cURL and libcurl, Linux, Security

Linux distros consolidate crypto libs

For a while already, the Fedora distribution has fought battles, done lots of work and pushed for a consolidation of all packages that use crypto libs to completely go with Mozilla’s NSS.

Now it seems to be OpenSUSE’s turn. The discussion I link to here doesn’t make any definite conclusions but they seem to lean towards NSS as well, claiming it has the most features. I wonder what they base that statement on – if there’s a public doc anywhere that state exactly which has what that makes any contender better than any other for them?

In the Fedora case it seems they’ve focused on the NSS FIPS license as the deciding factor but the license issue is also often brought up in this discussion.

I’ve personally been pondering on writing some kind of unified crypto layer that would expose a single API to an application and handle the different libs as backends, pretty much the same way we do it internally in libcurl at the moment. It hasn’t taken off (or even been started) since I’ve not had the time nor energy for it yet.

cURL and libcurl

FLOSS Weekly #51 on curl

4 Comments

FLOSS WeeklyLate Wednesday evening (middle European time zone) on January 7th 2009 I was up doing a live recording of the podcast show FLOSS Weekly with Leo Laporte and Randal Schwartz. This recording is now available for download as episode #51.

We chatted a bit about curl and libcurl and I think I did a decent job of keeping to the subject and not making a total fool of myself. Enjoy!

(The talk was done using skype and yes my laptop was running Windows at the time…!)

Rockbox, Technology

BYO rockbox player partly alive

Jorge “casainho” Pinto is known in the Rockbox circles as the main guy behind the “Rockbox Player” project which strives to build their own portable music player to run Rockbox.

They’ve made some progress latetly, and they’ve now run Rockbox far enough to display stuff on their screen:

Click the image for the full photo. Cortesy of Casainho himself. “I hope to take no more than 1 month to finish the port.“

The target is using an Atmel AT91SAM9260 at 200MHz and the screen is a 12bit color 128×128 one.

cURL and libcurl, Development, Linux, Network, Web

IETF http-state group created

Over at the IETF another group was just created named http-state (with an associated mailing list) with the specific goal:

Ultimately, the purpose of this group is to create an updated HTTP State Management Mechanism RFC (aka cookies) that will supersede the Netscape spec, RFCs 2109, 2964, 2965 then add in real-world usage (e.g. HTTPOnly), and possibly add in additional features and possibly merge in draft-broyer-http-cookie-auth-00.txt and draft-pettersen-cookie-v2-03.txt.

I’ve joined the list and I hope to follow and participate in this, as I believe the current state of HTTP cookies is a rather sorry mess and the Netscape spec is still what closest describes how cookies work in the wild. Of course I’ll do it with my libcurl experience in my luggage.

While it perhaps would be cool to join the group in more formal way, there’s no way for me to participate in that IETF meeting in San Francisco in March.

Development, Open Source

emacs!

I haven’t said it here before, but I feel I really should. I’ve been an avid emacs user since I started to learn it back in 1991 on emacs 18. I worked at IBM with their RS/6000 machines at the time and I learned C on AIX with emacs as my editor.

To me there was no alternative at that time and I soon learned all the quirks, got used to things and appreciated all the beautiful parts – my fellow colleagues being emacs fans of course helped pushing me into that team. For the fun of it, I’ve checked when vim was started and I’ve learned that it got available for “unix” in 1992. And it probably was quite far away from a real emacs competitor at that time. The vi editor was of course there, but it had no C syntax indent support and it used and still uses that quirky “mode” approach that I’ve never liked.

I came from hacking the C64 to programming Amiga over to AIX and I was used to and liked full-screen editors without any particular mode switching necessary. Still today I find it a bit curious how vi (in the shape of vim) can be this popular given that (in my view) funny concept.

While I do see some of the benefits of XEmacs over GNU Emacs I always disable all menus, icons and toolbars so to me in real-life editing the differences don’t mean a lot, so I tend to go with the plain GNU Emacs.

So, I’ve pretty much used Emacs just about daily at work and in my spare time hacking since then. Even during the few times I’ve been locked in at a windows desktop I’ve managed to get a windows version installed to survive my days!

Thank you emacs team!

cURL and libcurl, libssh2

A new year with new fun

2 Comments

I had a great and relaxing winter/Christmas holiday and hence my silence here.

I’m now back up to speed, with a podcast interview done yesterday (I’ll post another entry when it gets available), I do some funded development on libcurl and libssh2 in the background while I’m spending my days at my client’s place working on a 10G traffic analyzer product.

It was rather calm during “the break” but I’ve now noticed that at least the curl project has gotten significantly increased activity again. We’re on a feature freeze now for the January release, but there seems to be at least 4 patches pending adding new stuff for the release planned to come after this (around March if things go well).

