20 Oct 2017

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James Morris: Security Session at the 2017 Kernel Summit

For folks attending Open Source Summit Europe next week in Prague, note that there is a security session planned as part of the co-located Kernel Summit technical track.

This year, the Kernel Summit is divided into two components:

  1. An invitation-only maintainer summit of 30 people total, and;
  2. An open kernel summit technical track which is open to all attendees of OSS Europe.

The security session is part of the latter. The preliminary agenda for the kernel summit technical track was announced by Ted Ts'o here:

There is also a preliminary agenda for the security session, here:

Currently, the agenda includes an update from Kees Cook on the Kernel Self Protection Project, and an update from Jarkko Sakkinen on TPM support. I'll provide a summary of the recent Linux Security Summit, depending on available time, perhaps focusing on security namespacing issues.

This agenda is subject to change and if you have any topics to propose, please send an email to the ksummit-discuss list.

20 Oct 2017 12:23am GMT

16 Oct 2017

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Greg Kroah-Hartman: Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement FAQ

Based on the recent Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement and the article describing the background and what it means , here are some Questions/Answers to help clear things up. These are based on questions that came up when the statement was discussed among the initial round of over 200 different kernel developers.

Q: Is this changing the license of the kernel?

A: No.

Q: Seriously? It really looks like a change to the license.

A: No, the license of the kernel is still GPLv2, as before. The kernel developers are providing certain additional promises that they encourage users and adopters to rely on. And by having a specific acking process it is clear that those who ack are making commitments personally (and perhaps, if authorized, on behalf of the companies that employ them). There is nothing that says those commitments are somehow binding on anyone else. This is exactly what we have done in the past when some but not all kernel developers signed off on the driver statement.

Q: Ok, but why have this "additional permissions" document?

A: In order to help address problems caused by current and potential future copyright "trolls" aka monetizers.

Q: Ok, but how will this help address the "troll" problem?

A: "Copyright trolls" use the GPL-2.0's immediate termination and the threat of an immediate injunction to turn an alleged compliance concern into a contract claim that gives the troll an automatic claim for money damages. The article by Heather Meeker describes this quite well, please refer to that for more details. If even a short delay is inserted for coming into compliance, that delay disrupts this expedited legal process.

By simply saying, "We think you should have 30 days to come into compliance", we undermine that "immediacy" which supports the request to the court for an immediate injunction. The threat of an immediate junction was used to get the companies to sign contracts. Then the troll goes back after the same company for another known violation shortly after and claims they're owed the financial penalty for breaking the contract. Signing contracts to pay damages to financially enrich one individual is completely at odds with our community's enforcement goals.

We are showing that the community is not out for financial gain when it comes to license issues - though we do care about the company coming into compliance. All we want is the modifications to our code to be released back to the public, and for the developers who created that code to become part of our community so that we can continue to create the best software that works well for everyone.

This is all still entirely focused on bringing the users into compliance. The 30 days can be used productively to determine exactly what is wrong, and how to resolve it.

Q: Ok, but why are we referencing GPL-3.0?

A: By using the terms from the GPLv3 for this, we use a very well-vetted and understood procedure for granting the opportunity to come fix the failure and come into compliance. We benefit from many months of work to reach agreement on a termination provision that worked in legal systems all around the world and was entirely consistent with Free Software principles.

Q: But what is the point of the "non-defensive assertion of rights" disclaimer?

A: If a copyright holder is attacked, we don't want or need to require that copyright holder to give the party suing them an opportunity to cure. The "non-defensive assertion of rights" is just a way to leave everything unchanged for a copyright holder that gets sued. This is no different a position than what they had before this statement.

Q: So you are ok with using Linux as a defensive copyright method?

A: There is a current copyright troll problem that is undermining confidence in our community - where a "bad actor" is attacking companies in a way to achieve personal gain. We are addressing that issue. No one has asked us to make changes to address other litigation.

Q: Ok, this document sounds like it was written by a bunch of big companies, who is behind the drafting of it and how did it all happen?

A: Grant Likely, the chairman at the time of the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board (TAB), wrote the first draft of this document when the first copyright troll issue happened a few years ago. He did this as numerous companies and developers approached the TAB asking that the Linux kernel community do something about this new attack on our community. He showed the document to a lot of kernel developers and a few company representatives in order to get feedback on how it should be worded. After the troll seemed to go away, this work got put on the back-burner. When the copyright troll showed back up, along with a few other "copycat" like individuals, the work on the document was started back up by Chris Mason, the current chairman of the TAB. He worked with the TAB members, other kernel developers, lawyers who have been trying to defend these claims in Germany, and the TAB members' Linux Foundation's lawyers, in order to rework the document so that it would actually achieve the intended benefits and be useful in stopping these new attacks. The document was then reviewed and revised with input from Linus Torvalds and finally a document that the TAB agreed would be sufficient was finished. That document was then sent to over 200 of the most active kernel developers for the past year by Greg Kroah-Hartman to see if they, or their company, wished to support the document. That produced the initial "signatures" on the document, and the acks of the patch that added it to the Linux kernel source tree.

