Month: October 2015

The second day was opened by Leigh Honeywell and she was talking about how to secure an Open Future. An interesting case study, she said, was Heartbleed. Researchers found that vulnerability and went through the appropriate vulnerability disclosure channels, but the information leaked although there was an embargo in place. In fact, the bug proofed to be exploited for a couple of months already. Microsoft, her former employer, had about ten years of a head start in developing a secure development life-cycle. The trick is, she said, to have plans in place in case of security vulnerabilities. You throw half of your plan away, anyway, but it’s good to have that practice of knowing who to talk to and all. She gave a few recommendations of which she thinks will enable us to write secure code. Coders should review, learn, and speak up if they feel uncomfortable with a piece of code. Managers could take up on what she called “smells” when people tend to be fearful about their code. Of course, MicroSoft’s SDL also contains many good practices. Her minimal set of practices is to have a self-assessment in place to determine if something needs security review, have an up-front threat modelling that is kept up to date as things evolve, have a security checklist like Mozilla’s or OWASP’s, and have security analysis built into CI process.

The container panel was led by Jeo Zonker Brockmeier who started the discussion by stating that we’ve passed the cloud hype and containers are all the rage now. The first question he shot at the panellists was whether containers were ready at all to be used for production. The panellists were, of course, all in agreement that they are, although the road ahead is still a bit bumpy. One issue, they identified, was image distribution. There are, apparently, two types of containers. Application containers and System containers. Containers used to be a lightweight VM with a full Linux system. Application Containers, on the other hand, only run your database instance. They see application containers as replacing Apps in the future. Other services like databases are thus not necessarily the task of Application containers. One of the panellists was embracing dockerhub as a similar means to RPM or .deb packages for distributing software, but, he said, we need to solve the problem of signing and trusting. He was comparing the trust issue with packages he had installed on his laptop. When he installed a package, he didn’t check what was inside the packages his OS downloaded. Well, I guess he missed that people put trust in the distribution instead of random people on the Internet who put up an image for everybody to download. Anyway, he wanted Docker to be a form of trusted entity like Google or Apple are for their app stores which are distributing applications. I don’t know how they could have missed the dependency resolution and the problem of updating lower level libraries, maybe that problem has been solved already…

Intel’s Mark was talking on how Open Source was fuelling the Internet of Things. He said that trust was an essential aspect of devices that have access to personal or sensitive data like access to your house. He sees the potential in IoT around vaccines which is a connection I didn’t think of. But it makes somewhat sense. He explained that vaccines are quite sensitive to temperature. In developing countries, up to 30% of the vaccines spoil, he said, and what’s worse is that you can’t tell whether the vaccine is good. The IoT could provide sensors on vaccines which can monitor the conditions. In general, he sees the integration of diverse functionality and capabilities of IoT devices will need new development efforts. He didn’t mention what those would be, though. Another big issue, he said, was the updatetability, he said. Even with smaller devices, updates must not be neglected. Also, the ability of these devices to communicate is a crucial component, too, he said. It must not be that two different light bulbs cannot talk to their controller. That sounds like this rant.

Next, Bradley talked about GPL compliance. He mentioned the ThinkPinguin products as a pristine example for a good GPL compliant “complete corresponding source”. He pointed the audience to the Compliance.guide. He said that it’s best to avoid the offer for source. It’s better to include the source with the product, he said, because the offer itself creates ongoing obligations. For example, your call centre needs to handle those requests for the next three years which you are probably not set up to do. Also, products have a typically short lifespan. CCS requires good instructions how to build. It’s not only automated build tools (think configure, make, make install). You should rather think of a script as a movie or play script. The test to use on your potential CCS is to give your source release to another developer of some other department and try whether that person can build the code with your instructions. Anyway, make install does usually not work on embedded anyway, because you need to flash the code. So make sure to include instructions as to how to get the software on the device. It’s usually not required to ship the tool-chain as long as you give instructions as to what compiler to use (and how it was configured). If you do include a compiler, you might end up having more obligations because GCC, for example, is itself GPL licensed. An interesting question came up regarding specialised hardware needed to build or flash the software. You do not need to include anything “tool-chain-like” as long as you have instructions as to the requirements what the user needs to obtain.

