Surgut

Achieving full disk encryption using FIPS, TCG OPAL and LUKS to encrypt UEFI ESP on bare-metal and in VMs Many security standards such as CIS and STIG require to protect information at rest. For example, NIST SP 800-53r5 SC-28 advocate to use cryptographic protection, offline storage and TPMs to enhance protection of information confidentiality and/or integrity. Traditionally to satisfy such controls on portable devices such as laptops one would utilize software based Full Disk Encryption - Mac OS X FileVault , Windows Bitlocker , Linux cryptsetup LUKS2 . In cases when FIPS cryptography is required, additional burden would be placed onto these systems to operate their kernels in FIPS mode. Trusted Computing Group  works on establishing many industry standards and specifications, which are widely adopted to improve safety and security of computing whilst keeping it easy to use. One of their most famous specifications them is TCG  TPM 2.0 (Trusted Platform Module). TPMs are now...

Linux kernel getting a livepatch whilst running a marathon. Generated with AI. Livepatch service eliminates the need for unplanned maintenance windows for high and critical severity kernel vulnerabilities by patching the Linux kernel while the system runs. Originally the service launched in 2016 with just a single kernel flavour supported. Over the years, additional kernels were added: new LTS releases, ESM kernels, Public Cloud kernels, and most recently HWE kernels too. Recently livepatch support was expanded for FIPS compliant kernels, Public cloud FIPS compliant kernels, and as well IBM Z (mainframe) kernels. Bringing the total of kernel flavours support to over 60 distinct kernel flavours supported in parallel. The table of supported kernels in the documentation lists the supported kernel flavours ABIs, the duration of individual build's support window, supported architectures, and the Ubuntu release. This work was only possible thanks to the collaboration with the Ubuntu C...

Photo by Pixabay Ubuntu systems typically have up to 3 kernels installed, before they are auto-removed by apt on classic installs. Historically the installation was optimized for metered download size only. However, kernel size growth and usage no longer warrant such optimizations. During the 23.10 Mantic Minatour cycle, I led a coordinated effort across multiple teams to implement lots of optimizations that together achieved unprecedented install footprint improvements. Given a typical install of 3 generic kernel ABIs in the default configuration on a regular-sized VM (2 CPU cores 8GB of RAM) the following metrics are achieved in Ubuntu 23.10 versus Ubuntu 22.04 LTS: 2x less disk space used (1,417MB vs 2,940MB, including initrd) 3x less peak RAM usage for the initrd boot (68MB vs 204MB) 0.5x increase in download size (949MB vs 600MB) 2.5x faster initrd generation (4.5s vs 11.3s) approximately the same total time (103s vs 98s, hardware dependent) For minimal cloud images that do not in...

Example of website that only supports TLS v1.0, which is rejected by the client Overivew TLS v1.3 is the latest standard for secure communication over the internet. It is widely supported by desktops, servers and mobile phones. Recently Ubuntu 18.04 LTS received OpenSSL 1.1.1 update bringing the ability to potentially establish TLS v1.3 connections on the latest Ubuntu LTS release. Qualys SSL Labs Pulse report shows more than 15% adoption of TLS v1.3. It really is time to migrate from TLS v1.0 and TLS v1.1. As announced on the 15th of October 2018 Apple , Google , and Microsoft will disable TLS v1.0 and TLS v1.1 support by default and thus require TLS v1.2 to be supported by all clients and servers. Similarly, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS will also require TLS v1.2 as the minimum TLS version as well. To prepare for the move to TLS v1.2, it is a good idea to disable TLS v1.0 and TLS v1.1 on your local systems and start observing and reporting any websites, systems and applications that...

xkcd #538: Security Went into blogger settings and enabled TLS on my custom domain blogger blog. So it is now finally a https://blog.surgut.co.uk  However, I do use feedburner and syndicate that to the planet. I am not sure if that is end-to-end TLS connections, thus I will look into removing feedburner between my blog and the ubuntu/debian planets. My experience with changing feeds in the planets is that I end up spamming everyone. I wonder, if I should make a new tag and add that one, and add both feeds to the planet config to avoid spamming old posts. Next up went into gandi LiveDNS platform and enabled DNSSEC on my domain. It propagated quite quickly, but I believe my domain is now correctly signed with DNSSEC stuff. Next up I guess, is to fix DNSSEC with captive portals. I guess what we really want to have on "wifi" like devices, is to first connect to wifi and not set it as default route. Perform captive portal check, potentially with a reduced DNS server capabil...

Ubuntu Snowsports and Friends Team After talking to a bunch of people, I've realized that a lot of free & open source, debian / ubuntu, etc people do ski or snowboard. So I have this crazy idea, that maybe we can get enough people together to form a social team on Launchpad. And maybe if we have enough people there, to possibly try to organize a ski trip with or without conference talks. Kind of like a team building meetup / community event / UDS - Ubuntu Developer Snowsports trip, or maybe an Ubucon Snow. So here we go - please consider joining  https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-snowsports team, join the mailing list there, and/or hop onto IRC to join #ubuntu-snow on freenode. I hope we can get more members than  https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-cyclists