On the 20th of January (8 days before the start of linux.conf.au) I advertised contest to write blog posts related to computer security for the conference Planet [1].

The aim of the contest was to encourage (by money prizes) people who had no prior experience in computer security to get involved by writing blog posts. The rules permitted security professionals to enter but only for an honourable mention, the money was reserved for people without prior experience.

The money that I initially advertised was a fraction of what was reserved for prizes, the idea being that if the contest went well then the prize pool could be easily increased but that if it didn’t go well then there would only be one small prize for someone to win by default. At the time I considered a single entry winning by default to be the worst case scenario.

The eventual result was that there was only one entry, this was from Martin Krafft on the point of keysigning [2]. Martin has prior experience in the computer security field which excludes him from a money prize, but he gets the only honourable mention. From a quick conversation with him it seems that his desire from entering the contest was to get his ideas about weaknesses in the keysigning process spread more widely, so this seems like a fairly ideal result for him. I agree with Martin that there are significant issues related to the keysigning process, but my ideas about them are a little different (I’ll blog about it later). His point about people merely checking that the picture matches on the ID and not verifying what the ID means is significant, the fact is that the vast majority of people are not capable of recognising ID from other countries. Other than requiring passports (which differ little between countries) I can’t think of a good solution to this problem.

Congratulations Martin! It is a good post and a worthy entry.

Now as to why the contest failed. I spoke to some people at the end of the conference about this. One delegate (who I know has the skills needed to produce a winning entry) said that I advertised it too soon before the conference and didn’t give delegates time to write entries. While I can’t dispute his own reasons for not entering I find it difficult to believe that more than a small proportion of delegates had that motivation. The LCA Planet had some lengthy posts by other delegates, and the guy who won second prize in the hack-fest spent something like 20 hours coding on his entry during the conference time (I suspect that my contest had the potential for a better ratio of work to prize money). Also the 8 days before the conference started was a good time to write entries for the contest.

One suggestion was that I propose that the conference organisers run such a contest next year. The problem with this is that it’s difficult to say “I tried this and failed, could you please try it too”. If nothing else I would need some significant reasons to believe that the contest has the potential to be more successful before attempting it on a larger scale. If the contest had been backed by the LCA organisers then it might have been more successful, but that possibility seems unlikely (and there is scope for an event to be more successful than mine while still being a failure). The reason that I consider it unlikely that official support would make it more successful is that I first advertised the event on my blog (syndicated to the conference Planet). Everyone who has a blog and attends the conference can be expected to have read about it. I then advertised it on the conference mailing list which I believe had as subscribers a large portion of the people who have enough spare time to create a blog specifically for the purpose of entering such a contest.

A blogging contest related to a conference but which had a wider scope (IE not limited to one field but instead covering anything related to the conference) might be successful. If someone wants to run such a contest next year then it’s probably worth doing.

Of course I have not given up on the plan of getting more people involved in computer security, expect to see some blog posts from me in the near future with other approaches to this. Suggestions would be appreciated.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/01/20/lca-2008-security-blogging-contest/
• [2] http://madduck.net/blog/2008.01.28:on-the-point-of-keysigning/

It seems that my blogging contest idea is a failure. Could the interested people please meet me near the LCA registration desk at the start of the lunch breakh today for a post-mortem.

Any last-minute entries can be submitted by telling me the URL then.

Due to the lack of entries so far I am amending the rules. It is no longer required that an entry be on the blog of the person who submitted it. Being on any blog that is aggregated by the conference Planet will do.

This is known as a “guest post“. All it requires is that you email the post content to a blogger who you trust and they post it crediting you as the author. Guest posts are fairly common among serious bloggers, a google search will surely give more information.

Today I gave a talk about Debian security at the security mini-conf of LCA.

Before I started the talk I asked for suggestions as to how to get more entries in my security blogging contest [0]. During the talk I asked for suggestions as to how to get more people involved in security development. One suggestion was to offer incentives. I’m experimenting with that with my blogging contest and may do future variations of the same thing.

I started with describing some of the history of security in Debian (primarily things that involved me in some way):

In 2003 I suggested that exec-shield be a standard feature in Debian kernel images [1]. I created a kernel-patch-exec-shield package in 2003 and Marcus Better took it over in 2004. We are hoping to get it included in Lenny. AMD64 architecture doesn’t need exec-shield as the CPU has separate write and execute bits in the page table, but it would be nice to get exec-shield included before the last P4 machine gets decommissioned.

A presentation at the security miniconf at LCA 2005 on the topic of stack smashing is interesting [2]. At the time Adamantix was a distribution based on Debian which used PaX (similar to exec-shield). Adamantix has gone away. Hardened Gentoo has been available with Pax for all this time (but is not widely used). RHEL and Fedora have been available for all this time with exec-shield…

In mid 2002 I demonstrated the first SE Linux Play machine at a conference in Germany. It was fully operational with root as the guest user. At that time SE Linux support in Debian was essentially complete. Since that time the scope of the SE Linuc project has increased slightly (EG controlling DBUS access) so the amount of work required for full support is greater. Most of that support is in Debian and Etch is basically working with SE Linux (although not quite as well as it was in 2002 due to lack of support for the strict policy). The aim is to have Lenny SE Linux become as functional as SE Linux in Fedora Core 5. While FC5 has more SE Linux features than the SE Linux project supported in 2002 it’s still a great disappointment that it’s taken so long.

