Talking at GNOME.Asia Summit 2016 in New Delhi, India

It’s spring time and that means it’s time for GNOME.Asia Summit! This year’s edition took place in New Delhi, India. This years makes five years after the initial GNOME 3.0 release. In fact, an important releases planning hackfest happened five years ago in India, so it’s been a somewhat remarkable date.

The conference felt a little smaller than the last edition, although I guess the college we were hosted at tried hard to bring their students to the talks. That was especially noticeable in the opening slot were everybody who felt sufficiently important had something to say. The big auditorium was filled with students, but I doubt they were really interested or listening. The opening was a bit weird for my taste, anyway. I have seen many conference openings, I would say. But that guy from the college who opened GNOME.Asia 2016 seemed to be a little bit confused, I have the feeling. He said that GNOME started 2008 so that all the software you use can be had freely so that you can upgrade your devices, like GPS satnavs. The opening ceremony, and yes, it’s really more of a ceremony rather than a short “welcome, good that you’re here” talk seems to be quite a formal thing in this college. Everybody on the stage receives a bouquet of flowers and many people were greeted and saluted to which stretched everything to an enormous length which in turn made the schedule slip by two hours or so.

Cosimo keynoted the conference and presented his ideas for the future of the GNOME project. We’ve come a long way, he said, with GNOME 3, which has initially been released five years ago. GNOME has aged well, he said. No wrinkles can be seen and GNOME is looking better than ever. He said that he likes GNOME 2 to be thought of GNOME in the era of distributions, because you could plug together modules that you liked. And everybody liked that. The pain point, he said, was that distributions chose which modules to plug together which finally decided about the user experience. Due to module proliferation was felt as impacting the project negatively the new world of GNOME 3 was introduced. One the most controversial but also most successful thing GNOME 3 did, he said, was to put the responsibility of defining the user experience back in upstream’s hands by eliminating choices. While causing people to complain, it led to a less complicated test matrix which eventually made GNOME accessible to less technical people. He said, GNOME 3 is the era of Operating Systems, so there are not distributions packaging GNOME but rather Operating systems built on GNOME, like endless, mint, or solus. The big elephant in the room is the role of applications, he said. If cohesive Operating Systems are built upon GNOME, how can applications work with different operating systems? Currently, you cannot, he said, run elementary applications on GNOME and vice versa. xdg-app will hopefully address that, he said. It’s a big transition for the GNOME project and that transition is even bigger than the one from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3, he said. Unfortunately, the audience seemed to be a little tired by from the length of the opening session and it felt like they were demanding a break by starting to chat with their neighbours…

Pravin then continued to talk about the state of Indian languages in GNOME. He mentioned that some Indian languages are well supported while some others have no support at all. He also showed that with Fedora 24 you get a text prediction engine. So you can type Latin characters for the word you want to enter in a different script. The Q&A revealed that the list of suggested words is sorted by frequency. Apparently they did some analysis of usage of words. I wonder whether it’s also able to learn from the user’s behaviour.

The talk on privacy given by Ankit Prateek showed how your typical Internet and Web usage would leave traces and what you mitigation you could employ. He mentioned specific Web attacks like Super Cookies or Canvas fingerprinting. He recommended using NoScript whichs usefulness the audience immediately questioned. To my surprise, he didn’t mention one my favourite plugins Google Privacy, because Google remembers what search results you click.

I got to talk about five years of GNOME 3. I conveyed the story of how the 3.0 release happened and what was part of it. For example, we had so many release parties with swag being sent around the world! But I also showed a few things that have changed since the initial 3.0.

Another talk I had was about Security. I explained why I see GNOME being in the perfect position to design, develop, and deploy security systems for a wide range of users. First, I ranted about modal dialogues, prompts, and that they are not a good choice for making a security decision. Then, I explained how we could possible defend against malicious USB devices. I think it’s work we, as developers of a Free Software desktop, have to do in order to serve our users. Technically, it’s not very hard, e.g. you block new USB devices being plugged in, when the screensaver is shown. We know how to do the blocking and unblocking of USB devices. More subtle issues involve the policies to apply and how to make the user aware of USB devices. Another pet peeve of mine is Keysigning, so I also ranted about the state of the art and we can and should improve things.

Thanks to the local organising people and the GNOME Foundation for flying me in and out.
Sponsored by GNOME!

Talking at FOSSASIA 2016 in Singapore

This year I was able to attend this year’s FOSSASIA in Singapore. It’s quite a decently sized event with more than 150 speakers and more than 1000 people attending. Given the number of speakers you can infer that there was an insane number of talks in the two and a half day of the conference. I’ve seen recordings being made so I would expect those to show up at some stage, but I don’t have any details. The atmosphere was very friendly and the venue a-maze-ing. By that I mean that it was a fantastic and huge maze. We were hosted in Singapore’s Science Museum which exhibits various things around biology, physics, chemistry, and much more. It is a rather large building in which it was easy to get lost. But it was great being among those sciency exhibits and to exchange ideas and thoughts. Sometimes, we could see an experiment being made as a show to the kids visiting the museum. These shows included a Tesla coil or a fire tornado. Quite impressive.

One of the first things I could see was Cat Altmann talking about her position being in the field of marketing which, she says, engineers tend to not like. But as opposed to making people like things they don’t need or want, she is rather concerned with reaching out to people to open source code. The Making and Science team within Google exists to work on things like sending kids from under resourced schools to field trips. Science also plays a role in this year’s Summer of Code. 43+ out of 180 projects are related to science, she said.

Nikolai talked about the Nefertiti hack. In case you missed it, the Nefertiti was “cloned”. The bust is a 3000 years old artefact which is housed in Berlin and is publicly available (for people who can travel to Berlin…). The high resolution data of the scanned object is, however, not available, along with many many other data that the museums have about their objects. He compared that behaviour to colonisation; I couldn’t really follow why, though. Anyway, they managed to scan the bust themselves by sneaking into the museum and now they’ve released the data. Their aim, as far as I could follow, was to empower people to decide about what culture is and what not. Currently, it is the administration which decides, he said. With the data (and I think with a printed copy of the bust) they travelled to Egypt to make an exhibition. But beforehand, they had produced a video which substantiates the claim of having found a second bust while digging for artefacts. The talk itself was interesting, but the presentation was bad. the speaker was lost a few times and didn’t know how to handle the technical side of the presentation. Anyway, I like it when such guerrilla art makes it into the news.

Lenny talked about systemd which uncovered some news that you may have missed if you’re not following its development too closely. He said that systemd has moved to github and while it’s attracting new contributors it still has major issues which he didn’t mention though. A component named networkd is now the default on both Fedora and Ubuntu. It’s a rather underwhelming piece of software though, because it has no runtime interface. The nspawn tool is used by CoreOS’ rkt docker alternative. He also mentioned sd-bus which he claims is a replacement for the reference DBus implementation. Another interesting thing he mentioned is that systemd can not only do socket activation but also USB Function FS activation. So whenever you are in the need to start your USB gadget only when the USB cable has been plugged in, systemd may be for you.

In another session, Lenny continued talking about systemd with regards to its container capabilities. Containers are all the rage, right..? He said that all the systemd tools work on containers, too, with the -M switch. systemd also just works inside a container, with the exception of Docker, he said. It is also possible to make systemd download and verify images to run full system images. Funnily enough, he said, Ubuntu images are properly signed but Fedora images are not.

I also had a talk and a workshop to give. The workshop was titled “Functionality, Security, Usability: Choose any two. Or GNOME.” which is a bit sensational, I admit. I’m not experienced with holding workshops and it was unclear to me what to expect. Workshop sounds to me like people come and they want to hack on something. The venue, however, was not necessarily equipped with a reliable Internet connection for the attendees. Also, the time was set to one hour. I don’t think you can do a meaningful workshop within one hour. so I didn’t really know how to prepare. I ended up ranting about OpenPGP, GnuPG, and SKS. Then I invited people to hack on GNOME Keysign which was a bit difficult. given the time constraints we had. Well, that I mainly had, because I was meant to give a proper talk shortly after.