Network, Security, Web

Fun with executable extensions in viewvc

A few years ago I wrote up silly little perl script (let’s call it script.pl) that would fetch a page from a site that returns a “random URL off the internet”. I needed a range of URLs for a test program of mine and just making up a thousand or so URLs is tricky. Thus I wrote this script that I would run and allow to get a range of URLs on each invoke and then run it again later and append to the log file. It wasn’t a fancy script, but it solved my task.

The script was part of a project I got funded to work on, that was improving libcurl back in 2005/2006 so I thought adding and committing the script to CVS felt only natural and served a good purpose. To allow others to repeat what I did.

Fast forward to late 2008. The script is now browsable via viewvc on a site that… eh, doesn’t have “.pl” disabled as a cgi extension in its config! The result of course is that each time someone tries to view the script using the web interface, the web server invokes the script locally!

All of a sudden I get a mail from someone, who apparently is admin or something of the site this old script was using, and he mentions that a machine on our network is hammering his site with many requests per second (38 requests/second apparently) and asked me to stop this. It turns out a search engine crawler has indexed the viewvc output several times, and now some 8 processes or so were running this script.pl and they were all looping around getting a page, outputting the URL, getting another page…

While I think 38 requests second is a bit low to even be considered a DOS, it certainly wasn’t intended nor friendly and I was greatly surprised when I slowly realized how it all came to end up like this! Man I suck! It reminds me of my other extension mess from just a few months ago…

Maybe I’ll learn how to do things right in the future when I grow up!

libssh2

libssh2 1.0!

I’m happy to say that I’ve just uploaded the 1.0 release of libssh2 to sourceforge! (I must confess that I strongly dislike the “file release” thing of sourceforge but libssh2 has always been released there so I’m just continuing the tradition really…)

The changes can be read closer in the package but the main things are these:

Added libssh2_sftp_tell64()

Added libssh2_session_block_directions()

Added libssh2_channel_request_pty_size_ex()

Added libssh2_sftp_seek64()

Added the beginning of a test suite

Deprecated libssh2_base64_decode()

Fixed many bugs – possibly the biggest item really since several of the fixed bugs were of the kind that prevented the lib to do successful transfers in many cases.

This is the primary library for SSH-based communication that I know of. Note that this is not the same project as the libssh one. I once did a thorough comparison with all SSH libraries I could find, and libssh2 was then the one nearest to my feature requirements. We have since then taken it a lot further and it is now a fairly stable and good library for SSH-based transfers and generic communication.

There’s of course still (a lot of) things left to do, but here’s the 1.0 as a sign that this is now a lib ready to get used!

IT Politics, Rockbox, Technology

Rockbox 3.1

2 Comments

After three months of work since the last release, we manage to keep the schedule and ship Rockbox 3.1. The list of news since 3.0 include the following:

  • A bitmap scaler was added to Rockbox, which means that album art no longer has to be pre-scaled to the correct dimensions on your computer. See AlbumArt for more information.
  • The calendar plugin which has existed for the Archos units for a long time is now available on all devices equipped with a clock.
  • The spacerocks plugin which was removed from version 3.0 due to a major bug has been brought back.
  • Optimised MP3 decoder on dual-core targets, giving several more hours of battery life in most situations.
  • Optimizations for AAC and APE decoding
  • Backlight fading is now available on most targets.
  • When recording in mono, you can now chose between recording the left or right channel, or a mix of both.
  • It is now possible to configure which items are shown in the Quick Screen.
  • Several new features were added to the WPS syntax
  • The build system received a major overhaul. This only matters for people who compile their own builds.

Of course you can find a more detailed list in the MajorChanges wiki page, and the full release notes for 3.1.

My personal contribution has been very tiny this time around and I’ve basically just built the release builds and admined the distributed build system somewhat.

Rockbox

Development, IT Politics, Open Source, Security

SSL certs crash without trust

Eddy Nigg found out and blogged about how he could buy SSL certificates for a domain he clearly doesn’t own nor control. The cert is certified by Comodo who apparently has outsourced (parts of) there cert business to a separate company who obviously does very little or perhaps no verification at all of the buyers.

As a result, buyers could buy certificates from there for just about any domain/site name, and Comodo being a trusted CA in at least Firefox would thus make it a lot easier for phishers and other cyber-style criminals to setup fraudulent sites that even get the padlock in Firefox and looks almost perfectly legitimate!

The question is now what Mozilla should do. What Firefox users should expect their browser to do when HTTPS sites use Comodo-verified certs and how Comodo and their resellers are going to deal with everything…

Read the scary thread on the mozilla dev-tech-crypto list.

Update: if you’re on the paranoid/safe side you can disable trusting their certificates by doing this:

Select Preferences -> Advanced -> View Certificates -> Authorities. Search for
AddTrust AB -> AddTrust External CA Root and click “Edit”. Remove all Flags.

curl, open source and networking