Episode Details

This week on the show, we’re loaded up with great stories ranging from System call fuzzing, a history of UNIX Pipes, speeding up MySQL imports and more. Stay tuned, BSDNow is coming your way right now.

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System call fuzzing of OpenBSD amd64 using TriforceAFL (i.e. AFL and QEMU)

• The NCCGroup did a series of fuzz testing against the OpenBSD syscall interface, during which they found a number of vulnerabilities, we covered this back in the early summer
• What we didn’t notice, is that they also made the tools they used available.
• A combination of AFL (American Fuzzy Lop), QEMU, OpenBSD’s FlashRD image generation tool, and the “Triforce” driver
• The other requirement is “a Linux box as host to run the fuzzer (other fuzzer hosts may work as well, we've only run TriforceAFL from a Linux host, specifically Debian/Ubuntu”
• It would be interesting to see if someone could get this to run from a BSD host
• It would also be interesting to run the same tests against the other BSDs ***

On the Early History and Impact of Unix: the Introduction of Pipes

• Pipes are something we just take for granted today, but there was a time before pipes (How did anything get done?)
• Ronda Hauben writes up a great look back at the beginning of UNIX, and specifically at how pipes were born:

One of the important developments in Unix was the introduction of pipes. Pipes had been suggested by McIlroy during the early days of creating Unix. Ritchie explains how "the idea, explained one afternoon on a blackboard, intrigued us but failed to ignite any immediate action. There were several objections to the idea as put....What a failure of imagination," he admits.(35) McIlroy concurs, describing how the initial effort to add pipes to Unix occurred about the same time in 1969 that Ritchie, Thompson and Canaday were outlining ideas for a file system. "That was when," he writes, "the simple pipeline as a way to combine programs, with data notationally propagating along a chain of (not necessarily concurrent) filters was articulated."(36) However, pipes weren't implemented in Unix until 1972.

• We also have a great quote from McIlroy on the day pipes were first introduced:

Open Systems! Our Systems! How well those who were there remember the pipe-festooned garret where Unix took form. The excitement of creation drew people to work there amidst the whine of the computer's cool- ing fans, even though almost the same computer ac- cess, could be had from one's office or from home. Those raw quarters saw a procession of memorable events. The advent of software pipes precipitated a day-long orgy of one-liners....As people reveled in the power of functional composition in the large, which is even today unavailable to users of other systems.

• The paper goes on to talk about the invention of other important tools, such as “grep”, “diff” and more. Well worth your time if you want a glimpse into the history of UNIX ***

Speeding up MySQL Import on FreeBSD

• Mark Felder