During my talk, I gave a glimpse on what to expect from GNOME 3.20 codename Delhi. It was a day before the release, so it was the perfect timing for getting people excited. And I think it worked reasonably well. I would have loved to be able to show the release video, but it wasn’t finished until then. So I mainly showed screenshots of the changes and discussed on a high level what GNOME is and what it is not. People were quite engaged and still believe GNOME 3 was designed for tablets.

FOSSASIA used to be in Vietnam and it was actually co-hosted with GNOME.Asia Summit once. It smells like we could see such a double event in the future, but probably in Singapore. I think that’d be great, because FOSSASIA is a well organised event, albeit a little chaos here and there. But who doesn’t have that… In fact, I nearly couldn’t make it to the conference, because GNOME did not react for two weeks so the conference removed me from the schedule. Eventually, things worked out, so all is good and I would like to thank the GNOME Foundation for contributing to the coverage of the costs.

Sponsored by GNOME!

Talking on Searchable Encryption at 32C3 in Hamburg, Germany

This year again, I attended the Chaos Communication Congress. It’s a fabulous event. It has become much more popular than a couple of years ago. In fact, it’s so popular, that the tickets (probably ~12000, certainly over 9000) have been sold out a week or so after the sales opened. It’s gotten huge.

This year has been different than the years before. Not only were you able to use your educational leave for visiting the CCCongress, but I was also giving a talk. Together with my colleague Christian Forler, we presented on Searchable Encryption. We had the first slot on the last day. I think that’s pretty much the worst slot in the schedule you could get ๐Ÿ˜‰ Not only because the people are in Zombie mode, but also because you have received all those viruses and bacteria yourself. I was lucky enough, but my colleague was indeed sick on day 4. It’s a common thing to be sick after the CCCongress :-/ Anyway, we have hopefully entertained the crowd with what I consider easy slides, compared to the usualโ„ข Crypto talk. We used a lot imagery and tried to allude to funny stuff. I hope people enjoyed it. If you have seen it, don’t forget to leave feedback! It was hard to decide on the appropriate technical level for the almost 1800 people. The feedback we’ve received so far is mixed, so I guess we’ve hit a good spot. The CCCongress was amazingly organised for speakers. They really did care for us and made sure everything was right. So everything was perfect expect for pdfpc which crashed whenever it was meant to display a certain slide… I used Evince then and it worked…

The days at the CCCongress were intense as you might be able to tell from the Fahrplan. It generally started at about 12:00 and ended at about 01:00. And that’s only the talks. You can’t avoid bumping into VIP (very interesting people) and thus spend time in the hallway. And then you have these amazing parties. This year, they had motor-homes and lasers in the dance hall (last year it was a water cannon…). Very crazy atmosphere. It’s highly recommended to spend a night there.

Anyway, day 1 started for me with the Keynote by Fatuma Musa Afrah. The speaker stretched her time a little, I felt. At the beginning I couldn’t really grasp what her topic was or what she wanted to tell us. She repeatedly told us that we had to “kill the time together” which killed my sympathy to some extent. The conference’s motto was Gated Communities. She encouraged us to find ways to open these gates by educating people and helping them. She said that we have to respect each other irrespective of the skin colour or social status. It was only later that she revealed being refugee who came to Germany. Although she told us that it’s “Newcomers”, not “refugees”. In fact, she grew up in Kenya where she herself was a newcomer. She fled to Kenya, so she fled twice. She told us stories about her arriving and living in Germany. I presume she is breaking open the gates which separate the communities she’s living in, but that’s speculation. In a sense she was connecting her refugee community with our hacker community. So the keynote was interesting for that perspective.

Joanna Rutkowska then talked about trustworthy laptops. The basic idea is to have no state on the laptop itself, i.e. no place where malware could be injected. The state should instead be kept on a personal storage medium, like an SD card or a pen drive. She said that laptops are inherently not trustworthy. Trust, she said can be broken up into Trusted, Secure, and Trustworthy. Secure is resistant to attacks. Trusted is something we, as Security community, do not want to have, like a Trusted third party. Trustworthy, she said, is something different, like the Intel Management Engine which might be resistant to attacks, yet it is not acting in the interest of the user. Application level security is meaningless, she said, when we cannot trust the Operating System, because it is the trusted part. If it is compromised then every effort is not useful. Her project, Qubes OS, attempts to reduce the Trusted Computing Base. What is Operating system to the application, is the hardware to the Operating system. The hardware, she said, has been assumed to be trusted. A single malicious peripheral, like a malicious wifi module, can compromise the whole personal computer, the whole digital life, she said. She was referring to problems with Intel x86 platforms. Present Intel processors integrate everything on the main chip. The motherboard has been made more or less only a holder for the CPU and the memory. The construction of those big chips is completely opaque. We have no control over what is inside. And we cannot look inside, even if we wanted to. The firmware is being loaded during boot from a discrete element on the mainboard. We cannot, however, verify what firmware really is on the chip. One question is how to enforce read-only-ness of the system or how to upload your own firmware. For many years, she and others believed that TPM, TXT, or UEFI secure boot could solve that problem. But all of them have shown to fail horribly, she said. Unfortunately, she didn’t mention how so. So as of today, there is no such thing as a secure boot. Inside the processor is a management engine which special, because it is the perfect entry for backdooring and zombification of personal computing. By zombification, she means that the involvement of the Apps (vs. OS vs. Hardware) is decreasing heavily and make the hardware have much more of a say. She said that Intel wants to make the Hardware fully control your computing by having much more logic in the management engine. The ME is, in a sense, a gated community, because you cannot, whatsoever, inspect it, tinker with it, or otherwise get in touch. She said that the war is lost on X86. Even if we didn’t have the management engine. Again, she didn’t say why. Her proposal is to move all those moving firmware parts out to a trusted storage. It was an interesting perspective on what I think is a “simple” Free Software problem. Because we allow proprietary software, we now have the problem to see what is loaded into the hardware. With Free Software we’d still have backdoors in hardware, but assuming that most functionality is encoded in firmware, we could see and modify the existing firmware and build, run, and share our “better” firmware.

