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A critical GnuPG security update

Par : corbet
27 janvier 2026 à 17:31
There is a new GnuPG update for a "critical security bug" in recent GnuPG releases.

A crafted CMS (S/MIME) EnvelopedData message carrying an oversized wrapped session key can cause a stack buffer overflow in gpg-agent during the PKDECRYPT--kem=CMS handling. This can easily be used for a DoS but, worse, the memory corruption can very likley also be used to mount a remote code execution attack. The bug was introduced while changing an internal API to the FIPS required KEM API.

Only versions 2.5.13 through 2.5.16 are affected.

The GNU C Library is moving from Sourceware

Par : corbet
27 janvier 2026 à 16:58
GNU C Library maintainer Carlos O'Donell has announced that the project will be moving its core services away from Sourceware in favor of services hosted at the Linux Foundation.

While it was clear to the GNU Toolchain leadership that requirements were coming to improve the toolchain cyber-security posture, these requirements were not clear to all project developers. As part of receiving this feedback we have worked to document and define a secure development policy for glibc and at a higher level the GNU Toolchain. While Sourceware has started making some critical technical changes, the GNU Toolchain still faces serious, systemic concerns about securing a global, highly available service and building a sustainable, diverse sponsorship model.

This has been a long-running discussion; see this 2022 article for some background.

[$] Implicit arguments for BPF kfuncs

Par : corbet
27 janvier 2026 à 15:41
The kernel's "kfunc" mechanism is a way of exporting kernel functions so that they can be called directly from BPF programs. There are over 300 kfuncs in current kernels, ranging in functionality from string processing (bpf_strnlen()) to custom schedulers (scx_bpf_kick_cpu()) and beyond. Sometimes these kfuncs need access to context information that is not directly available to BPF programs, and which thus cannot be passed in as arguments. The implicit arguments patch set from Ihor Solodrai is the latest attempt to solve this problem.

Xfwl4: the roadmap for a Xfce Wayland compositor

Par : jzb
27 janvier 2026 à 14:20

The Xfce team has announced that it will be providing funding to Brian Tarricone to work on xfwl4, a Wayland compositor for Xfce:

Xfwl4 will not be based on the existing xfwm4 code. Instead, it will be written from scratch in rust, using smithay building blocks.

The first attempt at creating an Xfce Wayland compositor involved modifying the existing xfwm4 code to support both X11 and Wayland in parallel. However, this approach turned out to be the wrong path forward for several reasons:

  • Xfwm4 is architected in a way that makes it very difficult to put the window management behavior behind generic interfaces that don't include X11 specifics.
  • Refactoring Xfwm4 is risky, since it might introduce new bugs to X11. Having two parallel code bases will allow for rapid development and experimentation with the Wayland compositor, with zero risk to break xfwm4.
  • Some X11 window management concepts just aren't available or supported by Wayland protocols at this time, and dealing with those differences can be difficult in an X11-first code base.
  • Using the existing codebase would require us to use C and wlroots, even if a better alternative is available.

Work has already commenced on the project, and the project hopes to share a development release in mid-2026.

Security updates for Tuesday

Par : jzb
27 janvier 2026 à 14:07
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, python-urllib3, python3.11-urllib3, and python3.12-urllib3), Debian (imagemagick, openjdk-11, openjdk-17, and openjdk-21), Fedora (bind, bind-dyndb-ldap, chromium, ghostscript, glibc, mingw-glib2, mingw-harfbuzz, mingw-libsoup, mingw-openexr, and qownnotes), Mageia (kernel-linus), Red Hat (osbuild-composer), SUSE (go1.24-openssl, go1.25-openssl, govulncheck-vulndb, kernel, nodejs22, openCryptoki, openvswitch3, python-pyasn1, python311, and qemu), and Ubuntu (git-lfs, node-form-data, and screen).
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