Merry Christmas from the FreeBSD Security Team

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi all, No, the Grinch didn't steal the FreeBSD security officer GPG key, and your eyes aren't deceiving you: We really did just send out 5 security advisories. The timing, to put it bluntly, sucks. We normally aim to release advisories on Wednesdays in order to maximize the number of system administrators who will be at work already; and we try very hard to avoid issuing advisories any time close to holidays for the same reason. The start of the Christmas weekend -- in some parts of the world it's already Saturday -- is absolutely not when we want to be releasing security advisories. Unfortunately my hand was forced: One of the issues (FreeBSD-SA-11:08.telnetd) is a remote root vulnerability which is being actively exploited in the wild; bugs really don't come any worse than this. On the positive side, most people have moved past telnet and on to SSH by now; but this is still not an issue we could postpone until a more convenient time. While I'm writing, a note to freebsd-update users: FreeBSD-SA-11:07.chroot has a rather messy fix involving adding a new interface to libc; this has the awkward side effect of causing the sizes of some "symbols" (aka. functions) in libc to change, resulting in cascading changes into many binaries. The long list of updated files is irritating, but isn't a sign that anything in freebsd-update went wrong. - -- Colin Percival Security Officer, FreeBSD | freebsd.org | The power to serve Founder / author, Tarsnap | tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.18 (FreeBSD) iEYEARECAAYFAk70oKgACgkQFdaIBMps37IsdACgh01CeO+zVGe3o9dn2cLvhh70 ISoAoJCeLUAbJ+0ibyfbVM4fYxpiEfo0 =vt5I -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----