Ilja van Sprundel talked about Windows driver security or rather their attack surface. I’m not necessarily interested in Windows per se, but getting some lower level knowledge sounded intriguing. He gave a more high level overview of what to do and what to not do when doing driver development for Windows. The details, he said, matter. For example whether the IOManager probes a buffer in *that* instance. The Windows kernel is made of several managers, he said. The Windows Driver Model (WDM) is the standard model for how drivers are written. The IO Manager proxies requests from user to (WDM drivers. It may or may not validate arguments. Another central piece in the architecture are IO Request Packets (IRPs). They are being delivered from the IO Manager to the driver and contain all the necessary information for the operation in question. He went through the architecture really fast and it was hard for a kernel newbie like me to follow all the concepts he mentioned. Interestingly though, the IO Manager seems to also care about transferring the correct amount of memory from userspace to kernel space (e.g. makes sure data does not overflow) if you want it to using METHOD_BUFFERED. But, as he said, most of the drivers use METHOD_NEITHER which does not check anything at all and is the endless source of driver bugs. It seems as if KMDF is an alternative framework which makes it harder to have bugs. However, you seem to need to understand the old framework in order to use that new one properly. He then went on to talk about the actual attack surface of drivers. The bugs are either privilege escalation, denial of service, or information leak. He said that you could avoid the problem of integer overflow by using the intsafe library. But you have to use them properly! Most importantly, you need to check their return type and use the actual values you want to have been made safe. During creation of a device, a driver can call either IoCreateDeviceSecure with an SDDL string or use an INF file to ACL the device. That is, however, done either rarely or wrongly, he said. You need to think about who needs to have access to your device. When you work with the IOManager, you need to check whether Irp->MdlAddress is NULL which can happen, he said, if it’s a zero sized buffer. Similarly, when using the safer METHOD_BUFFERED mentioned earlier, Irp->AssociatedIrp.SystemBuffer can also be NULL. So avoid having that false sense of security when using that safe API. Another area of bugs is the cancellation of IRPs. The userland can cancel requests which apparently is not handled gracefully by drivers and leads to deadlocks, memory leaks, race conditions, double frees, and other classes of bugs. When dealing with data from userland, you are supposed to “probe” the memory which is basically checking whether the pointers are valid and in the expected range. If you don’t do that, it’ll lead to you writing to arbitrary kernel memory. If you do validate the data from userspace, make sure you don’t fetch it again from user space assuming that it hasn’t changed. There might be race between your check and your usage (TOCTOU). So better capture, validate, and use the data. The same applies when using MDLs. That, however, is more tricky, because you have a double mapping and you are using a kernel pointer. So it is very subtle. When you do memory allocation you can either use ExAllocatePool or ExAllocatePoolWithQuota. The latter throws an exception instead of returning NULL. Your exception or NULL pointer handling needs to be double checked, he said. It was a very technical talk on Windows which was way out of my comfort zone. I only understood a tiny fraction of what he was presenting. But I liked it for the new insight on Windows drivers and that the same old classes of bug have not died yet.

High up on my list of awaited talks was the talk on train systems by the SCADA strangelove people. Railways, he said, is the biggest system built by mankind. It’s main components are signals and switches. Old switches are operated manually by pure force. Modern switches are interlocked with signals such that the signals display forbidden entry when switches are set in certain positions. On tracks, he said, signals are transmitted over the actual track by supplying them with AC or DC. The locomotive picks up the signals and supplies various systems with them. The Eurostar, they said, has about seven security systems on board, among them a “RPS”, a Reactor Protection System which alludes to nuclear trains… They said that lately the “Bahn Automatisierungssystem (SIBAS)” has been updated to use much more modern and less proprietary soft- and hardware such as VxWorks and x86 with ELF binaries as well as XML over HTTP or SS7. In the threat model they identified, they see several attack vectors. Among them are making someone plug a malicious USB device in controlling machines in some operation center. He showed pictures from supposedly real operation centers. The physical security, he said, is terrible. With close to no access control. In one photograph, he showed a screenshot from a documentary aired on TV which showed credentials sticking on the screen… Even if the security is quite good, like good physical security and formally proven programs, it’s still humans who write the software, he said, so there will be bugs to be exploited. For example, he showed screenshots of when he typed “railway” into Shodan and the result included a good number of railway stations. Another vector is GSM-R. If you jam the train’s GSM-R connection, the train will simply stop. Also, you might be able to inject SIM toolkit malware. Via that vector, you might make the modem identify as, e.g. a keyboard and then penetrate further into the systems. Overall an entertaining talk, but the claims were a bit over the top. So no real train hacking just yet.

The talk on memory corruption by Mathias Payer started off by saying that software is unsafe and insecure. Low level languages trade type safety and memory safety for performance. A large set of legacy applications, he said, are prone to memory vulnerabilities. There are, he continued too many bugs to find and fix manually. So we need a runtime system to ensure security. An invalid dereference or an out of bounds pointer is the core of memory unsafety problems. But according to the C language, he claimed, it’s only a violation if the invalid pointer is read, written to, or freed. So during runtime, there are tons and tons of dangling pointers which is perfectly fine. With such a vulnerability a control-flow attack could be executed. Several defenses exist: Data Execution Prevention prevents code from actually being executed. Address Space Layout Randomisation scrambles the memory locations of executable code which makes it harder to successfully exploit a vulnerable. Stack canaries are special values which are supposed to detect overflowing writes. Safe exception handlers ensure that exception code paths follow predefined patterns. The DEP can only work together with ASLR, he said. If you broke ASLR, you could re-use existing code; as it turns out, people do break ASLR every now and then. Two new mechanisms are Stack Integrity and Code Flow Integrity. Stack Integrity enforces to return to the actual caller by having a shadow stack. He didn’t mention how that actually works, though. I suppose you obtain a more secret stack address somewhere and switch the stack pointer before returning to check whether the return address is still correct. Control Flow Integrity builds a control flow graph during compilation and for every control flow change it checks at run time whether the target address is allowed. Apparently, many CFI implementations exist (eleven were shown). He said they’ve measured those and IFCC and Lockdown performed rather badly. To show how all of the protection mechanisms fail, he presented printf-oriented programming. He said that printf was Turing complete and presented a domain specific language. They have built a brainfuck interpreter with snprintf calls. Another rather technical talk by a good speaker. I remember that I was already impressed last year when he presented on these new defense mechanisms.

DJB and Tanja Lange started their “late night show” by bashing TLS as a “gigantic clusterfuck”. They were presenting on quantum computing and cryptography. They started by mentioning that the D-Wave quantum computer exists, but it’s not useful, he said. It doesn’t do the basic things, and can only do limited computations. It can especially not perform Shor’s algorithm. So there’s no “Shor monster coming”. They recommended the Timeline of Quantum Computing as a good reference of the massive research effort going into quantum computing. If there was a general quantum computer pretty much every public key scheme deployed on the Internet today will be broken. But also symmetric schemes are under attack due to Grover’s algorithm which speeds up brute force algorithms significantly. The solution could be physical crypto like using strong (physical) locks. But, he said, the assumptions of those systems are already broken. While Quantum Key Distribution is secure under certain assumptions, those assumptions are off, he said. Secure schemes that survive the quantum era were the topic of their talk. The first workshop on that workshop happened in 2006 and efforts are still being made, e.g. with EU projects on the topic. The time it takes for a crypto scheme to gain significant traction has been long, so far. They gave ECC as an example. It has been introduced in the 1980s, but it’s only now that it’s taking over the deployed crypto on the Internet. So the time it takes is long. They gave recommendations on what to do to have connections that are secure “for at least the next hundred years”. These include at least 256 bit keys for symmetric encryption. McEliece with binary Goppa codes n=6960 k=5413 t=119. An efficient implementation of such a code based scheme is McBits, she said. Hash based signatures with, e.g. XMSS or SPHINCS-256. All you need for those is a proper hash function. The stuff they recommend for the next 100 years, like the McEliece system, are things from the distant past, she said. He said that Post Quantum Cryptography will be the standard in a couple of years from now so he urged the cryptographers in the audience to “get used to this stuff”.

Next on my list was Markus’ talk on Landesverrat which is the incident of Netzpolitik.org being investigated for revealing secret documents. He referred on the history of the case, how it came around that they were suspected of revealing secret documents. He said that one of their believes is to publish their sources, even the secret ones. They want their work to be critically reviewed and they believe that it is only possible if the readers can inspect the sources. The documents which lead to the criminal investigations were about finances of the introduction of the XKeyscore software. Then, the president of the “state security” filed a case against because of revealing secret documents. They wanted to publish the investigation files, but they couldn’t see them, because they were considered to be more secret than the documents they have already published… From now on, he said, they are prepared for the police raiding their offices, which I suppose is good standard preparation. They were lucky, he said, because their case fell into the regular summer low of news which could make the case become quite popular in the media. A few weeks earlier or later and they were much less popular due to the refugees or Greece. During the press coverage, they had a second battleground where they threw out a Russian television team who entered their offices without having called or otherwise introduced themselves… For the future, he wants to see changes in what is considered to be a state secret. He doesn’t want the government to decide what such a secret is. He also wants to have much more protection for whistle blowers. Freedom of press should also hold for people who do not blog for their “occupation”, but also hobbyists.

