Episode 79

Posted on Friday, Jun 19, 2020
This week Joe discusses Intel’s CET announcement with John Johansen, plus Alex details recent security fixes including SQLite, fwupd, NSS, DBus and more.

Show Notes

Overview

This week Joe discusses Intel’s CET announcement with John Johansen, plus Alex details recent security fixes including SQLite, fwupd, NSS, DBus and more.

This week in Ubuntu Security Updates

24 unique CVEs addressed

[USN-4394-1] SQLite vulnerabilities [00:56]

[USN-4385-2] Intel Microcode regression [01:43]

  • 3 CVEs addressed in Trusty ESM (14.04 ESM), Xenial (16.04 LTS), Bionic (18.04 LTS), Eoan (19.10), Focal (20.04 LTS)
  • Episode 78 - SRBDS etc - microcode is specific to processors, and is identified by the triplet of CPU Family, Model and Stepping - this is listed in /proc/cpuinfo - mine say is 6, 142, 10 - in hex - 06-8E-0A - would cause a specific Skylake processor type to fail to boot (06-4e-03) - we reverted this back to the previous release version from November 2019

[USN-4395-1] fwupd vulnerability [03:39]

[USN-4315-2] Apport vulnerabilities [06:11]

[USN-4396-1] libexif vulnerabilities [06:24]

[USN-4397-1] NSS vulnerabilities [07:24]

  • 2 CVEs addressed in Xenial (16.04 LTS), Bionic (18.04 LTS), Eoan (19.10), Focal (20.04 LTS)
  • Possible timing side-channel attack during DSA key generation - due to the difference in time of various operations (dependent on the contents of the private key) - the key value could be inferred by an attacker

[USN-4398-1, USN-4398-2] DBus vulnerability [08:01]

  • 1 CVEs addressed in Precise ESM (12.04 ESM), Trusty ESM (14.04 ESM), Xenial (16.04 LTS), Bionic (18.04 LTS), Eoan (19.10), Focal (20.04 LTS)
  • DBus can be used to send file-descriptors - client sends to server via the dbus daemon - daemon will validate that messages only contain a certain number of file-descriptors - if too may, will reject BUT fail to close those file-descriptors - eventually would accumulate too many open files itself and so the daemon would not be able to accept new connections -> DoS from a local unprivileged user

Goings on in Ubuntu Security Community

Joe discusses Intel CET with John Johansen (aka JJ) [09:28]

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