Security: Updates, Matthew Garrett Breaking Things Again and GNU Guix Strives for Reproducibility

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Security updates for Friday
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Matthew Garrett: Remote code execution as root from the local network on TP-Link SR20 routers
The TP-Link SR20[1] is a combination Zigbee/ZWave hub and router, with a touchscreen for configuration and control. Firmware binaries are available here. If you download one and run it through binwalk, one of the things you find is an executable called tddp. Running arm-linux-gnu-nm -D against it shows that it imports popen(), which is generally a bad sign - popen() passes its argument directly to the shell, so if there's any way to get user controlled input into a popen() call you're basically guaranteed victory. That flagged it as something worth looking at, but in the end what I found was far funnier.
Tddp is the TP-Link Device Debug Protocol. It runs on most TP-Link devices in one form or another, but different devices have different functionality. What is common is the protocol, which has been previously described. The interesting thing is that while version 2 of the protocol is authenticated and requires knowledge of the admin password on the router, version 1 is unauthenticated.
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Connecting reproducible deployment to a long-term source code archive
GNU Guix can be used as a “package manager” to install and upgrade software packages as is familiar to GNU/Linux users, or as an environment manager, but it can also provision containers or virtual machines, and manage the operating system running on your machine.
One foundation that sets it apart from other tools in these areas is reproducibility. From a high-level view, Guix allows users to declare complete software environments and instantiate them. They can share those environments with others, which can replicate them or adapt them to their needs. This aspect is key to reproducible computational experiments: scientists need to reproduce software environments before they can reproduce experimental results, and this is one of the things we are focusing on in the context of the Guix-HPC effort. At a lower level, the project, along with others in the Reproducible Builds community, is working to ensure that software build outputs are reproducible, bit-for-bit.
Work on reproducibility at all levels has been making great progress. Guix for instance allows you to travel back in time. That Guix can travel back in time and build software reproducibly is a great step forward. But there’s still an important piece that’s missing to make this viable: a stable source code archive. This is where Software Heritage (SWH for short) comes in.
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