opensource.dyc.edu

On 21 January 2009, the Tor team released tor-0.2.0.33 which addressed one security issue and several major bug fixes; so, today we build a new tor-ramdisk image updating the tor server. We are testing it on node "simba" before its official release on Jan 31.

This is the fifth release of Tin Hat. It doesn't include any new features, but rather focuses on testing and stabilizing the extensive changes implemented in the last release, as well as incorporating important bugfixes from upstream. The major changes in the previous release involved reworking the build scripts: now a new Tin Hat release is built from a running system rather than from VMWare templates. The entire process of syncing upstream with Gentoo using portage, recompiling the kernel if necessary, preparing a prestine system and building the ISOs are done purely in RAM.

Yesterday I rebooted one of my office machines. It's been running Tin Hat since the beginning of the Fall semester. Before I rebooted it into the latest version, I had an uptime of 121 days. I kepted it updated by reintroducing portage and emerging occasionally off our local mirror. The files I wanted to keep I put on a loop-aes encrypted drive --- the challenge when I teach the security course this up coming semester will be, if you can get at my tests, you deserve the A :)

This is a minor update release. Since tor-ramdisk follows stable Tor, we are following their upgrade to tor-0.2.0.32 to accomodate the bugfixes and new features. We also took this opportunity to upgrade the kernel to Gentoo's 2.6.25-hardened-r11 to keep up with their changes, although none that we know of effect tor-ramdisk. Finally we also made a minor fix to the setup script which is the main menu run on tty1. Since ntpd is started from init on tty3 before networking is configured and brought up, it doesn't reach any servers and just sits there.

This is the fourth release of Tin Hat and it includes many changes. As previously, we synced upstream with Gentoo to keep current. Over 50 packages were upgraded, fixing some important security issues. However, the biggest changes in this release deal with how Tin Hat is built and how it boots.

The latest release of Tin Hat came out before some security updates to mozilla-firefox. Tin Hat 20081025 shipped with mozilla-firefox-2.0.0.17 (under the brand name of Bon Echo as required by the Mozilla License). This release is known to have four critical security bugs. Here are the known bugs with the 2.0.0.x branch which is slated to be retired by the end of 2008 in favor of 3.0.x

http://www.mozilla.org/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefox20.html

The release notes can be found here:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/releases/

This is the fifth release of tor-ramdisk, to keep up with updates upstream in tor and the hardened Gentoo kernel. No new features are added. It comes tested: tor node "simba" has been running 20081115 for over a week now as a relay-only. Exit node testing was done on a private tor network with no bugs.

This is the third release of Tin Hat. No new features have been added, however, many packages were updated to sync up with Gentoo. In particular, gnome was updated to 2.22.3 and the kernel was updated to hardened 2.6.25-r8. Postfix was also updated to 2.5.5 to address a security issue.