Vincent Haupert was then talking on App-based TAN online banking methods. It’s a classic two factor method: Not only username and password, but also a TAN. These TAN methods have since evolved in various ways. He went on to explain the general online banking process: You log in with your credentials, you create a new wire transfer and are then asked to provide a TAN. While ChipTAN would solve many problems, he said, the banking industry seems to want their customers to be able to transfer money everywhereโ„ข. So you get to have two “Apps” on your mobile computer. The banking app and a TAN app. However, malware in “official” app stores are a reality, he said. The Google Playstore cannot protect against malware, as a colleague of him demonstrated during his bachelor thesis. This could also been by the “Brain Test” app which roots your device and then loads malware. Anyway, they hijacked the connection from the banking app to modify the recipient of the issued wire transfer and the TAN being pushed on the device. They looked at the apps and found that they “protected” their app with “Promon Shield“. That seems to be a strong obfuscation framework. Their attack involved tricking the root and hooks detection. For the root detection they check on the file system for certain binaries. He could simply change the filenames and was good to go. For the hooks (Xposed) it was pretty much the same with the exception of a few filenames which needed more work. With these modifications they could also “hack” the newer version 1.0.7. Essentially the biggest part of the problem is that the two factors are on one device. If the attacker hijacks that one device then ,

The talk by Christian Schaffner on Quantum Cryptography was introducing the audience to quantum mechanics. He said that a qubit can be imagined as the direction of a polarised photon. If you make the direction of the photons either horizontal or vertical, you can imagine that as representing 0 or 1. He was showing an actual physical experiment with a laser pointer and polarisation filters showing how the red dot of the laser pointer is either filtered or very visible. He also showed how actually measuring the polarisation changes the state of the photons! So yet another filter made the point in the back brighter. That was a bit weird, but that’s quantum mechanics. He showed a quantum random number generator based on that technology. One important concept is the no-cloning theorem which state that you can make a perfect copy of a quantum bit. He also compared current and “post quantum” crypto systems against efficient classical attackers and efficient quantum attackers. AES, SHA, RSA (or discrete logs) will be broken by quantum attacks. Hash-based signatures, McEliece, and lattice-based cryptography he considered to be resistant against quantum based attacks. He also mentioned that Quantum Key Distribution systems will also be against an exhaustive attacker who applies brute force. QKD is based on the no-cloning theorem so an eavesdropper cannot see the same bits as the communicating parties do. Finally, he asked how you could prove that you have been at a certain location to avoid the pizza delivery problem (i.e. to be certain about the place of delivery).

Fefe was talking on privileges. He said that software will be vulnerable. Various techniques should be applied such as simply fixing all the bugs (haha…) or make exploitation harder by applying ASLR or ROP protection. Another idea is to put the program in a straight jacket and withdraw privileges. That sounds a lot like containerisation. Firstly, you can drop your privileges from superuser down to the least privileges you need, then do privilege separation. Another technique is the admin confining the app in a jail instead of the app confining itself. Also, you can implement access control via a broker service by splitting up your process into, say, a left half which opens and reads files and a right half which processes data. When doing privilege separation, the idea is to split up the process into several separately running programs. Jailing is like firewall rules for syscalls which, he said, is impossible for complex programs. He gave Firefox as an example of it being impossible to write a rule set for. The app containing itself is like a werewolf chaining itself to the wall before midnight, he said. You restrict yourself from opening files, creating socket, or from attaching yourself as a debugger to other processes. The broker service is probably like a reference monitor. He went on showing how old-school privilege dropping works. You could do it as easily as seteuid(getuid()), but that’s not enough, because there is the saved UID, so you need to setresuid and not forget to check the return code. Because the call can fail if, for example, the target UID had already been running too many processes for its quota. He said that you should fail the build if your target platform does not provide setresuid. However, dropping privileges is more than setting your UID. It’s also about freeing resources you don’t necessarily need. Common approaches to jailing your process are to have a fake filesystem with only the necessary files, so your process cannot ever access anything that it shouldn’t. On Linux, that would probably be chroot. However, you can escape using fchdir . Also, mounting your /proc into the chroot, information about the host is exposed. So you need to do more work than calling chroot. The BSDs, he said, have Securelevel which is a kernel mode that only increases which withdraws certain privileges. They also have jails which is a chroot on steroids, he said. It leaks some information due the PIDs, though, he said.

The next talk was on Shellphish, an automatic exploitation framework. This is really fascinating stuff. It’s been used for various Capture the Flag contests which are basically about hacking other teams’ software services. In fact, the presenters were coming from the UCSB which is hosting the famous iCtF. They went from solving security challenges to developing a system which solves security challenges. From a vulnerability binary, they (automatically) develop an exploit and a patched binary which is immune to the exploit, but preserves the functionality of the program. They automatically find vulnerabilities, patches, and test both the exploits and the patches. For the automated vulnerability component, they presented Angr. It has a symbolic execution engine looking for memory accesses outside allocated regions and unconstrained instruction pointer which is a jump controlled by user input (JMP eax). They have written a paper for NDSS about “Augmenting Fuzzing Through Selective Symbolic Execution“. Angr is a Python library and they showed how to use it for identifying the overhyped Back to 28 vulnerability. Actually, there is too much state for a regular symbolic executor to find this problem. Angr does “veritesting“. He showed that his Angr script found the vulnerability by him having excluded many paths of execution that don’t really generate new state with a few lines of code. He didn’t show though what the lines of code were and how he determined how the states are not adding any new information.

The next talk was given by the people behind Intelexit was about convincing NSA agents to stop their work and serve democracy instead. They rented a van with big mottoes printed on them, like “Listen to your heart, not to private phone calls”. They also stuck the constitution on the “constitution protection office” which then got torn apart. Another action they did was to fly over the dagger complex and to release flyers about leaving the secret services. They want to have a foundation helping secret service agents to leave their job or to blow the whistle. They also want an anonymous call service where agents can call to talk about their job. I recommend browsing their photos.

Another artsy talk was on a cheap Facebook army. Actually it was on Instagram followers. The presenter is an artist himself and he’d buy Instagram followers for fellow artists “to make them all equal”. He dislikes the fact that society seems to measure the value or quality of art in followers or likes on social media.

Around the CCCongress were also other artsy installations like this one called “machine learning”:

It’s been a fabulous event. I really admire the people organising this event each and every year. Thank you so much and see you next year, hopefully.

mrmcd 2015

I attended this year’s mrmcd, a cozy conference in Darmstadt, Germany. As in the previous years, it’s a 350 people event with a relaxed atmosphere. I really enjoy going to these mid-size events with a decent selection of talks and attentive guests.

The conference was opened by Paolo Ferri’s Keynote. He is from the ESA and gave a very entertaining talk about the Rosetta mission. He mentioned the challenges involved in launching a missile for a mission to be executed ten years later. It was very interesting to see what they have achieved over a few hundred kilometers distance. Now I want to become a space pilot, too ๐Ÿ˜‰

The next talk was on those tracking devices for your fitness. Turns out, that these tracking devices may actually track you and that they hence pose a risk for your privacy. Apparently fraud is another issue for insurance companies in the US, because some allow you to get better rates when you upload your fitness status. That makes those fitness trackers an interesting target for both people wanting to manipulate their walking statistics to get a better premium for health care and attackers who want to harm someone by changing their statistics.

Concretely, he presented, these devices run with Bluetooth 4 (Smart) which allows anyone to see the device. In addition, service discovery is also turned on which allows anyone to query the device. Usually, he said, no pin is needed anymore to connect to the device. He actually tested several devices with regard to several aspects, such as authentication, what data is stored, what is sent to the Internet and what security mechanisms the apps (for a phone) have been deployed. Among the tested devices were the XiaomMi Miband, the Fitbit, or the Huawei TalkBand B1. The MiBand was setting a good example by disabling discovery once someone has connected to the device. It also saves the MAC address of the phone and ignores others. In order to investigate the data sent between a phone and a band, they disassembled the Android applications.

