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OpenSUSE: Freedom Does Not Come From One Vendor, Some Security Advisories Detailed
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OpenSUSE ☛ Freedom Does Not Come From One Vendor
As political winds shift across the globe, the digital world is not immune to the turbulence. Governments and organizations across the globe are reassessing their dependencies, especially those tied to large, centralized tech firms.
While headlines paint a world splintering along geopolitical lines, the open-source community is quietly doing what it has always done best; building global tools for global freedom.
A recent example of this is an EU OS initiative—a European blueprint for a locked-down, KDE Plasma-based GNU/Linux distribution aimed at public-sector use.
Though technically not a new operating system, EU OS serves as a proof-of-concept for deploying a GNU/Linux system. The project’s core value proposition centers on: [...]
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wait3() System Call as a Side Channel in Setuid Programs: nvidia-modprobe case study (CVE-2024-0149)
nvidia-modprobe is a setuid-root helper utility for the proprietary Nvidia GPU display driver that loads kernel modules and creates character devices required for userspace GPU access. Normally, drivers do this via udev. However, kernel licensing restrictions prohibit Nvidia’s proprietary kernel module from generating uevents, which are required for udev to work. Therefore this special helper is needed.
We reviewed nvidia-modprobe as part of our whitelisting process, which requires an audit for all newly introduced setuid binaries in openSUSE. The version we reviewed was 550.127.05 and this report is based on that version. Upstream released a bugfix in version 550.144.03 and a security advisory.
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SUSE Security Team Spotlight Winter 2024/2025
Winter time is coming to an end (at least in the northern hemisphere, where most of the SUSE security team members are located), and with this we want to take a look back at what happened during the last three months in our team. We have already posted about a number of bigger topics that kept us busy over the winter: