and made the assumption that what’s there, is all that matters.

    The changes to the make process only being present in the tarball was actually quite an ingenius move. Because they knew that the process many distro maintainers use is to pull the tarball and work from that (likely with some automated scripting to make the package for their distro).

    This particular path will probably be harder to reproduce in the future. Larger projects I would expect have some verification process in place to ensure they match (and the backup of people independently doing the same).

    But it’s not to say there won’t in the future be some other method of attack the happens out of sight of the main repository and is missed by the existing processes.



  • Actually how is your ISP giving out IPs to you? Mine uses IPv6 PD to give me a /48. And I then use SLAAC locally on the first /64 prefix on my LAN. Plus another /64 for VPN connections.

    If you mean receiving RA/ND packets from your ISP (which are used to announce IPv6 prefixes) then you need to allow icmpv6 packets (if you don’t want to be able to be pinged, just block echo requests, ICMP in v4 and v6 carry important messages otherwise).

    If your ISP uses DHCPv6 Prefix delegation you will need to allow packets to UDP port 546 and run a DHCPv6 client capable of handling PD messages.

    If you have a fixed prefix, then you probably don’t need to use your ISPs SLAAC at all. You could just put your router on a fixed IP as <yourprefix>::1 and then have your router create RA/ND packets (radvd package in linux, not sure what it would be on pfsense) and assign IPs within your network that way.

    If you have a dynamic prefix… It’s a problem I guess. But probably someone has done it and a google search will turn up how they handled it.

    EDIT: Just clarified that the RA/ND packets advertise prefixes, not assign addresses.


  • I believe the privacy concerns are made moot if all consumer level routers by default blocked incoming untracked connections and you need to poke holes in the firewall for the ports you need.

    Having said that, even knowing the prefix it’s a huge address space to port scan through. So it’s pretty secure too with privacy extensions enabled.

    But for sure the onus is on the router makers for now.





  • Whenever anyone asks if I use AI. My answer is that, so far it hasn’t ever delivered working code. However the majority of times I used it, the code it did provide sent me in the right direction.

    So it’s not useless. And I know tools have gotten better. But when I see companies seriously talking “AI first” and wanting vibe coding to be a main development strategy. I do really worry.



  • OK so it’s fairly simple. You need to install the acl package (or whatever equivalent package contains getfacl/setfacl. Then you can use that to dump the data from an entire structure into a file (I also then bzip that). Then I backup all installed packages to help with a restore too.

    So the script looks like:

    #!/bin/bash
    cd /etc
    /usr/bin/getfacl -R . | /usr/bin/bzip2 -9 >PERMISSION_BACKUP.bz2
    chmod 600 PERMISSION_BACKUP.bz2
    cd /home
    /usr/bin/getfacl -R . | /usr/bin/bzip2 -9 >PERMISSION_BACKUP.bz2
    chmod 600 PERMISSION_BACKUP.bz2
    cd /root
    /usr/bin/getfacl -R . | /usr/bin/bzip2 -9 >PERMISSION_BACKUP.bz2
    chmod 600 PERMISSION_BACKUP.bz2
    cd /var
    /usr/bin/getfacl -R . | /usr/bin/bzip2 -9 >PERMISSION_BACKUP.bz2
    chmod 600 PERMISSION_BACKUP.bz2
    /usr/bin/apt list --installed | /usr/bin/bzip2 -9 >/root/INSTALLED-PACKAGES.bz2
    chmod 600 /root/INSTALLED-PACKAGES.bz2
    

    To restore you change to the folder the backup was taken from, unbzip the file (or uncompress live via pipe) and use setfacl --restore=<file>





  • I’m not using VST. There’s a few games I got on Microsoft store some years ago which there’s no way (yet) to make run in Linux (at least to my knowledge). But, I don’t feel that much need to play them. At least not enough to boot into windows, complete the huge updates likely waiting and then fix the grub install afterwards just to play a game.