Open-source News

How To Set Up Linux On Your Chromebook  SlashGear

Best Parenting Software for Linux of 2022 May  BollyInside

System76-Scheduler as the Linux PC vendor's effort to provide a Rust-written daemon to enhance Linux desktop responsiveness and shipping as part of their Pop!_OS distribution is out with a new feature release...

Security BSides Sofia 2022 – Sergey Kostov’s ‘How To Collect Linux Malware’  Security Boulevard

This article originally appeared on the LF Training Blog. You can access all of the LF Training resources and courses, including Kubernetes certifications, at here. 

Faseela K. is a platform development engineer with a background in open source networking. As she saw the use of containers growing more than the VMs she was working with, she began studying Kubernetes and eventually decided to pursue a Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA). We spoke to her about her experience.

Linux Foundation: What was the experience like taking the CKA exam?

Faseela K: I was actually nervous, as this was the first online certification exam I was taking from home, so there was some uncertainty going in. Would the proctor turn up on time? Will the cloud platform where we are taking the exam get stuck? Will I be able to finish the exam on time? Those and several other such questions ran through my mind. But I turned down all my concerns, had a very smooth exam experience, and was able to finish it without any difficulties.

LF: How did you prepare for the exam?

FK: I am a person who uses Kubernetes in my day to day work, so the topics in the syllabus were familiar to me. On top of that I did some practice tests and online courses. Preparing for the exam made so many of my day to day work related tasks much easier, and my level of expertise on K8s increased considerably.

LF: How did preparing for and taking CKA help you improve your skills?

FK: Though I work on K8s regularly, the range of concepts and capabilities I was using were minimal. Preparing for CKA helped me touch upon all areas of K8s, and the experience which I already had helped me get a complete end to end view of things. I can troubleshoot Kubernetes issues in a better way now, and go deep into each problem to find a solution.

LF: Tell us more about your current job role. What types of activities are you engaged in and how has the CKA helped with them?

FK: I currently work as a platform development engineer at Cisco, where we develop and maintain an enterprise Kubernetes platform. Troubleshooting, upgrading, networking, and system management of containerized platforms are part of our daily tasks, and CKA has helped me master all these areas with perfection. The training which I took to prepare for the CKA phenomenally transformed my perspective about Kubernetes administration, and this has helped me attain an end to end view of the product. Debugging any issues in the platform has become easier than ever, and the certification has given me even more confidence with fixing issues in a time sensitive manner.

LF: You mentioned to us previously you’d like to take the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) next; what appeals to you about that certification?

FK: I am planning to go deeper into containerized application development in my career, and hence CKAD was appealing to me. In fact, I already completed CKAD and became CKAD certified within less than a month of achieving my CKA certification. The confidence I gained after CKA helped me try the second one also faster.

LF: Tell us about your experience working on the OpenDaylight project. What prompted you to move from focusing on SDN to Kubernetes?

FK: I was previously a member of the Technical Steering Committee of the OpenDaylight project at The Linux Foundation, and made a lot of contributions to OpenDaylight. Working in open source has been the most amazing experience I have ever had in my life, and OpenDaylight gave me exposure to the various activities under LF Networking, while being a part of The Linux Foundation generally helped me engage with some of the top notch brains across organizations.

Coming together from across the globe during various conferences and DDFs, and working together across the company boundaries to solve common SDN problems has given me so much satisfaction. Over a period of time, containers were gaining traction over VMs, and I wanted to get more involved with containerization and platform development, where Kubernetes looked more promising.

LF: What are your future career goals?

FK: I intend to learn more about K8s internal implementation, and also to get involved with projects like istio, servicemesh and networkservicemesh in the future. My dream is to become a cloud native software developer, who promotes containerized application development in a cloud native way.

LF: What technology are you most interested in studying next?

FK: I am currently pursuing a course on the golang programming language. I also plan to take the Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) exam if time permits.

The post Success Story: Preparing for Kubernetes Certification Improves a Platform Development Engineer’s Skills appeared first on Linux Foundation.

Last week I had the privilege of participating in the Open Source Software Security Summit II in Washington, DC. The Linux Foundation and OpenSSF gathered around 100 participants from enterprise, the U.S. government, and the open source community to agree on an action plan to help increase the security of open source software. 

If you were to look at the attendee list, you would likely be struck by the amount of collaboration among competitors on this issue. But, it isn’t a surprise to the open source community. Security is an excellent example of why organizations participate in open source software projects. 

This is organizations coming together on a joint solution to a common problem so they can focus on innovating.

A question I often receive when I tell people where I work is, Why would for-profit companies want to participate in open source projects? There are lots of reasons, of course, but it boils down to organizations coming together on a joint solution to a common problem so they can focus on innovating. For instance, film studios coming together around software for saving video files or color management or the finance industry improving trader’s desktops or web companies supporting the languages and tools that make the web possible. And these are just a handful of examples.

Security is everyone’s concern and solutions benefit everyone. As one summit participant noted, “My direct competitors are in the room, but this is not an area where we compete. We all want to protect our customers, shareholders, and employees. . . 99% of the time we’re working on the same problems and trying to solve them in a smarter way.”

99% of the time we’re working on the same problems and trying to solve them in a smarter way.

Everyone is better off by sharing vulnerabilities and solutions and working together towards a common goal of a more resilient ecosystem. No company is immune,  everyone relies on multiple open source software packages to run their organization’s software. It is no surprise that competitors are working together on this – it is what the open source community does. 

