All posts by Daniel Stenberg

IT Politics, Linux, Open Source

The Swedish BankID curse and Debian

5 Comments

Lots of bank, tax and insurance related stuff in Sweden these days switch to using BankID for secure logins on web sites.

That system used to be a java-thing so as long as your browser supported running java applets, you’d be fine. Even us strange guys who prefer Linux. While I’m not a huge fan of java, this seemed to be a rather fine example of where using a java-applet was actually a pretty good idea to achieve functionality on a wide variety of platforms without too much work.

They ditched the java applet a while ago and switched to a browser plugin and native application instead, which then suddenly made them forced to write platform-specific code to achieve the same magic. And not too surprisingly, the Linux version was poorly made and is not supported and is left with a really complicated way to install it which no doubt will prevent every Linux-newbie out there from using BankID on Linux. Annoying and rude if you ask me.

Now, my bank (Skandiabanken) is about to switch to use BankID completely for their regular logins and I thought it was about time for me to start the fight with this under Linux and see what I will learn.

The install.sh script is written for Ubuntu (very poorly) and doesn’t work. Shame on you Nexus for that crap. I poked it and with some manual hands-on I could install the stuff properly. I can now head over to the official BankID site and it verifies that my installation works fine. Somehow it does however not allow me to “sign” anything because of some failure and here’s the “fun” part:

The only help and contact there is about BankID says “contact your bank” for support. My bank says they have no support and just drops the ball there.

I’m willing to offer my fixed version of the install script that will work better on more distros. I’m willing to work a bit on my own to fix this for Linux uses such as myself. But how the hack can I even fix the problems when nobody can answer any questions or provide any details on this system?

Linux, Network, Open Source

My Debian Black-out – the price of bleeding edge

6 Comments

Ok, I admit it. I run Debian Unstable so I know I deserve to get hit really bad at times when things turn really ugly. It is called unstable for a reason.

The other day I decided it was about time I did a dist-upgrade. When I did that, I got a remark that I better restart my gnome session as otherwise apps would crash. So I logged out and… I couldn’t login again. In fact, neither my keyboard nor mouse (both on USB) worked anymore! I sighed, and rebooted (for the first time in many months) only to find out that 1) it didn’t fix the problem, both input devices were still non-functional and perhaps even more important 2) the wifi network didn’t work either so I couldn’t login to it from one of my other computers either!

Related to this story is the fact that I’ve been running an older kernel, 2.6.26, since that was the last version that built my madwifi drivers correctly and kernels after that I was supposed to use ath5k for my Atheros card, but I’ve not been very successful with ath5k and thus remained using the latest kernel I had a fine madwifi for.

I rebooted again and tried a more recent kernel (2.6.30). Yeah, then the keyboard and mouse worked again, but the ath5k didn’t get the wifi up properly. I think I basically was just lacking the proper tools to check the wifi network and set the desired ssid etc, but without network that’s a bit of a pain. Also, when I logged in on my normal gnome setup, it mentioned a panel something being broken and logged me out again! 🙁

Grrr. Of course I could switch to my backup – my laptop – but it was still highly annoying to end up being locked out from your computer.

Today I bought myself 20 meter cat5e cable and made my desktop wired so I can reach the network with the existing setup, I dist-upgraded again (now at kernel 2.6.31) and when I tried to login it just worked. Phew. Back in business. I think I’ll leave myself with the cable connected now that I’ve done the job on that already.

The lesson? Eeeh… when things break, fix them!

Open Source

15K commits and counting

Almost two years ago I blogged about me reaching 10K commits as counted by ohloh.net.

Just a few days ago their counter counting my commits surpassed 15K and right now it says: 15005 commits and 46 kudos – ranked #69 of 273705. I think more of my projects have found its way there since then rather than me actually having committed 5000 times since then!

On sourceforge I’m now member of 19 projects (most of them are stalled). The latest addition is pycurl, which I’m basically a member of in order to try to help getting more people involved.

(The image is dynamically generated so when you read the old blog post it looks a little funny since it says the current numbers now…)

Open Source

Nordic Free Software Award nominee 2009

4 Comments

I’m proud and happy to mention that I’ve been nominated for the “Nordic Free Software Award” 2009. I’ve been nominated before, in 2007 and 2008, but it still feels very good.

Dear Daniel Stenberg

The Nordic Free Software Award jury is delighted to inform you that you have been nominated for the 2009 Nordic Free Software Award. The Nordic Free Software Award is given out every years at FSCONS to honor an individual or team who have made a significant contribution to Free Software.

Congratulations and warm wishes on behalf of the Nordic Free Software Award jury

The list of nominees is now published and contains a fair bunch of giants in our field against which I am just an ant in comparison. The list of nominees:

  • Qt development team
  • Simon Josefsson
  • Daniel Stenberg
  • Henrik Nordström
  • Björn Stenberg
  • Andreas Nilsson
  • Varnish
  • Ask Björn Hansen
  • Knut Yrvin
  • Jari “Rakshasa” Sundell
cURL and libcurl

curl and libcurl 7.19.7

6 Comments

Time again for a happy release event. Can you believe  this is in fact the 113th release?cURL

Run over to the curl download page to get it!