Q: How do I add my name to the document?

A: If you are a developer of the Linux kernel, simply send Greg a patch adding your name to the proper location in the document (sorting the names by last name), and he will be glad to accept it.

Q: How can my company show its support of this document?

A: If you are a developer working for a company that wishes to show that they also agree with this document, have the developer put the company name in '(' ')' after the developer's name. This shows that both the developer, and the company behind the developer are in agreement with this statement.

Q: How can a company or individual that is not part of the Linux kernel community show its support of the document?

A: Become part of our community! Send us patches, surely there is something that you want to see changed in the kernel. If not, wonderful, post something on your company web site, or personal blog in support of this statement, we don't mind that at all.

Q: I've been approached by a copyright troll for Netfilter. What should I do?

A: Please see the Netfilter FAQ here for how to handle this

Q: I have another question, how do I ask it?

A: Email Greg or the TAB, and they will be glad to help answer them.

16 Oct 2017 9:05am GMT

Greg Kroah-Hartman: Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement

By Greg Kroah-Hartman, Chris Mason, Rik van Riel, Shuah Khan, and Grant Likely

The Linux kernel ecosystem of developers, companies and users has been wildly successful by any measure over the last couple decades. Even today, 26 years after the initial creation of the Linux kernel, the kernel developer community continues to grow, with more than 500 different companies and over 4,000 different developers getting changes merged into the tree during the past year. As Greg always says every year, the kernel continues to change faster this year than the last, this year we were running around 8.5 changes an hour, with 10,000 lines of code added, 2,000 modified, and 2,500 lines removed every hour of every day.

The stunning growth and widespread adoption of Linux, however, also requires ever evolving methods of achieving compliance with the terms of our community's chosen license, the GPL-2.0. At this point, there is no lack of clarity on the base compliance expectations of our community. Our goals as an ecosystem are to make sure new participants are made aware of those expectations and the materials available to assist them, and to help them grow into our community. Some of us spend a lot of time traveling to different companies all around the world doing this, and lots of other people and groups have been working tirelessly to create practical guides for everyone to learn how to use Linux in a way that is compliant with the license. Some of these activities include:

Unfortunately the same processes that we use to assure fulfillment of license obligations and availability of source code can also be used unjustly in trolling activities to extract personal monetary rewards. In particular, issues have arisen as a developer from the Netfilter community, Patrick McHardy, has sought to enforce his copyright claims in secret and for large sums of money by threatening or engaging in litigation. Some of his compliance claims are issues that should and could easily be resolved. However, he has also made claims based on ambiguities in the GPL-2.0 that no one in our community has ever considered part of compliance.

Examples of these claims have been distributing over-the-air firmware, requiring a cell phone maker to deliver a paper copy of source code offer letter; claiming the source code server must be setup with a download speed as fast as the binary server based on the "equivalent access" language of Section 3; requiring the GPL-2.0 to be delivered in a local language; and many others.

How he goes about this activity was recently documented very well by Heather Meeker.

Numerous active contributors to the kernel community have tried to reach out to Patrick to have a discussion about his activities, to no response. Further, the Netfilter community suspended Patrick from contributing for violations of their principles of enforcement. The Netfilter community also published their own FAQ on this matter.

While the kernel community has always supported enforcement efforts to bring companies into compliance, we have never even considered enforcement for the purpose of extracting monetary gain. It is not possible to know an exact figure due to the secrecy of Patrick's actions, but we are aware of activity that has resulted in payments of at least a few million Euros. We are also aware that these actions, which have continued for at least four years, have threatened the confidence in our ecosystem.

Because of this, and to help clarify what the majority of Linux kernel community members feel is the correct way to enforce our license, the Technical Advisory Board of the Linux Foundation has worked together with lawyers in our community, individual developers, and many companies that participate in the development of, and rely on Linux, to draft a Kernel Enforcement Statement to help address both this specific issue we are facing today, and to help prevent any future issues like this from happening again.

A key goal of all enforcement of the GPL-2.0 license has and continues to be bringing companies into compliance with the terms of the license. The Kernel Enforcement Statement is designed to do just that. It adopts the same termination provisions we are all familiar with from GPL-3.0 as an Additional Permission giving companies confidence that they will have time to come into compliance if a failure is identified. Their ability to rely on this Additional Permission will hopefully re-establish user confidence and help direct enforcement activity back to the original purpose we have all sought over the years - actual compliance.

Kernel developers in our ecosystem may put their own acknowledgement to the Statement by sending a patch to Greg adding their name to the Statement, like any other kernel patch submission, and it will be gladly merged. Those authorized to 'ack' on behalf of their company may add their company name in (parenthesis) after their name as well.

Note, a number of questions did come up when this was discussed with the kernel developer community. Please see Greg's FAQ post answering the most common ones if you have further questions about this topic.

16 Oct 2017 9:00am GMT