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cryptography

CVE-2023-31147: Insufficient randomness for DNS query identifiers in c-ares

We've been part of a team that audited c-ares. This is a writeup of how we discovered that DNS query identifiers generated by c-ares are not always properly random which lead to CVE-2023-31147.

22.08.2023
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linux

Let's Embed a Go Program into the Linux Kernel

Today, we would like to present a lesser-known feature of the Linux kernel. Instead of launching a program from a file system, regardless of whether it's virtual or not, it is also possible to embed a user-space program directly into the kernel image itself and start it from there.

21.07.2023
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sigma-star

Embedded Open Source Summit 2023 in Prague

The Embedded Open Source Summit in Prague offered valuable insights and connections for our company, focusing on Linux and security, as our first major conference since the pandemic.

03.07.2023
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security

Who's your canary?

Stack canaries are a common security feature to mitigate buffer-overflows. However, it's value is generated differently in every libc-implementation, which has security implications.

30.05.2023
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security

Restricting network access using Linux Network Namespaces

Our last blog post on Linux mount namespaces explored ways to restrict access to the file system. In this post we'll show how to restrict access to the network.

07.05.2023
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sigma-star

Too many CPUs to build

Lately we've been facing strange build errors on one of our build servers. The root cause was quite surprising.

09.04.2023
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security

Restricting file system access using Linux Mount Namespaces

Linux offers a variety of mechanisms to confine a process, one of them are namespaces. Today they are mostly used as foundation for Linux containers. In this blog post we'll demonstrate how namespaces can be used to restrict access to the file system for a given process and all its children.

18.03.2023
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sigma-star

Training: Kernel Internals for Linux Admins

Understanding certain kernel internals is not only useful for persons that intend developing kernel related software.

13.12.2022
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security

Securely booting x86 using Heads

An overview about x86 firmware security and Heads, a project aiming to gain more trust in the boot process.

10.11.2022
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sigma-star

Alpine Linux Persistence and Storage Summit 2022

ALPSS 2022 took place again and here's what happened

23.10.2022
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embedded

EROFS vs. SquashFS: A Gentle Benchmark

This blog post gives an overview of EROFS vs. SquashFS and tries to compare them with a simple benchmark.

21.07.2022
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sigma-star

Our ProtonMail Adventure - A Five Act Drama

In 2021 we switched to ProtonMail and figured the hard way that it is not the right thing for us.

01.07.2022
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sigma-star

Summit on a Summit 2022 Edition

After a two years long break the Summit on a Summit was back in early June this year.

13.06.2022
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linux

Linux process priorities demystified

Simple questions often have not so simple answers. One example is the question is, what priority does this process have?

02.02.2022
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security

Re-exploiting unsquashfs

Squashfs-tools recently fixed a security issue. In this blog post we show how to re-exploit it and how it got mitigated

10.01.2022
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sigma-star

Alpine Linux Persistence and Storage Summit 2021

ALPSS was back in 2021 and here's what happened :-)

20.11.2021
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