73: Pipe Dreams

This week on the show we'll be chatting with David Maxwell, a former NetBSD security officer. He's got an interesting project called Pipecut that takes a whole new approach to the commandline. We've also got answers to viewer-submitted questions and all this week's headlines, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

FreeBSD quarterly status report

The FreeBSD team has posted an updated on some of their activities between October and December of 2014
They put a big focus on compatibility with other systems: the Linux emulation layer, bhyve, WINE and Xen all got some nice improvements
As always, the report has lots of updates from the various teams working on different parts of the OS and ports infrastructure
The release engineering team got 10.1 out the door, the ports team shuffled a few members in and out and continued working on closing more PRs
FreeBSD's forums underwent a huge change, and discussion about the new support model for release cycles continues (hopefully taking effect after 11.0 is released)
Git was promoted from beta to an officially-supported version control system (Kris is happy)
The core team is also assembling a new QA team to ensure better code quality in critical areas, such as security and release engineering, after getting a number of complaints
Other notable entries include: lots of bhyve fixes, Clang/LLVM being updated to 3.5.0, ongoing work to the external toolchain, adding FreeBSD support to more "cloud" services, pkgng updates, work on SecureBoot, more ARM support and graphics stack improvements
Check out the full report for all the details that we didn't cover ***

OpenBSD package signature audit

"Linux Audit" is a website focused on auditing and hardening systems, as well as educating people about securing their boxes
They recently did an article about OpenBSD, specifically their ports and package system and signing infrastructure
The author gives a little background on the difference between ports and binary packages, then goes through the technical details of how releases and packages are cryptographically signed
Package signature formats and public key distribution methods are also touched on
After some heckling, the author of the post said he plans to write more BSD security articles, so look forward to them in the future
If you haven't seen our episode about signify with Ted Unangst, that would be a great one to check out after reading this ***

Replacing a Linux router with BSD