triggered a cascade of events", which led to people resigning from the distribution. Eventually, one of those people used their administrative privileges to delete part of the distribution's GitHub repository and to "
publish an empty package in the cooker repository, which obsoleted all gnome and cosmic packages, which could have damaged the systems of people using gnome or cosmic".
We are currently working to restore the deleted repositories and restore the functionality of the obsolete packages.[...] We performed a full system audit and, aside from the removed packages, we found no other violations.
At the 2026 Linux Security Summit North America, Eric Biggers spoke about some of the problems with the kernel's cryptography framework, as well as the recent progress in adding library APIs to allow developers to use cryptographic functions without using the traditional crypto API. He walked through a couple of examples to demonstrate the frailty of the original API and showed how the new library API made life easier for developers and kernel maintainers.
William Woodruff, better known online as "yossarian", has published a blog post to make the case that users should not place their trust in trusted publishing:
Trusted Publishing is a mechanism for establishing trust between an external machine identity (like a CI/CD workflow) and one or more projects on a package index/registry. The "trust" in "Trusted Publishing" refers to that trust relationship, and not to anything else.
It is not, and cannot be, a signal for package trust or quality. You cannot use it to determine whether a package is safe or "good," and PyPI consciously stymies attempts to misuse it for that purpose by not rendering it as a "green checkmark" or anything else of the sort.
Or as another framing: Trusted Publishing is just a form of authentication. It doesn't tell you anything other than that an upload was authenticated, which all uploads to PyPI are.
LWN covered trusted publishing in June.
Puranjay Mohan shared some of the work he's been doing recently on improving the performance of read-copy-update (RCU) at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit; his talk would have been nice context to have earlier in the day when Harry Yoo and Alexei Starovoitov led a session about the new kmalloc_nolock() function that allows for lockless allocation from any kernel context, and which interacts with the RCU subsystem to allow that. This article therefore covers the two sessions together and in the reverse order, to provide that missing context.
OpenSSH 10.4 has been released. In addition to a number of security and bug fixes, there are a few notable changes; this release adds experimental support for a composite post-quantum signature scheme combining ML-DSA 44 and Ed25519 as described in this IETF draft. With 10.4, if OpenSSH is compiled with sandbox support it will fail on Linux systems that have not enabled SECCOMP or NO_NEW_PRIVS; prior to this release, sshd would log an error but continue operation. See the release notes for a full list of changes.
It's Sunday afternoon, and rc2 is out. Things look very normal - it's not a small rc2, but it's in line with recent releases, and slightly smaller than rc2 was in 7.1. Let's see how that all continues, but so far so good."
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.1.3, 6.18.38, 6.12.95, 6.6.144, 6.1.177, 5.15.211, and 5.10.260 stable kernels. Several kernels in this batch include a fix for a vulnerability introduced in the 6.0 kernel in IPv6 (CVE-2026-53362), which could allow an attacker to escape a container and gain root access.
There is also a fix for a use-after-free bug in KVM (CVE-2026-53359) that was introduced in the 2.6.36 kernel. As usual, each stable kernel includes a number of fixes throughout the tree. Users are advised to upgrade.
The GNU Guix project has announced three vulnerabilities in the guix substitute utility as well as a fourth that affects the guix pull and guix time-machine commands. The impact of the vulnerabilities ranges from remote privilege escalation to local disclosure of sensitive files.
The remote exploitation of guix substitute only requires that the vulnerable system attempt to download a binary substitute. Any configured substitute server, including ones discovered using guix-daemon's --discover option, can exploit this, and so can a man-in-the-middle (MITM), regardless of whether https is used in the substitute server urls.
The local exploitation of guix substitute only requires the ability to connect to guix-daemon's socket, which by default any user can do.
Separately, another security issue (CVE ID pending) was identified in guix pull and guix time-machine, which enables anyone who can control the channels file used by these commands to cause a file to be created or overwritten wherever the user running the command in question has permission to create them.
The project is recommending that all users upgrade guix and guix-daemon immediately. See the announcement for instructions, how to test for the vulnerabilities, the disclosure timeline, and more.
In August 2025, the CalyxOS privacy-focused
Android distribution announced
that it was pausing all releases while it reworked its
release process, security protocols, and changed its signing keys
following the departure of one of its founders. The project has now announced
that it is "officially back from the hiatus
" with the
7.2.2.0 release.
CalyxOS 7.2.2.0 is signed by us using a new HSM-based, open-source signing solution we designed to enhance the security of the entire signing process, ensure redundancy, and remove single points of failure. You can verify CalyxOS 7.2.2.0 and future builds following these instructions. For anyone who is interested, the security audit report of the HSM provisioning ceremony script can be found here.
In addition, we also went through significant infrastructure improvements. In particular, we have set up a cleaner server structure to streamline each release. In response to Google's less frequent AOSP source code releases, our team developed scripts to reduce the overhead in applying monthly patches and updates. Please keep in mind, additional manual steps are still needed to compensate for AOSP changes, such as requesting and storing kernel sources with each update. Currently, our lead engineer is continuing the maintenance of the base device trees for both LineageOS and CalyxOS to bridge the gap created by the absence of Google Pixel device trees.
A few astute observers have noticed that some content on kernel.org had disappeared and were understandably concerned. Konstantin Ryabitsev has provided an update via social.kernel.org:
There was an unfortunate error while changing the kernel.org primary/secondary mirroring infrastructure, which resulted in the /pub tree suddenly becoming empty. No data was lost, just public mirror copies. Everything is now being restored, but deletes are fast and restores are slow, so thank you for your patience!
The incident is being tracked on the Linux Foundation's IT status page.
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