Linux.conf.au 2018 – Day 4 – Session 1

Panel: Meltdown, Spectre, and the free-software community Jonathan Corbet, Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang, Benno Rice, Jess Frazelle, Katie McLaughlin, Kees Cook

  • FreeBSD only heard 11 days beforehand. Would have liked more notice
  • Got people involved from the Kernel Summit in Oct
  • Hosting company only heard once it went official, been busy patching since
  • Likely to be class-action lawsuit for $billions. That might make chip makers more paranoid about documentation and disclosure.
  • Thoughts in embargo
    • People noticed strange patches going in beforehand.
    • Only broke 6 days early, had been going for 6 months
    • “Linus is happy with this, something is terribly wrong”
    • Sad that the 2nd-tier cloud providers didn’t know. Exclusive club and lines as to who got informed were not clear
    • Projects that don’t have explicit relationship with Intel didn’t get informed
  • Thoughts on other vendors
    • This class of bugs could affect anybody, open hardware would probably not fix
    • More open hardware could enable people to review the processors and find these from the design rather than poking around
    • Hard to guarantee the shipped hardware matches the design
    • Software people can build everything at home and check. FABs don’t work at home.
  • Speculative execution warned about years ago. Danger ignored. How to make sure the next one isn’t ignored?
    • We always have to do some risky stuff
    • The research on this built up slowly over the years
    • Even if you have only found impractical attacks against something doesn’t mean the practical one doesn’t exist.
  • What criteria do we use to decide who is in?
    • Mechanisms do exist, they were mainly not used. Perhaps because they were for software vulnerabilities
  • Did people move providers?
    • No but Containers made things easier to reboot stuff and shuffle
  • Are there similar vulnerabilities ( similar or general hardware ) coming along?
    • The Kernel page-table patches were fairly general, should cover many similar ones
    • All these performance optimising bit of your CPU are now attack surfaces
    • What are people going to do if this slows down hardware too much?
  • How do we explain problems like these to politicians etc
    • Legos
    • We still have kernel devs getting their laptops
  • Can be use CPUs that don’t have speculative execution?
    • Not really. Back to 486s
  • Who are we protesting against with the embargo?
    • Everybody
    • The longer period let better fixes get in
    • The meltdown fix could be done in semi-public so had better quality

What is the most common street name in Australia? Rachel Bunder

  • Why?
    • Saw a map with most common name by US street
  • Just looking at name, not end bit “park” , “road”
  • Data
    • PSMA Geocoded national address file – Great but came out after project
    • Use Open Street Maps
  • Started with Common Name in Sydney
    • Used Metro Extracts – site closing down soon
    • Format is geojson
    • Road files separately provided
  • Procedure
    • Used python, R also has good features and libaraies
    • geopandas
    • Had some paths with no names
    • What is a road? – “Something with a name I can drive a car on”
  • Sydney
    • Full street name
      • Victoria Road
      • Pacific Highway
      • oops like like names are being counted twice
    • Tried merging them together
    • Roads don’t 100% match ends. Added function to fuzzy merge the roads that are 100m apart
    • Still some weird ones but probably won’t affect top
    • Second attempt
      • Short st, George st, William st, John st, Church st
  • Now with just the “name bit”
    • Tried taking out just the last name. ended up with “the” as most common.
    • Started with “The” = whole name
    • Single word = whole name
    • name – descriptor – suffex
    • lots of weird names
    • name list – Park, Victoria, Railway, William, Short
  • Wouldn’t work in many other counties
  • Now for all over Australia
    • overpass data
    • Downloaded in 50kmx50x squares
  • Lessons
    • Start small
    • Choose something familiar
    • Check you bias (different naming conventions)
    • Constance vigerlence
    • Know your problem
  • Common plant names
    • Wattle – 15th – 385
  • Other name
    • “The Esplanade” more common than “The Avenue”
  • Top names
    • 5th – Victoria
    • 4th – Church – 497
    • 3rd – George –  551
    • 2nd – Railway
    • 1st – Park – 693
  • By State
    • WA – Forest
    • SA – Railway
    • Vic – Park
    • Tas – Esplanade
    • NT – Smith/Stuart
    • NSW – Park

 

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