Samsung’s Krzysztof was talking about USB in Linux. He said, it is the most common external interface in the world. It’s like the Internet in the sense that it provides services in a client-server architecture. USB also provides services. After he explained what the USB actually is how the host interacts with devices, he went on to explain the plug and play aspect of USB. While he provided some rather low-level details of the protocol, it was a rather high level in the sense that it was still the very basic USB protocol. He didn’t talk too much on how exactly the driver is being selected, for example. He went on to explain the BadUSB attack. He said that the vulnerability basically results from the lack of user interaction when plugging in a device and loading its driver. One of his suggestions were to not connect “unknown devices”, which is hard because you actually don’t know what “services” the device is implementing. He also suggested to limit the number of input sources to X11. Most importantly, though, he said that we’d better be using device authorisation to explicitly allow devices before activating them. That’s good news, because we are working on it! There are, he said, patches available for allowing certain interfaces, instead of the whole device, but they haven’t been merged yet.

Jeff was talking about applying Open Source Principles to hardware. He began by pointing out how many processors you don’t get to see, for example in your hard disk, your touchpad controller, or the display controller. These processors potentially exfiltrate information but you don’t really know what they do. Actually, these processors are about owning the owner, the consumer, to then sell them stuff based on that exfiltrated big data, rather than to serve the owner, he said. He’s got a project running to build devices that you not only own, but control. He mentioned IoT as a new battleground where OpenHardware could make an interesting contestant. FPGAs are lego for hardware which can be used easily to build your functionality in hardware, he said. He mentioned that the SuperH patents have now expired. I think he wants to build the “J-Core CPU” in software such that you can use those for your computations. He also mentioned that open hardware can now be what Linux has been to the industry, a default toolkit for your computations. Let’s see where his efforts will lead us. It would certainly be a nice thing to have our hardware based on publicly reviewed designs.

The next keynote was reserved for David Mohally from Huawei. He said he has a lab in which they investigate what customers will be doing in five to ten years. He thinks that the area of network slicing will be key, because different businesses needs require different network service levels. Think your temperature sensor which has small amounts of data in a bursty fashion while your HD video drone has rather high volume and probably requires low latency. As far as I understood, they are having network slices with smart meters in a very large deployment. He never mentioned what a network slice actually is, though. The management of the slices shall be opened up to the application layer on top for third parties to implement their managing. The landscape, he said, is changing dramatically from what he called legacy closed source applications to open source. Let’s hope he’s right.

It was announced that the next LinuxCon will happen in Berlin, Germany. So again in Germany. Let’s hope it’ll be an event as nice as this one.

The conference was opened by the LinuxFoundation’s Executive Jim Zemlin. He thanked the FSF for their 30 years of work. I was a little surprised to hear that, given the differences between OpenSource and Free Software. He continued by mentioning the 5 Billion Dollar report which calculates how much “value” the projects hosted at Linux Foundation have generated over the last five years. He said that a typical product contains 80%, 90%, or even more Free and Open Source Software. He also extended the list of projects by the Real Time Collaborative project which, as far as I understood, effectively means to hire Thomas Gleisxner to work on the Real Time Linux patches.

The next, very interesting, presentation was given by Sean Gourley, the founder of Quid, a business intelligence analytics company. He talked about the limits of human cognition and how algorithms help to exploit these limits. The limit is the speed of your thinking. He mentioned that studies measured the blood flow across the brain when making decisions which found differences depending on how proficient you are at a given task. They also found that you cannot be quicker than a certain limit, say, 650ms. He continued that the global financial market is dominated by algorithms and that a fibre cable from New York to London costs 300 million dollars to save 5 milliseconds. He then said that these algorithms make decisions at a speed we are unable to catch up with. In fact, the flash crash of 2:45 is inexplicable until today. Nobody knows what happened that caused a loss of trillions of dollars. Another example he gave was the crash of Knight Capital which caused a loss of 440 million dollars in 45 minutes only because they updated their trading algorithms. So algorithms are indeed controlling our lives which he underlined by saying that 61% of the traffic on the Internet is not generated by humans. He suggested that Bots would not only control the financial markets, but also news reading and even the writing of news. As an example he showed a Google patent for auto generating social status updates and how Mexican and Chinese propaganda bots would have higher volume tweets than humans. So the responsibilities are shifting and we’d be either working with an algorithm or for one. Quite interesting thought indeed.

Next up was IBM on Transforming for the Digital Economy with Open Technology which was essentially a gigantic sales pitch for their new Power architecture. The most interesting bit of that presentation was that “IBM is committed to open”. This, she said, is visible through IBM’s portfolio and through its initiatives like the IBM Academic Initiative. OpenPower Foundation is another one of those. It takes the open development model of software and takes it further to everything related to the Power architecture (e.g. chip design), she said. They are so serious about being open, that they even trademarked “Open by Design“…

Then, the drone code people presented on their drone project. They said that they’ve come a long way since 2008 and that the next years are going to fundamentally change the drone scene as many companies are involved now. Their project, DroneCode, is a stack from open hardware to flight control and the next bigger thing will be CAN support, which is already used in cards, planes, and other vehicles. The talk then moved to ROS, the robot operating system. It is the lingua franca for robotic in academia.