Muzy was telling a fairytale about a big data lake gone bad.
He said that data lakes are a storage for not necessarily structured data which allow extraction of certain features in an on-demand fashion and that the processed data will then eventually end up in a data warehouse in a much more structured fashion. According to him, data scientists then have unlimited access to that data. That poses a problem and in order to secure the data, he proposed to introduce another layer of authorization to determine whether data scientists are allowed to access certain records. That is a bit different from what exists today: Encrypt data at rest and encrypt in motion. He claimed that current approaches do not solve actual problems, because of, e.g. key management questions. However, user rights management and user authorization are currently emerging, he said.

Later, he referred on Apache Spark. With big data, he said, you need to adapt to a new programming paradigm away from a single worker to multiple nodes, split up work, handling errors and slow tasks. Map reduce, he said, is one programming model. A popular framework for writing in a such a paradigm is Apache’s Hadoop, but there are more. He presented Apache Spark. But it only begins to make sense if you want to analyse more data than you can fit in your RAM, he said. Spark distributes data for you and executes operations on it in a parallel manner, so you don’t need to care about all of that. However, not all applications are a nice fit for Spark, he mentioned. He gave high performance weather computations as such as example. In general, Spark fits well if IPC not required.

The conference then continued with two very interesting talks on Bahn APIs. derf presented on public transport APIs like EFA, HAFAS, and IRIS. These APIs can do things like routing from A to B or answer questions such as which trains are running from a given station. However, these APIs are hardly documented. The IRIS-system is the internal Bahn-API which is probably not supposed to be publicly available, but there is a Web page which exposes (bits) of the API. Others have used that to build similar, even more fancy things. Anyway, he used these APIs to query for trains running late. The results were insightful and entertaining, but have not been released to the general public. However, the speakers presented a way to query all trains in Germany. Long story short: They use the Zugradar which also contains the geo coordinates. They acquired 160 millions datasets over the last year which is represented in 80GB of JSON. They have made their database available as ElasticSearch and Kibana interface. The code it at Github. That is really really good stuff. I’m already in the process of building an ElasticSearch and Spark cluster to munch on that data.

Yours truly also had a talk. I was speaking on GNOME Keysign. Because the CCC people know how to run a great conference, we already have recordings (torrent). You get the slides here. Those of you who know me don’t find the content surprising. To all others: GNOME Keysign is a tool for signing OpenPGP Keys. New features include the capability to sign keys offline, that is, you present a file with a key and you have it signed following best practices.

Another talk I had, this time with a colleague of mine, was on Searchable Encryption. Again, the Video already exists. The slides are probably less funny than they were during the presentation, but hopefully still informative enough to make some sense out of them. Together we mentioned various existing cryptographic schemes which allow you to have a third party execute search operations on your encrypted data on your behalf. The most interesting schemes we showed were Song, Wagner, Perrig and Cash et al..

Thanks again to the organisers for this nice event! I’m looking forward to coming back next year.

Open Source Hong Kong 2015

Recently, I’ve been to Hong Kong for Open Source Hong Kong 2015, which is the heritage of the GNOME.Asia Summit 2012 we’ve had in Hong Kong. The organisers apparently liked their experience when organising GNOME.Asia Summit in 2012 and continued to organise Free Software events. When talking to organisers, they said that more than 1000 people registered for the gratis event. While those 1000 were not present, half of them are more realistic.

Olivier from Amazon Web Services Klein was opening the conference with his keynote on Big Data and Open Source. He began with a quote from RMS: about the “Free” in Free Software referring to freedom, not price. He followed with the question of how does Big Data fit into the spirit of Free Software. He answered shortly afterwards by saying that technologies like Hadoop allow you to mess around with large data sets on commodity hardware rather than requiring you to build a heavy data center first. The talk then, although he said it would not, went into a subtle sales pitch for AWS. So we learned about AWS’ Global Infrastructure, like how well located the AWS servers are, how the AWS architecture helps you to perform your tasks, how everything in AWS is an API, etc. I wasn’t all too impressed, but then he demoed how he uses various Amazon services to analyse Twitter for certain keywords. Of course, analysing Twitter is not that impressive, but being able to do that within a few second with relatively few lines of code impressed me. I was also impressed by his demoing skills. Of course, one part of his demo failed, but he was reacting very professionally, e.g. he quickly opened a WiFi hotspot on his phone to use that as an alternative uplink. Also, he quickly grasped what was going on on his remote Amazon machine by quickly glancing over netstat and ps output.

The next talk I attended was on trans-compiling given by Andi Li. He was talking about Haxe and how it compiles to various other languages. Think Closure, Scala, and Groovy which all compile to Java bytecode. But on steroids. Haxe apparently compiles to code in another language. So Haxe is a in a sense like Emcripten or Vala, but a much more generic source-to-source compiler. He referred about the advantages and disadvantages of Haxe, but he lost me when he was saying that more abstraction is better. The examples he gave were quite impressive. I still don’t think trans-compiling is particularly useful outside the realm of academic experiments, but I’m still intrigued by the fact that you can make use of Haxe’s own language features to conveniently write programs in languages that don’t provide those features. That seems to be the origin of the tool: Flash. So unless you have a proper language with a proper stdlib, you don’t need Haxe…

From the six parallel tracks, I chose to attend the one on BDD in Mediawiki by Baochuan Lu. He started out by providing his motivation for his work. He loves Free/Libre and Open Source software, because it provides a life-long learning environment as well as a very supportive community. He is also a teacher and makes his students contribute to Free Software projects in order to get real-life experience with software development. As a professor, he said, one of his fears when starting these projects was being considered as the expertโ„ข although he doesn’t know much about Free Software development. This, he said, is shared by many professors which is why they would not consider entering the public realm of contributing to Free Software projects. But he reached out to the (Mediawiki) community and got amazing responses and an awful lot of help.
He continued by introducing to Mediawiki, which, he said, is a platform which powers many Wikimedia Foundation projects such as the Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, and others. One of the strategies for testing the Mediawiki is to use Selenium and Cucumber for automated tests. He introduced the basic concepts of Behaviour Driven Development (BDD), such as being short and concise in your test cases or being iterative in the test design phase. Afterwards, he showed us how his tests look like and how they run.

The after-lunch talk titled Data Transformation in Camel Style was given by Red Hat’s Roger Hui and was concerned with Apache Camel, an “Enterprise Integration” software. I had never heard of that and I am not much smarter know. From what I understood, Camel allows you to program message workflows. So depending on the content of a message, you can make it go certain ways, i.e. to a file or to an ActiveMQ queue. The second important part is data transformation. For example, if you want to change the data format from XML to JSON, you can use their tooling with a nice clicky pointy GUI to drag your messages around and route them through various translators.

From the next talk by Thomas Kuiper I learned a lot about Gandi, the domain registrar. But they do much more than that. And you can do that with a command line interface! So they are very tech savvy and enjoy having such customers, too. They really seem to be a cool company with an appropriate attitude.

