News¶
These are what we consider significant SIG/Security news items, not an exhaustive list of package updates and wiki edits.
January 31, 2024¶
Further EL9 glibc security hardening in response to the recent findings by Qualys.
January 3, 2024¶
control 0.8.0-7 can now manage two SUID root PAM helper programs unix_chkpwd and pam_timestamp_check.
December 27, 2023¶
control 0.8.0-5 can now manage user password hashing scheme and password policy in use by PAM-aware programs.
December 18, 2023¶
This SIG/Security News wiki page has been created, retroactively identifying and listing selected news items so far.
control 0.8.0-4 can now manage 3 privileged programs from util-linux (and util-linux-core): mount, umount (one "facility" for both), and write. Its wiki page has been reworked.
December 14, 2023¶
control wiki page added, documenting the new package.
control provides a common interface to register and control (what it calls) system facilities.
This is intended primarily for facilities that can potentially be dangerous to system security, to let you enable, disable, or configure each facility.
A typical facility is a SUID/SGID/setcap program or a configuration setting of a service.
Included initially are facility specifications corresponding to the shadow-utils package. Currently, these allow to control access to 5 privileged programs - 3 of them (chage, gpasswd, and newgrp) are by default SUID root and 2 (newuidmap and newgidmap) are cap_setuid=ep.
November 25, 2023¶
Everything we had so far has been updated for EL 9.3 and 8.9, including our hardened EL9 glibc and openssh packages rebased on 9.3's and lkrg rebuilt for 9.3's and 8.9's kernels, along with re-testing and wiki edits.
The rocky-release-security package containing our repository configuration has been made (a while earlier) easier to use on EL distros other than Rocky Linux, and we've now updated the wiki accordingly.
November 16 to 19, 2023¶
microcode_ctl also for EL8, providing 8.9's Intel CPU microcode to fix CVE-2023-23583 a few days before general availability of our own 8.9 release as a whole.
November 16, 2023¶
Wiki pages lkrg and passwdqc have been created. We had these extra packages for a while, but previously only had wiki pages for override packages (referring solely to upstream homepages for the extra packages).
November 15, 2023¶
We've started maintaining wiki pages for selected high profile security issues, initially for glibc CVE-2023-4911 and Intel CPU microcode CVE-2023-23583.
microcode_ctl for EL9, providing latest Intel CPU microcode to fix CVE-2023-23583 ahead of availability of a rebuilt new upstream package.
October 31 to November 15, 2023¶
hardened_malloc package - a security-focused memory allocator providing the malloc(3) API, and a script to preload it into existing program binaries. Its documentation on the wiki.
October 13, 2023¶
We've started maintaining per-package wiki pages, initially for the override packages of glibc and openssh.
We've added instructions for installation of Rocky Linux SIG/Security repository on other EL distros (non-Rocky).
October 3, 2023¶
Initial wiki content documenting what we had so far, which included override packages of glibc and openssh and extra packages of lkrg and passwdqc (even though these per-package wiki pages did not exist yet, so we instead had summaries and external links on the front page only), the repository package, source code repositories, and Mattermost channel.