FC5 had pam_namespace to polyinstantiate directories such as /tmp. Lenny will hopefully have it.

I described the current status:

The hardening-wrapper package in unstable allows environment variables starting with DEB_BUILD_HARDENING_ to be used to control execution of GCC. Documented on the Debian Hardening Wikipedia page [3]. It’s still a little experimental and may change in the near future, but it works.

Lucas Nussbaum is working on automatically building Debian packages with warnings for security related issues. The aim is to build all packages and maintain a central location for the logs to allow DDs to find and fix the problems in their packages.

The Alioth Hardening project [4] will hopefully get some action soon (the people involved are busy doing work but not updating the project). The current plan is to base the Debian Hardening work around it.

SE Linux in Debian is something that I want to get working correctly. There are still some significant issues that make strict policy unusable (such as correct labelling of /etc/passwd) as of last time I tested it.

Finally I described the future plans. There were many questions about usability features for SE Linux, I mentioned in concept the features that Red Hat and Tresys people are developing (which I often don’t use as I prefer vi for policy editing).

There were some questions about how SE Linux works. More than half the audience indicated that they had used it so I assumed some basic knowledge of SE Linux when describing how SE Linux works in regard to minimum privilege and the benefits of MAC in terms of limiting the scope of attack. I noted that every program has bugs and every program which performs security related tasks (which includes serving data to the net without being owned) should be assumed to inevitably have security related bugs (see the The Inevitability of Failure paper []).

Based on the Twilight of the Books [5] article I decided to give this talk with no slides as an experiment. I talked from notes that I wrote and advised the delegates to read my blog for the details. Not presenting any slides meant that the room lights were all left on, which made things much easier when answering the many questions (I prefer an interactive format to my talks and have more questions than most speakers). It will be interesting to get some feedback from delegates about how they regarded this.

• [0] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/01/20/lca-2008-security-blogging-contest/
• [1] http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2003/45/
• [2] http://www.linux.org.au/conf/2005/security_miniconf/presentations/smashing.pdf
• [3] http://wiki.debian.org/Hardening
• [4] http://alioth.debian.org/projects/hardening/
• [5] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/12/28/twilight-of-the-books/

I have decided to run a contest for security related blog posts that appear on Planet Linux Conf Au [1]. That Planet is for people who are attending Linux Conf Au [2], and the prize (or prizes) will be given out at the conference.

The aim will be posts on the topic of computer security from people who are not experts. Anyone who has been employed as a security consultant or developer of security software or who has spoken at a conference such as LCA on a topic related to security can enter but will only be eligible for an honourable mention. Any such expert who enters for an honourable mention MUST note on their entry that they are not eligible for a prize to avoid any possible confusion.

Only blog posts of a positive nature will be well regarded by the judges. Negative reviews are only acceptable if they have positive suggestions for improvement and/or bug reports linked from them.

You may submit a series of posts on a theme, and multiple posts on different security issues will help an entry – we will judge the contributions of the person not a single post.

The prize pool is currently $50, which I hope to expand – but such expansion depends in part on the quality and quantity of early entries, so if some good entries are submitted soon then there will be more and bigger prizes. Currently the prize pool comes from the pockets of me and Casey, commercial sponsorship will be accepted and may increase the prize pool significantly.

The duration of the contest is from this moment until at least lunch-time on Friday the 1st of February. We may extend the contest until Friday night and announce the winner(s) on Saturday – but at this time you should not count on such an extension and plan to have your entry or entries in by mid-day on Friday the 1st of Feb (Australian eastern daylight savings time).

So far of the people I have invited to join the judging panel only Casey Schaufler has accepted. Casey and I will consider offers to assist in judging from people who have a combination of security and blogging experience that is significant, but note that as of this time all prize money comes from the judges…

When you write a post that you wish to submit for the contest please comment on this post with the URL to make sure that the judges don’t miss it. Entries submitted on the last day may need some other form of notification, I will write a future post which clarifies this issue.

Some issues related to selecting the winners have yet to be determined, I will write future posts with more information. But please don’t hesitate to enter now, well written posts that have a positive tone are what you need. Also entering quickly will help increase the prize pool, more prizes means a greater chance that you will win one!

One thing I am considering is how to manage commercial sponsorship if it is offered. One possibility I am considering is allowing a sponsor to declare that half of the money they pay will be used as prizes for entries that relate to their product. That would give an extra incentive for people to blog about topics related to the sponsor but still give extra prize money for other topics. In that situation the relation between the sponsor’s product and the prize winning entry or entries would be liberal, so a post about standard Unix security features would be eligible for prize money from any commercial Linux distribution.

Finally you must have your own individual blog to enter the contest. Guest-posts on other people’s blogs or group efforts are not eligible for anything other than an honourable mention.

Update: The contest is over and was not a success. See this page for the details [3].

• [1] http://planet.linux.org.au/lca2008.html
• [2] http://linux.conf.au/
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/02/07/the-failure-of-my-security-blogging-contest/