The next day began with Jon’s Kernel Report. If you’re reading LWN then you haven’t missed anything. He said that the kernel grows and grows. The upcoming 4.2 kernel, probably going to be released on August 23rd. might very well be the busiest we’ve seen with the most changesets so far. The trend seems to be unstoppable. The length of the development cycle is getting shorter and shorter, currently being at around 63 days. The only thing that can delay a kernel release is Linus’ vacation… The rate of volunteer contribution is dropping from 20% as seen for 2.6.26 to about 12% in 3.10. That trend is also continuing. Another analysis he did was to look at the patches and their timezone. He found that that a third of the code comes from the Americas, that Europe contributes another third, and so does Australasia. As for Linux itself, he explained new system calls and other features of the kernel that have been added over the last year. While many things go well and probably will continue to do so, he worries about the real time Linux project. Real time, he said, was the system reacting to an external event within a bounded time. No company is supporting the real time Linux currently, he said. According to him, being a real time general purpose kernel makes Linux very attractive and if we should leverage that potential. Security is another area of concern. 2014 was the year of high profile security incidents, like various Bash and OpenSSL bugs. He expects that 2015 will be no less interesting. Also because the Kernel carries lots of old and unmaintained code. Three million lines of code haven’t been touch in at least ten years. Shellshock, he said, was in code more than 20 years old code. Also, we have a long list of motivated attackers while not having people working on making the Kernel more secure although “our users are relying on us to keep them safe in a world full of threats”

The next presentation was given by Microsoft on .NET going Open Source. She presented the .NET stack which Microsoft has open sourced at the end of last year as well as on Visual Studio. Their vision, she said, is that Visual Studio is a general purpose IDE for every app and every developer. So they have good Python and Android support, she said. A “free cross platform code editor” named Visual Studio Code exists now which is a bit more than an editor. So it does understand some languages and can help you while debugging. I tried to get more information on that Patent Grant, but she couldn’t help me much.

There was also a talk on Luwrain by Michael Pozhidaev which is GPLv3 software for blind people. It is not a screen reader but more of a framework for writing software for blind people. They provide an API that guarantees that your program will be accessible without the application programmer needing to have knowledge of accessibility technology. They haven’t had a stable release just yet, but it is expected for the end of 2015. The demo unveiled some a text oriented desktop which reads out text on the screen. Several applications already exist, including a file editor and a Twitter client. The user is able to scroll through the text by word or character which reminded of ChorusText I’ve seen at GNOME.Asia Summit earlier this year.

I had the keynote slot which allowed me to throw out my ideas for the future of the Free Software movement. I presented on GNOME and how I see that security and privacy can make a distinguishing feature of Free Software. We had an interesting discussion afterwards as to how to enable users to make security decisions without prompts. I conclude that people do care about creating usable secure software which I found very refreshing.

Both the conference and Hong Kong were great. The local team did their job pretty well and I am proud that the GNOME.Asia Summit in Hong Kong inspired them to continue doing Free Software events. I hope I can be back soon ๐Ÿ™‚

GNOME.Asia Summit 2015 in Depok, Indonesia

I have just returned from the GNOME.Asia Summit 2015 in Depok, Indonesia.

Out of the talks, the most interesting talk I have seen, I think, was the one from Iwan S. Tahari, the manager of a local shoe producer who also sponsored GNOME shoes!

Open Source Software in Shoes Industry” was the title and he talked about how his company, FANS Shoes, est 2001, would use “Open Source”. They are also a BlankOn Linux partner which seems to be a rather big thing in Indonesia. In fact, the keynote presentation earlier was on that distribution and mentioned how they try to make it easier for people of their culture to contribute to Free Software.
Anyway, the speaker went on to claim that in Indonesia, they have 82 million Internet users out of which 69 million use Facebook. But few use “Open Source”, he asserted. The machines sold ship with either Windows or DOS, he said. He said that FANS preferred FOSS because it increased their productivity, not only because of viruses (he mentioned BRONTOK.A as a pretty annoying example), but also because of the re-installation time. To re-install Windows costs about 90 minutes, he said. The average time to install Blank On (on an SSD), was 15 minutes. According to him, the install time is especially annoying for them, because they don’t have IT people on staff. He liked Blank On Linux because it comes with “all the apps” and that there is not much to install afterwards. Another advantage he mentioned is the costs. He estimated the costs of their IT landscape going Windows to be 136,57 million Rupees (12000 USD). With Blank On, it comes down to 0, he said. That money, he can now spend on a Van and a transporter scooter instead. Another feature of his GNU/Linux based system, he said, was the ability to cut the power at will without stuff breaking. Indonesia, he said, is known for frequent power cuts. He explicitly mentioned printer support to be a major pain point for them.

When they bootstrapped their Free Software usage, they first tried to do Dual Boot for their 5 employees. But it was not worth their efforts, because everybody selected Windows on boot, anyway. They then migrated the accounting manager to a GNU/Linux based operating system. And that laptop still runs the LinuxMint version 13 they installed… He mentioned that you have to migrate top down, never from bottom to top, so senior management needs to go first. Later Q&A revealed that this is because of cultural issues. The leaders need to set an example and the workers will not change unless their superiors do. Only their RnD department was hard to migrate, he said, because they need to be compatible to Corel Draw. With the help of an Indonesian Inkscape book, though, they managed to run Inkscape. The areas where they lack support is CAD (think AutoCAD), Statistics (think SPSS), Kanban information system (like iceScrum), and integration with “Computer Aided Machinery”. He also identified the lack of documentation to be a problem not only for them, but for the general uptake of Free Software in Indonesia. In order to amend the situation, they provide gifts for people writing documentation or books!

All in all, it was quite interesting to see an actual (non-computer) business running exclusively on Free Software. I had a chat with Iwan afterwards and maybe we can get GNOME shaped flip-flops in the future ๐Ÿ™‚

The next talk was given by Ahmad Haris with GNOME on an Android TV Dongle. He brought GNOME to those 30 USD TV sticks that can turn your TV into a “smart” device. He showed various commands and parameters which enable you to run Linux on these devices. For the reasons as to why put GNOME on those devices, he said, that it has a comparatively small memory footprint. I didn’t really understand the motivation, but I blame mostly myself, because I don’t even have a TV… Anyway, bringing GNOME to more platforms is good, of course, and I was happy to see that people are actively working on bringing GNOME to various hardware.

Similarly, Running GNOME on a Nexus 7 by Bin Li was presenting how he tried to make his Android tabled run GNOME. There is previous work done by VadimRutkovsky:

He gave instructions as to how to create a custom kernel for the Nexus 7 device. He also encountered some problems, such as compilations errors, and showed how he fixed them. After building the kernel, he installed Arch-Linux with the help of some scripts. This, however, turned out to not be successful, so he couldn’t run his custom Arch Linux with GNOME.
He wanted to have a tool like “ubuntu-device-flash” such that hacking on this device is much easier. Also, downloading and flashing a working image is too hard for casually hacking on it, he said.

A presentation I was not impressed by was “In-memory computing on GNU/Linux”. More and more companies, he said, would be using in-memory computing on a general operating system. Examples of products which use in-memory computing were GridGain, SAP HANA, IBM DB2, and Oracle 12c. These products, he said, allow you to make better and faster decision making and to avoid risks. He also pointed out that you won’t have breaking down hard-drives and less energy consumption. While in-memory is blazingly fast, all your data is lost when you have a power failure. The users of big data, according to him, are businesses, academics, government, or software developers. The last one surprised me, but he didn’t go into detail as to why it is useful for an ordinary developer. The benchmarks he showed were impressive. Up to hundred-fold improvements for various tests were recorded in the in-memory setting compared to the traditional on-disk setting. The methodology wasn’t comprehensive, so I am yet not convinced that the convoluted charts show anything useful. But the speaker is an academic, so I guess he’s got at least compelling arguments for his test setup. In order to build a Linux suitable for in-memory computation, they installed a regular GNU/Linux on a drive and modify the boot scripts such that the disk will be copied into a tmpfs. I am wondering though, wouldn’t it be enough to set up a very aggressive disk cache…?

I was impressed by David’s work on ChorusText. I couldn’t follow the talk, because my Indonesian wasn’t good enough. But I talked to him privately and he showed me his device which, as far as I understand, is an assistive screen reader. It has various sliders with tactile feedback to help you navigating through text with the screen reader. Apparently, he has low vision himself so he’s way better suited to tell whether this device is useful. For now, I think it’s great and I hope that it helps more people and that we can integrate it nicely into GNOME.

