What’s new in Java 10: Episode 2

Java 10 is coming in March 2018. This release contains quite a lot of enhancements in the JVM. But it looks like JDK users are mostly interested in one particular update in the Java Language – type inference to declarations of local variables with initializers. Besides updates to the Java Language and JVM, Java 10 contains another update which together with the six-month release model has been bothering the Java community for several months.

Here is a digest of the rest of the main features in Java 10 which weren’t covered in the previous post. Enjoy!

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What’s new in Java 10: Episode 1

Java 10 should be released in Mar 2018. It’s going to be the next short-term release after Java 9 which was released in Sep 2017.

After I had left the Java Team at Oracle in the end of 2017, and moved to another side of Atlantic Ocean, I made a New Year’s promise that I’ll keep myself updated about changes in Java at least for a year.

Since Java 10 is coming, it’s time to have a look at the JEPs (Java Enhancement Proposal) targeted to Java 10. Here is a digest of the main features which are planned to be delivered in Java 10. Enjoy!

 

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Running an SSH server in a Docker image as a debugging mode

I was recently debugging one Python application which ran in a Docker container. At some point, I’d like to debug the app in the container. At first, I was wondering if there is a way to run a Python application with a debug agent like you can do with Java, so that the agent listened in a port for incoming connections from a remote debugger. Unfortunately I didn’t find a convenient way how I could remotely debug my Python app. I found an article which describes how you can debug a Python application remotely with PyCharm IDE and SSH. If I understood correctly, PyCharm can deploy your application to a Docker container via SSH, then do some magic which is called “remote interpreter”, so as a result, you can debug the application from your local PyCharm installation. Looks like this feature is available only in a commercial PyCharm version, but I had only a community edition.

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Running Java with AddressSanitizer

OpenJDK and AddressSanitizer are well-known open source projects. OpenJDK sources contain C/C++ code which may be affected by memory corruption issues and memory leaks. Such issues may be detected at runtime with memory checkers like AddressSanitizer. Now it’s going to be easier to use AddressSanitizer for OpenJDK development to check for memory corruptions and leaks.

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New bug bounty programs on HackerOne for open source libraries

There are a couple of new bug bounty programs on HackeOne for popular open source libraries:

  • libcap
  • ImageMagick
  • libpng
  • GraphicsMagick
  • curl
  • tcpdump

They just started on last week (Sep 22nd, 2017). You can find the rules, scope and other details on HackerOne

Those are well-known tools and libraries, and they have already gotten quite much attention from the security community. So, looks like it’s going to be challenging to discover new issues there. Looking for a challenge? This may be a good one for sure. By the way, minimum bounty is $500. Not too much, but you also are going to get some credit for making the world better.

The libraries are mostly written in C/C++, so you may want to start with fuzzing. Although, if you search for fuzzing results for the libs above, you are going to find that security researches put some effort on it. On the other hand, it’s never worse to try even harder. Someone can also contribute to Google’s OOS-fuzz project, and add support for fuzzing those libraries. OSS-fuzz already has libpng and curl, but seems like there may be some room for libcap, ImageMagick, GraphicsMagick and tcpdump.

Good luck!

LDAP injections

Everybody knows about SQL injections. It’s like a celebrity in the world of software security. But there are much more many different types of injection attacks which may feel jealous about popularity of SQL injections. That’s not fair. Let’s try to feel the gap, and talk about LDAP injections.

Версия на русском.

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Global buffer overflow

There are a lot of articles, posts, and even books which describe a stack buffer overflow. There are a little less stuff about heap buffer overflows. But there is one more thing which you can overflow – buffers in global memory. Although all of those types of issues are very similar, let me try to fill this little gap with global buffer overflows.

Русская версия

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Sending temperature and humidity to ThingSpeak with ESP8266 and MicroPython

MicroPython on ESP8266: sending data to ThingSpeak

When you play with new microcontroller, first thing you usually do is driving an LED. That’s a classic “Hello World!” project for microcontrollers. That’s what I did when I was playing first time with ESP8266 and MicroPython. Let’s move on, and implement another classic project – measuring temperature and humidity with DHT22 sensor. But we don’t want to be quiet, so we are going to share this so important data on the Internet. ThingSpeak will help us with it. Let’s add a new warrior to the army of Internet of Shit!

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