So I recently announced my intention to rejoin the Debian project, having been a member between 2002 & 2011 (inclusive).

In the past I resigned mostly due to lack of time, and what has changed is that these days I have more free time - primarily because my wife works in accident & emergency and has "funny shifts". This means we spend many days and evenings together, then she might work 8pm-8am for three nights in a row, which then becomes Steve-time, and can involve lots of time browsing reddit, coding obsessively, and watching bad TV (currently watching "Lost Girl". Shades of Buffy/Blood Ties/similar. Not bad, but not great.)

My NM-progress can be tracked here, and once accepted I have a plan for my activities:

• I will minimally audit every single package running upon any of my personal systems.
• I will audit as many of the ITP-packages I can manage.
• I may, or may not, actually package software.

I believe this will be useful, even though there will be limits - I've no patience for PHP and will just ignore it, along with its ecosystem, for example.

As progress today I reported #754899 / CVE-2014-4978 against Rawstudio, and discussed some issues with ITP: tiptop (the program seems semi-expected to be installed setuid(0), but if it is then it will allow arbitrary files to be truncated/overwritten via "tiptop -W /path/to/file"

(ObRandom still waiting for a CVE identifier for #749846/TS-2867..)

And now sleep.

Tags: audit, debian, security | 4 comments