As we gathered in DC, my colleague Mark Miller talked to participants about their expectations and their perspectives on the meeting. When asked what he hoped to accomplish during the two day summit, Brian Fox of Sonatype said, “The world is asking for a response to make open source better. We are bringing together the government, vendors, competitors, [and] open source ecosystems to see what we can collectively do to raise the bar in open source security.” 

We are bringing together the government, vendors, competitors, [and] open source ecosystems to see what we can collectively do to raise the bar in open source security.

Another participant painted a picture which I find especially helpful, “I remember the old saying, we built the Internet on sand. I thought about that, underscoring the fact that sand is a part of concrete. This process means that we have an opportunity to shore up a lot of the foundation that we built the Internet on, the code that we’re developing.  It is an opportunity to improve upon what we currently have, which is a mixture of sand and concrete. How do we get it all to concrete?”

Enterprise companies and community representatives were at the summit, as well as key U.S. government decision makers. The high-level government officials were there the entire day, participating in the meeting, and listening to the discussions. Their level of participation was striking to me.  I have worked in and around government at the policy level for 25 years – and it is more common than not – for government officials to be invited to speak, come and speak, and then leave right after they deliver their remarks. To see them there one year after implementing the Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity and engaged signals the importance they place on solving this problem and the respect they have for the group that gathered last week  Kudos to Anne Neuberger, her team, and the others who joined from around the U.S. government. 

By the end of the first day, agreement was reached on a plan, comprised of 10 key initiatives:

• Security Education Deliver baseline secure software development education and certification to all. 
• Risk Assessment Establish a public, vendor-neutral, objective-metrics-based risk assessment dashboard for the top 10,000 (or more) OSS components.
• Digital Signatures Accelerate the adoption of digital signatures on software releases.
• Memory Safety Eliminate root causes of many vulnerabilities through replacement of non-memory-safe languages.
• Incident Response Establish the OpenSSF Open Source Security Incident Response Team, security experts who can step in to assist open source projects during critical times when responding to a vulnerability.
• Better Scanning Accelerate discovery of new vulnerabilities by maintainers and experts through advanced security tools and expert guidance.
• Code Audits Conduct third-party code reviews (and any necessary remediation work) of up to 200 of the most-critical OSS components once per year. 
• Data Sharing Coordinate industry-wide data sharing to improve the research that helps determine the most critical OSS components.
• SBOMs Everywhere Improve SBOM tooling and training to drive adoption. 
• Improved Supply Chains Enhance the 10 most critical OSS build systems, package managers, and distribution systems with better supply chain security tools and best practices.

The full document, The Open Source Software Security Mobilization Plan,  is available for you to review and download.

Of course, a plan without action isn’t worth much. Thankfully, organizations are investing resources. On the day it was delivered, already $30 million was pledged to implement the plan. Organizations are also setting aside staff to support the project: 

Google announced its “new ‘Open Source Maintenance Crew’, a dedicated staff of Google engineers who will work closely with upstream maintainers on improving the security of critical open source projects.” 

Amazon Web Services committed $10 million in funding in addition to engineering resources, “we will continue and increase our existing commitments of direct engineering contributions to critical open source projects.

Intel is increasing its investment: “Intel has a long history of leadership and investment in open source software and secure computing. Over the last five years, Intel has invested over $250M in advancing open source software security. As we approach the next phase of Open Ecosystem initiatives, Intel is growing its pledge to support the Linux Foundation by double digit percentages.”

Microsoft is adding $5 million in additional funding because, “Open source software is core to nearly every company’s tech strategy. Collaboration and investment across the ecosystem strengthens and sustains security for everyone.” 

These investments are the start of an initiative to raise $150M toward implementation of the project. 

Last week’s meeting and the plan mark the beginning of a new and critical pooling of resources – knowledge, staff, and money – to further shore up the world’s digital infrastructure, all built upon a foundation of open source software. It is the next step (well, really several steps) in the journey.

If you want to join the efforts, start at the OpenSSF. 

The post Open Source Software Security: Turning Sand into Concrete appeared first on Linux Foundation.

Surfshark VPN for Linux gets a breakthrough new feature  TechRadar

Surfshark VPN for Linux gets a breakthrough new feature  TechRadar

Understanding Linux System Calls With the strace Command  MUO - MakeUseOf

How to Install Linux on M1 Apple Silicon Mac  BollyInside

Microsoft detects massive surge in Linux XorDDoS malware activity  BleepingComputer

Hearing "open-source", "PSP", and "security" all together got me excited with my initial reaction thinking it was about AMD's Platform Security Processor (PSP) albeit that's not the case here. Google's PSP announced today is the "PSP Security Protocol" and is designed for dealing with cryptographic hardware offloading at data center scale and used by Google already in production...

CrowdStrike Cloud Security Extends to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Versions  CrowdStrike

The Framework Laptop is a modular laptop design that launched a year ago and is designed to be upgrade-friendly and allows users for switching out lots of components from different ports to the motherboard itself. And the laptop is Linux-friendly -- see my Framework Laptop review from last year. For new systems or those wishing to upgrade their laptop's motherboard, Intel Core 12th Gen "Alder Lake" is now available...

Upgraded Linux-Friendly Framework Laptop Shifts To Intel 12th Gen "Alder Lake"  Phoronix

Best Music And Audio Software for Linux of 2022 May  BollyInside

How to Install and Use Bitwarden on Linux  MUO - MakeUseOf

How to install Borgmatic for easy Linux server backups  TechRepublic

How to Use chattr Command on Linux  BollyInside

Intel today has lifted the embargo on SYCLomatic, their new open-source tool to help migrate code-bases targeting NVIDIA's CUDA so they can be re-purposed to target C++ and SYCL -- thereby being able to leverage Intel's graphics processors and jiving with their oneAPI goals...