Me and Claude have been working on zfetch (https://github.com/roobie/zfetch), which is a single static binary that fetches URLs over HTTPS with strict security defaults. For many applications, it should be able to replace curl in restricted environments where you need a small, auditable tool with no runtime dependencies.
It should also be usable as a Zig library for embedding HTTP(S) fetches in your own programs.
I've been thinking about knowledge in agentic systems lately. Your comment made me put up my draft of the `knowledge-repo` concept: https://github.com/roobie/rfc/blob/main/knowledge-repo/READM... - nothing special really, but I think the concept could be really powerful.
Mutation testing is a new concept for me, and even though one has to manage the performance aspects of it, it seems like a good idea to at least apply to selected functions in one's codebase, in order to find bugs.
All the open source developers/publishers here should get together and pitch in to get one long lasting certificate to sign all of their respective binaries (of course, really important that they vet each other's code, so has to be open source)
Edit: typo.
The FreeBSD Security Team was notified of the issue in late December
and received a briefing under NDA with the original embargo date of
January 9th. Since we received relatively late notice of the issue, our
ability to provide fixes is delayed.
Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In terms of priority, the first step is to mitigate against the Meltdown
attack (CVE-2017-5754, cited as variant 3 by Project Zero). Work for
this is ongoing, but due to the relatively large changes needed, this is
going to take a little while. We are currently targeting patches for
amd64 being dev complete this week with testing probably running into
next week. From there, we hope to give it a short bake time before
pushing it into the 11.1-RELEASE branch. Additional work will be
required to bring the mitigation to 10.3-RELEASE and 10.4-RELEASE.
The code will be selectable via a tunable which will automatically turn
on for modern Intel processors and off for AMD processors (since they
are reportedly not vulnerable). Since the fix for Meltdown does incur a
performance hit for any transition between user space and kernel space,
this could be rather impactful depending on the workload. As such, the
tunable can also be overridden by the end-user if they are willing to
accept the risk.
Initial work can be tracked at https://reviews.freebsd.org/D13797.
Please note this is a work in progress and some stuff is likely to be
broken.
Spectre (CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When it comes to the Spectre vulnerabilities, it is much harder to sort
these out. Variant 1 (CVE-2017-5753) is going to require some static
analysis to determine vulnerable use cases that will require barriers to
stop speculation from disclosing information it shouldn't. While we
haven't done the analysis to determine where we are vulnerable, the
number of cases here are supposed to be pretty small. Apparently there
have been some Coverity rules developed to help look for these, but we
are still evaluating what can be done here.
The other half of Spectre, variant 2 (CVE-2017-5715) is a bit trickier
as it affects both normal processes and bhyve. There is a proposed patch
for LLVM (https://reviews.llvm.org/D41723) that introduces a concept
called 'retpoline' which mitigates this issue. We are likely to pull
this into HEAD and 11-STABLE once it hits the LLVM tree. Unfortunately,
the currently supported FreeBSD releases are using older versions of
LLVM for which we are not sure the LLVM project will produce patches. We
will be looking at the feasibility to backport these patches to these
earlier versions.
There are CPU microcode fixes coming out when in concert with OS changes
would also help, but that's a bit down the road at the moment.
If anything significantly changes I will make additional posts to
clarify as the information becomes available.
Best regards,
Gordon Tetlow
with security-officer hat on
Well, if one were to buy into the hypothesis that AMP is a way for Google to monopolize content, that would be the reason. At least in search results provided by Google's search.
Art in Swedish is "konst" which is the base for the word "konstig" which means, literally, weird or odd. I'm pretty sure there's a reason for that etymology.
It should also be usable as a Zig library for embedding HTTP(S) fetches in your own programs.
Vendors and links BoringSSL