This release fixes issues found in 24.07.1 and 24.07.2, bringing important enhancements, bug fixes, and new features. Key improvements include setting vital system and software packages, adding support to mark packages as vital, and including hgame in kld_list. Notably, they resolved the legacy boot issue where the live session wouldn't start due to missing gzip in the BIOS /boot/loader. They’ve also ensured /etc/X11 is properly created during setup.
From Cloud Chaos to FreeBSD Efficiency, August 2024 Foundation Update, Email encryption at rest on OpenBSD using dovecot and GPG, Workarounds are often forever (unless you work to make them otherwise), Remote Desktop using RDP and VNC, Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple, Plan 9 is a Uniquely Complete Operating System, and more.
Although NetBSD doesn’t provide native read-only support, it’s flexible enough to allow for this configuration.
The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX/BSD/Linux systems.
The third Release Candidate build for the FreeBSD 13.4 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe, armv6, armv7, aarch64, and riscv64 architectures are FreeBSD mirror sites.
X Window System At 40, Lessons from Ancient File Systems, HardenedBSD July 2024 Status Report, FreeBSD's 'root on ZFS' is appealing, I Miss BSD/Linux, Simple automated deployments using git.
Concurrent removals of such a mapping by using the UMTXSHMDESTROY sub-request of UMTXOPSHM can lead to decreasing the reference count of the object representing the mapping too many times, causing it to be freed too early. A malicious code exercizing the UMTXSHMDESTROY sub-request in parallel can panic the kernel or enable further Use-After-Free attacks, potentially including code execution or Capsicum sandbox escape. IV. Workaround No workaround is available.
Applications performing certificate name checks (e.g., TLS clients checking server certificates) may attempt to read an invalid memory address when comparing the expected name with an otherName subject alternative name of an X.509 certificate. Basic certificate chain validation is not affected. The issue only occurs when an application also specifies an expected DNS name, Email address or IP address. Applications affected by the problem may result in a termination, leading to a denial of service.
bhyve can be configured to emulate devices on a virtual USB controller (XHCI), such as USB tablet devices. An insufficient boundary validation in the USB code could lead to an out-of-bounds write on the heap, with data controlled by the caller. A malicious, privileged software running in a guest VM can exploit the vulnerability to achieve code execution on the host in the bhyve userspace process, which typically runs as root. Note that bhyve runs in a Capsicum sandbox, so malicious code is constrained by the capabilities available to the bhyve process.
Several vulnerabilities were found in the ctl subsystem. The function ctlwritebuffer incorrectly set a flag which resulted in a kernel Use-After-Free when a command finished processing (CVE-2024-45063). The ctlwritebuffer and ctlreadbuffer functions allocated memory to be returned to userspace, without initializing it (CVE-2024-8178). The ctlreportsupportedopcodes function did not sufficiently validate a field provided by userspace, allowing an arbitrary write to a limited amount of kernel help memory (CVE-2024-42416). The ctlrequestsense function could expose up to three bytes of the kernel heap to userspace (CVE-2024-43110). Guest virtual machines in the bhyve hypervisor can send SCSI commands to the corresponding kernel driver via the virtioscsi interface. This provides guests with direct access to the vulnerabilities covered by this advisory. The CAM Target Layer iSCSI target daemon ctld(8) accepts incoming iSCSI connections, performs authentication and passes connections to the kernel ctl(4) target layer. Malicious software running in a guest VM that exposes virtio_scsi can exploit the vulnerabilities to achieve code execution on the host in the bhyve userspace process, which typically runs as root. Note that bhyve runs in a Capsicum sandbox, so malicious code is constrained by the capabilities available to the bhyve process. A malicious iSCSI initiator could achieve remote code execution on the iSCSI target host.
bhyve can be configured to provide access to the host's TPM device, where it passes the communication through an emulated device provided to the guest. This may be performed on the command-line by starting bhyve with the -l tpm,passthru,/dev/tpmX parameters. The MMIO handler for the emulated device did not validate the offset and size of the memory access correctly, allowing guests to read and write memory contents outside of the memory area effectively allocated. Malicious software running in a guest VM can exploit the buffer overflow to achieve code execution on the host in the bhyve userspace process, which typically runs as root. Note that bhyve runs in a Capsicum sandbox, so malicious code is constrained by the capabilities available to the bhyve process.
CVE-2024-45287 is a vulnerability that affects both the kernel and userland. A malicious value of size in a structure of packed libnv can cause an integer overflow, leading to the allocation of a smaller buffer than required for the parsed data. CVE-2024-45288 is a vulnerability that affects both the kernel and userland. A missing null-termination character in the last element of an nvlist array string can lead to writing outside the allocated buffer. It is possible for an attacker to overwrite portions of memory (in userland or the kernel) as the allocated buffer might be smaller than the data received from a malicious process. This vulnerability could result in privilege escalation or cause a system panic.
periodic(8) jobs are typically run in a context as the root user, but an erratum in calendar(1) may clobber the login session of both cron(8) and periodic(8) to a non-root user if the daily calendar job is enabled with daily_calendar_enable=YES.Mail sent after calendar(1) has run in the daily periodic run will have a non-root sender on the envelope. This includes security jobs as well as other cron jobs that may be run after the daily job has concluded.