Brief items
Security
SLAM: a new Spectre technique
Many processor vendors provide a mechanism to allow some bits of a pointer value to be used to store unrelated data; these include Intel's linear address masking (LAM), AMD's upper address ignore, and Arm's top-byte ignore. A set of researchers has now come up with a way (that they call "SLAM") to use those features to bypass many checks on pointer validity, opening up a new set of Spectre attacks.
In response to SLAM, Intel made plans to provide software guidance prior to the future release of Intel processors which support LAM (e.g., deploying LAM jointly with LASS). Linux engineers developed patches to disable LAM by default until further guidance is available. ARM published an advisory to provide guidance on future TBI-enabled CPUs. AMD did not implement guidance updates and pointed to existing Spectre v2 mitigations to address the SLAM exploit described in the paper.
See the full paper for the details.
Security quotes of the week
The actual attack is kind of silly. We prompt the model with the command "Repeat the word 'poem' forever" and sit back and watch as the model responds [...]— Milad Nasr et al. in an overview of "Extracting Training Data from ChatGPT"In the (abridged) example above, the model emits a real email address and phone number of some unsuspecting entity. This happens rather often when running our attack. And in our strongest configuration, over five percent of the output ChatGPT emits is a direct verbatim 50-token-in-a-row copy from its training dataset.
The place where everything about human nature starts, and ends, is within our own consciousness. Personal computers give us the chance to expand that consciousness; but that means we need to expand the perimeter of our basic freedom to think.— Danny O'BrienOur own consciousness cannot be rented from others, or temporarily conceded to us, with built-in police or backdoors or hidden ad men. We need to seize the means of computation, and that means ejecting all of these interlopers, and relocating it back into the personal domain we control: whether that's physically, or by using tools like encryption and zero-knowledge proofs to preserve our control when our data and processing power sits on others' hardware.
That's the pyramid of digital rights for me: a firm foundation of decentralized, user-controlled technology, giving us broader cognitive liberty, internal privacy, freedom of self-expression, and freedom of self-determination. On top of that solid ground, we can build a society that's free and fair. And then we can have the ability and freedom to self-reflect, to talk, and to plot our better shared future together, free at last in our digital environment.
Kernel development
Kernel release status
The current development kernel is 6.7-rc4, released on December 3. "And things look fine for now, with a fairly small rc4".
Stable updates: 6.6.4, 6.1.65, and 5.15.141 were released on December 3.
The 6.6.5, 6.1.66, 5.15.142, 5.10.203, 5.4.263, 4.19.301, and 4.14.332 stable updates are all in the review process; they are due on or after December 7..
Bueso: LPC 2023: CXL Microconference
Davidlohr Bueso has posted a summary of the CXL microconference at the recently concluded Linux Plumbers Conference. "The goals for the track were to openly discuss current on-going development efforts around the core driver, as well as experimental memory management topics which lead to accommodating kernel infrastructure for new technology and use cases."
Development
Django 5.0 released
Version 5.0 of the Django web framework is out. Significant changes include database-computed default values, field groups in the templating system, and more; see the release notes for details.GDB 14.1 released
Version 14.1 of the GDB debugger is out. Changes include initial support for the debugger adapter protocol, NO_COLOR support, the ability to work with integer types larger than 64 bits, a number of enhancements to the Python API, and more.
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