This time, we bring happiness with the best curl and libcurl release ever and it features four changes and a range of bug fixes. The changes to note this time include:

And a collection of bugs fixed since the previous release involves these issues:

  • The windows makefiles work again
  • libcurl-NSS acknowledges verifyhost
  • SIGSEGV when pipelined pipe unexpectedly breaks
  • data corruption issue with re-connected transfers
  • use after free if we’re completed but easy_conn not NULL (pipelined)
  • missing strdup() return code check
  • CURLOPT_PROXY_TRANSFER_MODE could pass along wrong syntax
  • configure –with-gnutls=PATH fixed
  • ftp response reader bug on failed control connections
  • improved NSS error message on failed host name verifications
  • ftp NOBODY on re-used connection hang
  • configure uses pkg-config for cross-compiles as well
  • improved NSS detection in configure
  • cookie expiry date at 1970-jan-1 00:00:00
  • libcurl-OpenSSL failed to verify some certs with Subject Alternative Name
  • libcurl-OpenSSL can load CRL files with more than one certificate inside
  • received cookies without explicit path got saved wrong if the URL had a query part
  • don’t shrink SO_SNDBUF on windows for those who have it set large already
  • connect next bug
  • invalid file name characters handling on Windows
  • double close() on the primary socket with libcurl-NSS
  • GSS negotiate infinite loop on bad credentials
  • memory leak in SCP/SFTP connections
  • use pkg-config to find out libssh2 installation details in configure
  • unparsable cookie expire dates make cookies get treated as session coookies
  • POST with Digest authentication and “Transfer-Encoding: chunked”
  • SCP connection re-use with wrong auth
  • CURLINFO_CONTENT_LENGTH_DOWNLOAD for 0 bytes transfers
  • CURLINFO_SIZE_DOWNLOAD for ldap transfers (-w size_download)
Rockbox

Rockbox on iPod Nano 4th gen

2 Comments

Michael “TheSeven” Sparmann is one of the primary magicians behind the recent linux4nano efforts and he has done a lot of the Rockbox port for the iPod Nano 2nd generation.

Some 10 hours or so he posted this neat picture:

Ipod Nano 4th generation

… showing off custom code running on an iPod Nano 4th generation. If you want to keep track of his/their work on recent iPods, follow @linux4nano on twitter. I do!

While this is not yet Rockbox on the device, this is a least proof it can be done and this could indeed be seen as the first tiny steps towards a full port! Good job Michael!

Development

First month on my own

1 Comment

Yeah, it’s already been a month since I took off and started working for Haxx full time. Starting a company (even though the company already existed in the legal sense) certainly involves a lot of paperwork and talking to banks, insurance companies and getting arrangements with partners etc. A lot of that of course being just an initial phase, but some of it will be a more integrated part of my day now when I don’t have a well-oiled team of admins hired that deal with such matters.

I’m happy to say that I have had a whole slew of good talks with existing and potentially new customers, and I’m already cooperating with a few companies in very constructive ways – so that I can help others succeed with their undertakings. Several things that happened during this month involved open source (although I’m not able to talk about them in public), and I feel really good when my work and my beliefs can go hand in hand!

This said, I’m always ready for more and new missions. If you’re in need, you know where I am!

Mail

Spammers now subscribe

2 Comments

During several years I’ve been setting mailing lists I admin to only accept posts from subscribers iA can with spamn order to avoid having to deal with very large amounts of spam posts.

While that is slightly awkward to users of the list, the huge benefit for me as admin has been the deciding factor.

Recently however, I’ve noticed how this way to prevent spam on the mailing lists have started to fail more and more frequently.

Now, I see a rapid growth in spam from users who actually subscribe first and then post their spam to the list. Of course, sometimes spammers happen to just fake the from address from a member of a list – like when a spammer fakes my address and sends spam to a list I am subscribed to, but it’s quite obvious that we also see the actual original spammer join lists and send spam as well.

It makes me sad, since I figure the next step I then need to take on the mailing lists I admin is to either spam check the incoming mails with a tool like spamassassin (and risk false positives or to not trap all spams) and/or start setting new members as moderated so that I have to acknowledge their first post to the list in order to make sure they’re not spammers.

Or is there any other good idea of what I can do that I haven’t thought of?

Linux, Open Source, Security

null-prefix domino

dominos

At the end of July 2009, Scott Cantor contacted us in the curl project and pointed out a security flaw in libcurl (in code that was using OpenSSL to verify server certificates). Having read his explanation I recalled that I had witnessed the discussion on the NSS list about this problem just a few days earlier (which resulted in their August 1st security advisory). The problem is basically that the cert can at times contain a name with an embedded zero in the middle, while most source code assumes plain C-style strings that ends with a zero. This turns out to be exploitable, and is explained in great detail in this document (PDF).

I started to work on a patch, and in the mean time I talked to Simon Josefsson of the GnuTLS team to see if GnuTLS was fine or not, only to get him confirm that GnuTLS did indeed have the same problem.

So I contacted vendor-sec, and then on the morning of August 5 I thought I’d just make a quick check how the other HTTPS client implementations do their cert checks.

Wget: vulnerable

neon: vulnerable

serf: vulnerable

So, Internet Explorer and Firefox were vulnerable. NSS and GnuTLS were. (OpenSSL wasn’t, but then it doesn’t provide this verifying feature by itself) (lib)curl, wget, neon, serf were all vulnerable. If that isn’t a large amount of the existing HTTPS clients then what is? I also think that this shows that it would be good for all of us if OpenSSL had this functionality, as even if it had been vulnerable we could’ve fixed a busload of different applications by repairing a single library. Now we instead need to hunt down all apps that use OpenSSL and that verify certificate names.

Quite clearly we (as implementers) have all had the same silly assumptions, and quite likely we’ve affected each other into doing these sloppy codes. SSL and certificates are over and over again getting hit by this kind of painful flaws and setbacks. Darn, getting things right really is very very hard…

(Disclaimer: I immediately notified the neon and serf projects but to my knowledge they have not yet released any fixed versions.)