May 31st 2017

Free software activities in May 2017

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world (previous month):


Reproducible builds


Whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, most software is distributed pre-compiled to end users.

The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to permit verification that no flaws have been introduced — either maliciously or accidentally — during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised.

(I have generously been awarded a grant from the Core Infrastructure Initiative to fund my work in this area.)

This month I:


I also made the following changes to our tooling:

diffoscope

diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues.

  • Don't fail when run under perversely-recursive input files. (#780761).

strip-nondeterminism

strip-nondeterminism is our tool to remove specific non-deterministic results from a completed build.

  • Move from verbose_print to nonquiet_print so we print when normalising a file. This is so we can start to target the removal of strip-nondeterminism itself.
  • Only print log messages by default if the file was actually modified. (#863033)
  • Update package long descriptions to clarify that the tool itself is a temporary workaround. (#862029)


Debian

My activities as the current Debian Project Leader are covered in my "Bits from the DPL" email to the debian-devel-announce list.

However, I:

  • Represented Debian at the OSCAL 2017 in Tirana, Albania.
  • Attended the Reproducible Builds hackathon in Hamburg, Germany. (Report)
  • Finally, I attended Debian SunCamp 2017 in Lloret de Mar in Catalonia, Spain.

Patches contributed

  • xarchiver: Adding files to .tar.xz deletes existing content. (#862593)
  • screen-message: Please invert the default colours. (#862056)
  • fontconfig: fc-cache returns with exit code 0 on 256 errors. (#863427)
  • quadrapassel: Segfaults when unpausing a paused finished game. (#863106)
  • camping: Broken symlink. (#861040)
  • dns-root-data: Does not build if /bin/sh is Bash. (#862252)
  • dh-python: bit.ly link doesn't work anymore. (#863074)

Debian LTS


This month I have been paid to work 18 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS). In that time I did the following:

  • "Frontdesk" duties, triaging CVEs, adding links to upstream patches, etc.
  • Issued DLA 930-1 fixing a remote application crash vulnerability in libxstream-java, a Java library to serialize objects to XML and back again
  • Issued DLA 935-1 correcting a local denial of service vulnerability in lxterminal, the terminal emulator for the LXDE desktop environment.
  • Issued DLA 940-1 to remedy an issue in sane-backends which allowed remote attackers to obtain sensitive memory information via a crafted SANE_NET_CONTROL_OPTION packet.
  • Issued DLA 943-1 for the deluge bittorrent client to fix a directory traversal attack vulnerability in the web user interface.
  • Issued DLA 949-1 fixing an integer signedness error in the miniupnpc UPnP client that could allow remote attackers to cause a denial of service attack.
  • Issued DLA 959-1 for the libical calendaring library. A use-after-free vulnerability could allow remote attackers could cause a denial of service and possibly read heap memory via a specially crafted .ICS file.

Uploads

  • redis (3:3.2.9-1) — New upstream release.
  • python-django:
    • 1:1.11.1-1 — New upstream minor release.
    • 1:1.11.1-2 & 1:1.11.1-3 — Add missing Build-Depends on libgdal-dev due to new GIS tests.
  • docbook-to-man:
    • 1:2.0.0-36 — Adopt package. Apply a patch to prevent undefined behaviour caused by a memcpy(3) parameter overlap. (#842635, #858389)
    • 1:2.0.0-37 — Install manpages using debian/docbook-to-man.manpages over manual calls.
  • installation-birthday — Initial upload and misc. subsequent fixes.
  • bfs:
    • 1.0-3 — Fix FTBFS on hurd-i386. (#861569)
    • 1.0.1-1 — New upstream release & correct debian/watch file.

I also made the following non-maintainer uploads (NMUs):

  • ca-certificates (20161130+nmu1) — Remove StartCom and WoSign certificates as they are now untrusted by the major browser vendors. (#858539)
  • sane-backends (1.0.25-4.1) — Correct missing error handler in (generated) prerm script. (#862334)
  • seqan2 (2.3.1+dfsg-3.1) — Fix broken /usr/bin/splazers symlink on 32-bit architectures. (#863669)
  • jackeq (0.5.9-2.1) — Fix a segmentation fault caused by passing a truncated pointer instead of a GtkType. (#863416)
  • kluppe (0.6.20-1.1) — Fix segmentation fault at startup. (#863421)
  • coyim (0.3.7-2.1) — Skip tests that require internet access to avoid FTBFS. (#863414)
  • pavuk (0.9.35-6.1) — Fix segmentation fault when opening "Limitations" window. (#863492)
  • porg (2:0.10-1.1) — Fix broken LD_PRELOAD path. (#863495)
  • timemachine (0.3.3-2.1) — Fix two segmentation faults caused by truncated pointers. (#863420)

Debian bugs filed

  • acct: Docs incorrectly installed to "accounting.html" directory. (#862180)
  • git-hub: Does not work with 2FA-enabled accounts. (#863265)
  • libwibble: Homepage and Vcs-Darcs fields are outdated. (#861673)



I additionally filed 2 bugs for packages that access the internet during build against flower and r-bioc-gviz.



I also filed 6 FTBFS bugs against cronutils, isoquery, libgnupg-interface-perl, maven-plugin-tools, node-dateformat, password-store & simple-tpm-pk11.


FTP Team


As a Debian FTP assistant I ACCEPTed 105 packages: boinc-app-eah-brp, debug-me, e-mem, etcd, fdroidcl, firejail, gcc-6-cross-ports, gcc-7-cross-ports, gcc-defaults, gl2ps, gnome-software, gnupg2, golang-github-dlclark-regexp2, golang-github-dop251-goja, golang-github-nebulouslabs-fastrand, golang-github-pkg-profile, haskell-call-stack, haskell-foundation, haskell-nanospec, haskell-parallel-tree-search, haskell-posix-pty, haskell-protobuf, htmlmin, iannix, libarchive-cpio-perl, libexternalsortinginjava-java, libgetdata, libpll, libtgvoip, mariadb-10.3, maven-resolver, mysql-transitional, network-manager, node-async-each, node-aws-sign2, node-bcrypt-pbkdf, node-browserify-rsa, node-builtin-status-codes, node-caseless, node-chokidar, node-concat-with-sourcemaps, node-console-control-strings, node-create-ecdh, node-create-hash, node-create-hmac, node-cryptiles, node-dot, node-ecc-jsbn, node-elliptic, node-evp-bytestokey, node-extsprintf, node-getpass, node-gulp-coffee, node-har-schema, node-har-validator, node-hawk, node-jsprim, node-memory-fs, node-pbkdf2, node-performance-now, node-set-immediate-shim, node-sinon-chai, node-source-list-map, node-stream-array, node-string-decoder, node-stringstream, node-verror, node-vinyl-sourcemaps-apply, node-vm-browserify, node-webpack-sources, node-wide-align, odil, onionshare, opensvc, otb, perl, petsc4py, pglogical, postgresql-10, psortb, purl, pymodbus, pymssql, python-decouple, python-django-rules, python-glob2, python-ncclient, python-parse-type, python-prctl, python-sparse, quoin-clojure, quorum, r-bioc-genomeinfodbdata, radlib, reprounzip, rustc, sbt-test-interface, slepc4py, slick-greeter, sparse, te923con, trabucco, traildb, typescript-types & writegood-mode.

I additionally filed 6 RC bugs against packages that had incomplete debian/copyright files against: libgetdata, odil, opensvc, python-ncclient, radlib and reprounzip.




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