My own keynote went fairly well. I spent my time with explaining what I think GNOME is, why it’s good, and what it should become in the future. If you know GNOME, me, and my interests, then it doesn’t come as a surprise that I talked about the history of GNOME, how it tries to bring Free computing to everyone, and how I think security and privacy will going to matter in the future. I tried to set the tone for the conference, hoping that discussions about GNOME’s future would spark in the coffee breaks. I had some people discussing with afterwards, so I think it was successful enough.

When I went home, I saw that the Jakarta airport runs GNOME 3, but probably haven’t done that for too long, because the airport’s UX is terrible. In fact, it is one of the worst ones I’ve seen so far. I arrived at the domestic terminal, but I didn’t know which one it was, i.e. its number. There were no signs or indications that tell you in which terminal you are in. Let alone where you need to go to in order to catch your international flight. Their self-information computer system couldn’t deliver. The information desk was able to help, though. The transfer to the international terminal requires you to take a bus (fair enough), but whatever the drivers yell when they stop is not comprehensible. When you were lucky enough to get out at the right terminal, you needed to have a printed version of your ticket. I think the last time I’ve seen this was about ten years ago in Mumbai. The airport itself is big and bulky with no clear indications as to where to go. Worst of all, it doesn’t have any air conditioning. I was not sure whether I had to pay the 150000 Rupees departure tax, but again, the guy at the information desk was able to help. Although I was disappointed to learn that they won’t take a credit card, but cash only. So I drew the money out of the next ATM that wasn’t broken (I only needed three attempts). But it was good to find the non-broken ATM, because the shops wouldn’t take my credit card, either, so I already knew where to get cash from. The WiFi’s performance matches the other airport’s infrastructure well: It’s quite dirty. Because it turned out that the information the guy gave me was wrong, I invested my spare hundred somewhat thousands rupees in dough-nuts in order to help me waiting for my 2.5 hours delayed flight. But I couldn’t really enjoy the food, because the moment I sat on any bench, cockroaches began to invade the place. I think the airport hosts the dirtiest benches of all Indonesia. The good thing is, that they have toilets. With no drinkable water, but at least you can wash your hands. Fortunately, my flight was only two hours late, so I could escape relatively quickly. I’m looking forward to going back, but maybe not via CGK ๐Ÿ˜‰

All in all, many kudos to the organisers. I think this year’s edition was quite successful.

Sponsored by GNOME!

FOSDEM 2015

It’s winter again and it was clear that FOSDEM was coming. However, preparation fell through the cracks, at least for me, mainly because my personal life is fast-paced at the moment. We had a table again, and our EventsBox, which is filled with goodness to demo GNOME, made its way from Gothenburg, where I actually carried it to a couple of months ago.

Unfortunately though, we didn’t have t-shirts to sell. We do have boxes of t-shirts left, but they didn’t make it to FOSDEM :-\ So this FOSDEM didn’t generate nearly as much revenue as the last years. It’s a pity that this year’s preparation was suboptimal. I hope we can improve next year. Were able to get rid of other people’s things, though ๐Ÿ˜‰ Like last year, the SuSE people brought beer, but it was different this time. Better, even ๐Ÿ˜‰

The fact that there wasn’t as much action at our booth as last years, I could actually attend talks. I was able to see Sri and Pam talking on the Groupon incident that shook us up a couple of months ago. It was really nice to see her, because I wanted to shake hands and say thanks. She did an amazing job. Interestingly enough, she praised us, the GNOME Foundation’s Board of Directors, for working very professionally. Much better than any client she has worked with. I am surprised, because I didn’t really have the feeling we were acting as promptly as we could. You know, we’re volunteers, after all. Also, we didn’t really prepare as much as we could have which led to some things being done rather spontaneously. Anyway, I take that as a compliment and I guess that our work can’t be all too bad. The talk itself showed our side of things and, if you ask me, was painting things in a too bright light. Sure, we were successful, but I attribute much of that success to network effects and a bit of luck. I don’t think we could replicate that success easily.

GNOME’s presence at FOSDEM was not too bad though, despite the lack of shirts. We had a packed beer event and more talks by GNOMEy people. The list includes Karen‘s keynote, Benzo‘s talk on SDAPDS, and Sri‘s talk on GNOME’s impact on the Free Software ecosystem. You can find more here.

A talk that I did see was on improving the keysigning situation. I really mean to write about this some more. For now, let me just say that I am pleased to see people working on solutions. Solutions to a problem I’m not sure many people see and that I want to devote some time for explaining it, i.e. in s separate post. The gist is, that contemporary “keysigning parties” come with non-negligible costs for both, the organiser and the participant. KeySigningPartyTools were presented which intend to improve they way things are currently done. That’s already quite good as it’ll reduce the number of errors people typically make when attending such a party.

However, I think that we need to rethink keysigning. Mostly, because the state of the art is a massive SecOps fail. There is about a gazillion traps to be avoided and many things don’t actually make so much sense. For example, I am unable to comprehend why we are muttering a base16 encoded version of your 160 bit fingerprint to ourselves. Or why we must queue outside in the cold without being able to jump the queue if a single person is a bit slow, because then everybody will be terribly confused and the whole thing taking even longer. Or why we need to do everything on paper (well, I know the arguments: Your computer can be hacked, be social, yadda yadda). I did actually give a talk on rethinking the keysigning problem (slides). It’s about a project that I have only briefly mentioned here and which I should really write about in the near future. GNOME Keysign intends to be less of a SecOps fail by letting the scan a barcode and click “next”. The rest will be operations known to the user such as sending an email. No more manually comparing fingerprints. No more leaking data to the Internet about who you want to contact. No more MITM attacks against your OpenPGP installation. No more short key ids that you accidentally use or because you mistyped a letter of the fingerprint. No more editing raw Perl in order to configure your keysigning tool. The talk went surprisingly well. I actually expected the people in the security devroom to be mad when someone like me is taking their perl and their command line away. I received good questions and interesting feedback. I’ll follow up here with another post once real-life lets me get to it.

Brussels itself is a very nice city. We were lucky, I guess, because we had some sunshine when we were walking around the city. I love the plethora of restaurants. And I like that Brussels is very open and cultural. Unfortunately, the makerspace was deserted when we arrived, but it is was somewhat expected as it was daytime… I hope to return again and check it out during the night ๐Ÿ˜‰

GNOME at FSCONS14 in Gothenburg, Sweden

I was glad to be invited to FSONCS 2014 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Remember that this is also the place for next year’s GUADEC! This year’s FSCONS was attended by around 150 people or so. I guess it was a bit less. That might not sound like a lot, but it’s a very cool event with many interesting people and talks.

We, GNOME, had a presence at the event due to me bringing the EventsBox and T-Shirts to Gothenburg. It was quite a trip, especially with those heavy boxes…

The first keynote of the conference was given by Karl Fogel. He declared the end of copyright in 1993. He imagined copyright as a tree whose bottom has been chopped off, but the, the top hasn’t noticed that just yet. He put copyright on a timeline and drew a strong relation to the printing press. He claimed that in the United Kingdom, a monopoly used to control who prints and distributes books and it then transferred to a differently shaped monopoly which involved the actual authors. These could then transfer their rights to printers. He went on with ranting about the fact that nowadays you cannot tip the author for their (free) work. He appealed to the authors of f-droid or the firefox mobile app market to integrate such a functionality. Overall it was an interesting talk with many aspects. He is a talented speaker.

