March 19, 2024
The FreeBSD Foundation is grateful to have received a 2024 Alpha-Omega grant to undertake code audits of important subsystems, pursue a process audit, and to pilot 2FA approaches. We have also entered into an agreement with Tailscale to undertake some NAT development.
Two sponsored development projects that began at the end of Q4 ‘23 and in January are proceeding well. One, sponsored by RG Nets, is porting VPP to FreeBSD. The other is adding the IOMMU driver to support AMD chips with 512+ cores.
Moin (@bofh) is making incredible progress on the CIS Benchmark for FreeBSD. These guides are essential resources for CIOs, CISOs, and other professionals seeking to adhere to industry-leading practices when deploying and configuring critical platform technologies. The team is ready for reviewers that are very familiar with FreeBSD security configurations and/or CIS benchmarks. Contact partnerships@freebsdfoundation.org if you would like to be part of the review.
In March, I attended a CISA-hosted Open Source Security Summit on the topic of securing open source package repositories in Washington DC. It was an intense two-day session including a “tabletop” exercise on a hypothetical worst case package repo exploit. I was proud to represent the decades of excellent work by the FreeBSD Ports Management team providing a secure package management system.
While in London for the UKRI and Innovate UK Digital Security by Design All Hands meeting, I had lunch with longtime Committer Doug Rabson (@dfr). Doug’s lightning talk has been accepted at next month’s Cloud Plumbing Days conference on April 15. His talk “OCI Containers for FreeBSD” will cover Doug’s work over the last 1-2 years porting Podman, Buildah and related systems to FreeBSD, including some of the challenges along the way and future plans. Check out the full schedule here and hopefully we will see you in Seattle!
— Contributed by Greg Wallace