Posts in category OpenBSD Journal
OpenBSD Community Goes Gold for 2018!
Ken Westerback (krw@ when wearing his developer hat) writes:
Monthly paypal donations from the OpenBSD community have made the
community the
OpenBSD Foundation\'s first
Gold level contributor for
2018!
2018 is the third consecutive year that the community has reached
Gold status or better.
These monthly paypal commitments by the [...]
Hardware accelerated AES/HMAC-SHA on ...
In this commit, visa@ submitted code (disabled for now) to use built-in acceleration
on octeon CPUs, much like AESNI for x86s.
I decided to test tcpbench(1) and IPsec, before and after updating and enabling the octcrypto(4) driver.
Read more…
MAP_STACK Stack Register Checking Com...
The MAP_STACK anti-ROP mechanism described in a recent
article
has been
committed
to
-current.
The
commit message
includes:
Implement MAP_STACK option for mmap(). Synchronous faults (pagefault and
syscall) confirm the stack register points at MAP_STACK memory, otherwise
SIGSEGV is delivered. sigaltstack() and pthread_attr_setst [...]
Transparent network audio with mpd &a...
Landry Breuil (landry@ when wearing his developer hat) wrote
in…
I\'ve been a huge fan of MPD over the
years to centralize my audio collection, and i\'ve been using it with the
http output to stream the music as a radio on the computer i\'m currently
using…
Read more…
OpenBSD 6.3 Released
April 2, 2018: The OpenBSD
project has announced the availability of the newest release,
OpenBSD 6.3:
We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 6.3.
This is our 44th release. We remain proud of OpenBSD\'s record of more
than twenty years with only two remote holes in the default install.
Notable changes include:
[...]
Stack-register Checking
Recently, Theo de Raadt (deraadt@)
described
a new type of mitigation he has been working on together with Stefan Kempf (stefan@):
How about we add another new permission! This is not a hardware
permission, but a software permission. It is opportunistically
enforced by the kernel.
[...]
Mike Larkin at bhyvecon 2018: OpenBSD...
Mike Larkin (mlarkin@) has just given a presentation at
bhyvecon Tokyo 2018.
The slides are now
available (as PDF).
In addition to the excellent summary of the state-of-play for
vmm
and friends, the presentation offers a tantalizing glimpse at possible future
directions.
syspatches will be provided for both ...
Good news for people doing upgrades only once per year: syspatches will be provided for both supported releases. The commit from T.J. Townsend (tj@) speaks for itself:
Subject: CVS: cvs.openbsd.org: www
From: T.J. Townsend <tj () openbsd ! org>
Date: 2018-03-06 22:09:12
CVSROOT: /cvs
Module name: www
Changes [...]
a2k18 Hackathon Report: Ken Westerbac...
Ken Westerback (krw@) has sent in the first report from the (recently concluded) a2k18 hackathon:
YYZ -> YVR -> MEL -> ZQN -> CHC -> DUD -> WLG -> AKL -> SYD -> BNE -> YVR -> YYZ.
Whew.
Once in Dunedin the hacking commenced. The background was a regular
tick of new meltdown diffs to test in (Read more. [...]
Meltdown-mitigation syspatch/errata n...
The recent changes in -current mitigating the Meltdown vulnerability have been backported to the
6.1 and
6.2
(amd64) releases, and the
syspatch update (for 6.2) is now available.
Happy syspatching, and don\'t forget to show your appreciation by
donating to the project.
Meltdown fix committed by guenther@
Meltdown mitigation is coming to OpenBSD. Philip Guenther (guenther@) has just committed a diff that implements a new mitigation technique to OpenBSD: Separation of page tables for kernel and userland. This fixes the Meltdown problems that affect most CPUs from Intel. Both Philip and Mike Larkin (mlarkin@) spent a lot of time implementing [...]
a2k18 Hackathon preview: Syncookies c...
As you may have heard, the a2k18 hackathon is in progress. As can be seen from the commit messages, several items of goodness are being worked on.
One eagerly anticipated item is the arrival of TCP syncookies (read: another important tool in your anti-DDoS toolset) in PF. Henning Brauer (henning@) added the code in a series of commits (R [...]
Remi Locherer’s EuroBSDcon 2017...
Remi Locherer wrote in:
Last September I gave a talk at EuroBSDcon in Paris. It was about the
VPN setup for connecting the branch offices of my employer.
https://2017.eurobsdcon.org/talk-speakers/#RemiLocherer
It was not my first EuroBSDcon but the first time I delivered a talk!
I feared that only few people will show up at to my talk [...]
The OpenBSD Foundation 2018 Fundraisi...
Details of the
2018 campaign have been added to the Foundation\'s website. The goal for the
year is for $300,000. The total for "smaller" donations has already
taken the OpenBSD community to bronze level sponsorship!
Please show your support by contributing.
CPU microcode update code for amd64
Patrick Wildt (patrick@) recently committed some code that will update the Intel microcode on many Intel CPUs, a diff initially written by Stefan Fritsch (sf@). The microcode of your CPU is basically the firmware that runs on your (Intel) processor, defining its instruction set in terms of so called \"microinstructions\". The new code depend [...]
Handling of CPU bugs disclosure ̵...
ITWire
has published
an article
regarding Theo de Raadt\'s (deraadt@) reaction to the
Meltdown/Spectre disclosures.
One choice quote reads:
Intel engineers attended the same conferences as other company engineers, and read the same papers about performance enhancing strategies – so it is hard to believe they ignored the risky aspec [...]
OpenBSD-current now has ‘smtpct...
If you run a mail service, you probably like to have greylisting in place, via spamd(8) or similar means. However, there are some sites that simply do not play well with greylisting, and for those it\'s useful to extract SPF information to identify their valid outgoing SMTP hosts.
Now OpenBSD offers a straightforward mechanism to do that [...]
Response to the “Meltdown”...
A
message to tech@
from Philip Guenther (guenther@) provides the first public
information from developers regarding the OpenBSD response to the recently
announced
CPU vulnerabilities:
So, yes, we the OpenBSD developers are not totally asleep and a handful of
us are working out how to deal with Intel\'s fuck-up aka the Meltdown
attack [...]
BSDCAN2017 Interview with Peter Hessl...
In a
message to misc@,
Tom Smyth wrote (in part):
While attending BSDCAN2017 in Ottawa I met many OpenBSD Developers,
and I was fortunate to grab a few moments and video an interview
with Peter Hessler, Henning Brauer and Reyk Floeter and talk to
them about OpenBSD generally,
I really appreciate the guys generosity in their time on t [...]
pledge() work in progress
In a
message to tech@,
Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) provided some insights into ongoing
work on pledge(2):
I wanted to give an update that a two pledge-related changes are being
worked on. The semantics and integration are complicated so it is
taking some time.
Read more…