Matthew Garret talked on securing containers. He mentioned seccomp and what type of features you can deprive processes of. Nowadays, you can also reason about the arguments for the system call in question, so it might be more useful to people. Although, he said, writing a good seccomp policy is hard. So another mechanism to deprive processes of privileges is to set capabilities. It allows you to limit the privileges in a more coarse grained way and the behaviour is not very well defined. The combination of capabilities and seccomp might have surprising results. For example, you might be allowing the mknod() call, but you then don’t have the capability to actually execute it or vice versa. SELinux was next on his list as a mechanism to secure your containers. He said that writing SELinux policy is not the most fun thing in the world. Another option was to run your container in a virtual machine, but you then lose some benefits such as introspection of fine grained control over the processes. But you get the advantages of more isolation. Eventually, he asked the question of when to use what technology. The performance overhead of seccomp, SELinux, and capabilities are basically negligible, he said. Fully virtualising is usually more secure, he said, but the problem is that you have more complex infrastructure which tend to attract bugs. He also mentioned GRSecurity as a means of protecting your Linux kernel. Let’s hope it’ll be merged some day.

Canonical’s Daniel Watkins then talked on cloud-init. He said it runs in three stages. Init, config, and final in which init sets up networking, config does the actual configuration of your services, final is for the things that eventually need to be done. The clound-init architecture is apparently quite flexible and versatile. You can load your own configuration and user-data modules so that you can set up your cloud images as you like. cloud-init allows you get rid of custom images such that you can have confidence in your base image working as intended. In fact, it’s working not only with BSDs but also with Windows images. He said, it is somewhat similar to tools like Ansible, so if you are already happily using one of those, you’re good.

An entertaining talk was given by Florian Haas on LXC and containers. He talked about tricks managing your application containers and showed a problem when using a naive chroot which is that you get to see the host processes and networking information through the proc filesystem. With LXC, that problem is dealt with, he said. But then you have a problem when you update the host, i.e. you have to take down the container while the upgrade is running. With two nodes, he said, you can build a replication setup which takes care of failing over the node while it is upgrading. He argued that this is interesting for security reasons, because you can upgrade your software to not be vulnerable against “the latest SSL hack” without losing uptime. Or much of it, at least… But you’d need twice the infrastructure to run production. The future, he said, might be systemd with it’s nspawn tool. If you use systemd all the way, then you can use fleet to manage the instances. I didn’t take much away, personally, but I guess managing containers is all the rage right now.

Next up was Michael Hausenblas on Filesystems, SQL and NoSQL with Apache Mesos. I had briefly heard of Mesos, but I really didn’t know what it was. Not that I’m an expert now, but I guess I know that it’s a scheduler you can use for your infrastructure. Especially your Apache stack. Mesos addresses the problem of allocating resources to jobs. Imagine you have several different jobs to execute, e.g. a Web server, a caching layer, and some number crunching computation framework. Now suppose you want to increase the number crunching after hours when the Web traffic wears off. Then you can tell Mesos what type of resources you have and when you need that. Mesos would then go off and manage your machines. The alternative, he said, was to manually SSH into the machines and reprovision them. He explained some existing and upcoming features of Mesos. So again, a talk about managing containers, machines, or infrastructure in general.

The following Kernel panel didn’t provide much information to me. The moderation felt a bit stiff and the discussions weren’t really enganged. The topics mainly circled around maintainership, growth, and community.

SuSE’s Ralf was then talking on DevOps. He described his DevOps needs based on a cycle of planning, coding, building, testing, releasing, deploying, operating, monitoring, and then back to planning. When bringing together multiple projects, he said, they need to bring two independent integration loops together. When doing DevOps with a customer, he mentioned some companies who themselves provide services to their customers. In order to be successful when doing DevOps, you need, he said, Smart tools, Process automation, Open APIs, freedom of choice, and quality control are necessary. So I guess he was pitching for people to use “standards”, whatever that exactly means.

I awaited the next talk on Patents and patent non aggression. Keith Bergelt, from OIN talked about ten years of the Open Invention Network. He said that ten years ago Microsoft sued Linux companies to hinder Linux distribution. Their network was founded to embrace patent non-aggression in the community. A snarky question would have been why it would not be simply enough to use GPLv3, but no questions were admitted. He said that the OIN has about 1750 licensees now with over a million patents being shared. That’s actually quite impressive and I hope that small companies are being protected from patent threats of big players…

That concluded the first day. It was a lot of talks and talking in the hallway. Video recordings are said to be made available in a couple of weeks. So keep watching the conference page.