FreeBSD Project iPhone app

Gerard — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 17:13:27 +0000

Edwin Groothuis created a FreeBSD iPhone app that provides general information about FreeBSD, news, upcoming events, videos from YouTube (BSD conference) and so on. May be useful if you have an iPhone. But the FreeBSD community is larger than just a map of the committers. There is a Newsflash on the website so you can see what [...]

Obligatory ChromeOS Post

Daengbo — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:30:00 +0000

Since ChromeOS requires Ubuntu to build the new operating system (and is based on it), I can't ignore it, can I? I may get fancy-schmancy and build it if an image doesn't come on-line in an hour or two.

About ChromeOS

Security

Open Development

Boot Speed

ChromeOS in Summary

The OS is Chrome, basically
All apps are web-based
There's no permanent local storage and everything is stored on the Internet
But thumb drives are supported
Local config and cache are encrypted
File browsing is done from within Chrome
Music and videos, too
There's no printing
The OS is self-repairing at boot, probably limiting the customization
But it's largely open source so you can customize and compile your own
"They want, wherever feasible, to build on existing components and tools from the open source community without unnecessary re-invention. This clear focus should benefit a wide variety of existing projects and we welcome it."[1]
x86 and AMD64 are supported now
ARM support is "coming soon."

Here is the system daemon-type info:

D-Bus: The browser uses D-Bus to interact with the rest of the system. Examples of this include the battery meter and network picker.
Connection Manager: Provides a common API for interacting with the network devices, provides a DNS proxy, and manages network services for 3G, wireless, and ethernet.
WPA Supplicant: Used to connect to wireless networks.
Autoupdate: Our autoupdate daemon silently installs new system images.
Power Management: (ACPI on Intel) Handles power management events like closing the lid or pushing the power button.
xscreensaver: Handles screen locking when the machine is idle.
Standard Linux services: NTP, syslog, and cron.

Security Model

Process sandboxing

Mandatory access control implementation that limits resource, process, and kernel interactions
Control group device filtering and resource abuse constraint
Chrooting and process namespacing for reducing resource and cross-process attack surfaces
Media device interposition to reduce direct kernel interface access from Chromium browser and plugin processes

Toolchain hardening to limit exploit reliability and success

NX, ASLR, stack cookies, etc

Kernel hardening and configuration paring
Additional file system restrictions

Read-only root partition
tmpfs-based /tmp
User home directories that can't have executables, privileged executables, or device nodes

Longer term, additional system enhancements will be pursued, like driver sandboxing

How encryption works

In a nutshell, each user gets an encrypted image file in a hidden directory that is created at her first login. Thereafter, each time she logs in, the encrypted image is unlocked and made available for use. On logout or reboot, the user's data is locked away again. On some logouts, the encrypted image may be compacted. This step minimizes data loss due to file system fragmentation inside the image.

Find out more at the ChromiumOS site.

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