The second keynote was given by Leigh Honeywell. She talked about communities and community building. She said that she got most of the ideas presented in her talk from Sumana Harihareswara‘s “Models we use to change the world”. During her talk she referred to her experiences when founded the HackLabTO Hackerspace after having attended the CCCamp 2007. She basically shared models of understanding the community and their behaviour. The Q&A session was inspiring and informative. Many questions about managing a community were asked and answered.

Another interesting talk was given by Guilhem Moulin who went on to talk about Fripost. It is a democratic email service provider from Sweden. He gave a bit of an insight regarding the current Email usage on today’s Internet. He claimed that we have 2.7 billion internet users and that the top three email service providers accumulate roughly a third of this population. His numbers were 425 million for GMail, 420 million for Hotmail, and 280 million for Yahoo. All these companies are part of PRISM, he said, which worried him enough to engage with Fripost. In fact, he became a board member after having been a user and a sysadmin. As someone who operates a mail server for oneself and others with similar needs, I was quite interested in seeing concentrated efforts like this. Fripost’s governance seems to be interesting. It’s a democratic body and I wonder how to thwart malicious subversion. Anyway, the talk was about technical details as to how to create your own fripost.org. So I can only encourage to run your own infrastructure and found structures that care about running ecosystem. A memorable quote he provided to underpin this appeal is attributed to Schneier: “We were safer when our email was at 10,000 ISPs than it was at 10“.

My talk went sufficiently well. I guess I preached to the choir regarding Free Software. I don’t think I needed to convince the people that Free Software is a good thing. As for convincing the audience that GNOME is a good thing, I think I faced a big challenge. Some of the attendees didn’t seem to be very enthusiastic about their desktop which is great. But some others were more in the, what I would call, old school category using lynx, xautoscreenlock, and all that stuff from the 90s. Anyway, we had a great session with many questions from the audience such that I couldn’t even go through my slides.

I had a lightning talk about signing OpenPGP keys using GNOME Keysign. I probably need to write up a separate blog post for that. In short, I mentioned that short key IDs are evil, but that long key IDs are also problematic. Actually, using keyservers is inherently problematic and should be avoided. To do so, I showed how I transfer a key securely and sign it following best practices (thanks to Andrei for an initial version!). Bastian was nice enough to do the demo with me. We needed to cheat a little though, as currently, they key is transferred using the WiFi network you are on. The WiFi, however, didn’t allow us to create a TCP connection to each other. We thus opened a WiFi hotspot and used that. I think this would be a useful feature.

The last talk of the conference was given by Hans Lysglimt from Norway. He is, among other things, a politician, an activist, and an entrepreneur who founded an email service. His runbox has around 1000000 accounts and 30000 paid subscriptions, so it’s fairly big, compared to Fripost at least. Again, running email services myself, I found it interesting to listen to the stories he had to tell. His story was that he received a gag order for running his commercial email service provider. It remained unclear whether it was send because of his interview with Julian Assange or not.

Interestingly, he didn’t seem to have received many correct subpoenas in the sense that they were Norwegian court orders. However, in one case the American authorities went through the Norwegian legal system which he found funny in itself because the two legal system were not very similar. He eventually mentioned that every email service provider has at least one gag order, either an implicit or and explicit one. Ultimately, he concluded that you cannot trust a corporation.

FSCONS is an interesting event. Their manifesto is certainly impressive. I am glad to have visited and I am looking forward to visiting again. It is very atmospheric, very relaxed, and friendly. A very nice place to be.

mrmcd14 in Darmstadt – DOM-based XSS

After last year’s fabulous event, I was really looking forward to this year’s mrmcd in Darmstadt, Germany. It outgrew last year’s edition and had probably around 250 to 300 people attending. Maybe even more. In fact, 450 clients generated 423 GB traffic during the conference which lasted 60 hours or so. That’s around 2MB/s. That’s megabytes. Per second. Every second. I find that quite impressive. Especially as the outdoor area was very inviting to just hang around, grab a beer, and chat to your fellow hackers. So some people must have had an amazing demand of … updates…

This year’s theme was construction sites. As IT, and especially security, is a major, never ending, and dangerous construction site. It was well done, with a lot of warning tape, the people wearing helmets, hi-vis vests, some security boots, etc. Although it couldn’t excel last year’s aviation theme, but the watermark was set extremely high. Anyway, the speakers received cool gadgets, like a tool set, a level, and other very well done gadgets. The talks were opened by Unicorn who, as you can see, was wearing proper safety gear. We were given instructions as to how to behave in case of fire, flood, or lack of alcohol. A nifty feature of this event is the availability of carbo hydrates in form of various food stuffs. It’s very cool to always being able to walk up to the buffet and fill up energy reserves.

The keynote was involuntarily given by dodger who did not miss the opportunity to show us various constructions sites, such as the Utah Data Center. Ultimately, (now I am maybe over interpreting things), it’s also hackers like us who make those possible. We usually decide for ourselves where to go and what to do. It was a good round-up on how we as a community work or should work. Also with some political references which I think is important as I have the feeling that many people lose that focus too easily.

An interesting series of talks was given by Ange Albertini, who first presented the PDF file format. It was interesting to see how the format actually looks like. I knew already a little but I’ve never really cared about the details. This was a very interesting and visually appealing talk. Pretty much like his other presentations which were again on file formats and on crypto.

My own talk was scheduled after the second night. I was positively surprised to see a half-filled room on a Sunday morning, after two nights of demanding partying… Anyway, I had an interested crowd which I think I could entertain. You can find my slides here. I was talking on DOM-based Cross-site Scripting. I presented a modified Chrome browser which is able to stop all identified DOM-based XSSs. I will need a separate post to cover the details. As a brief summary: Both WebKit and V8 were modified to track taint, that is, to annotate strings with the information of the source. Such a source could be the document.URL or the window.name. This taint information is evaluated whenever it is about to be compiled to code. The simple approach of blocking every tainted string to compile is not followed as it breaks the Web. Instead, the compiler will notice which token is about to be generated and only allow generation if and only if the string is untainted or of a data type (String, Boolean, Number). If the tainted token is, for example, function call, assignment or pretty much anything else, then it is replaced with an illegal token in order to abort compilation. There is a video of the talk here:

As we are on videos, the video team is just plainly amazing. It released videos of the event pretty much after they finished. And in a quality that is hard to excel. You check the videos of this conference, but also others. You may find some gems that are well worth watching. Be aware though, some talks are also very much on the vapor-ware side of things… I guess I don’t need to point to specific talks as it should be easy to identify…

I am already looking forward to next year’s event. The watermark has, again, been set high and I expect the next year to be able to raise that bar. But I hope it will be able to stay small enough to not lose the cosy and comfy feeling. Maybe I shouldn’t blog about that fantastic event to not generate too much attention ๐Ÿ˜‰

LibreOffice Con in Bern, Switzerland

I was invited to give a talk in Bern, Switzerland, for the LibreOffice Conference. The LibreOffice people are a nice crowd with diverse backgrounds. I talked to design people, coders doing rather low-level GL things, marketing folks, some being new to Free Software, and to some being old farts. It sounds like a lot of people and one is inclined to think of boat loads of people attending the conference when having the community statistics in mind. But it has been a very cosy event, with less than a hundred people. I found that surprising, but not necessarily in a bad way.

I couldn’t make it to many talks, because the conference took place on week days. But judging from the schedule there were many interesting talks. The only thing I didn’t like about the schedule was the weird formatting. Seriously, who makes the track’s name more visible than the talk’s title..? Also grouping by room and not by time is a bit weird.

Anyway, my talk went well although it was in the first slot after the free beer party ๐Ÿ˜‰ You can find my slides in the collection. I was talking about GNOME in general, but with a twist for those who migrate from proprietary software to Free Software. I hope I could convey that the GNOME desktop might be a viable alternative to proprietary products.

As this was a great, comfortable conference, I’m looking forward to visiting next year’s event.

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This work by Muelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.