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Gentoo Linux Security

Content:

1. Security in Gentoo Linux

Security is a primary focus of Gentoo Linux and ensuring the confidentiality and security of our users machines is of utmost importance to us. The Gentoo Linux Security Project is tasked with providing timely information about security vulnerabilities in Gentoo Linux, along with patches to secure those vulnerabilities. We work directly with vendors, end users and other OSS projects to ensure all security incidents are responded to quickly and professionally.

You can find a document describing the policy the security team follows to treat the vulnerabilities found in the Gentoo Linux distribution on the Vulnerability Treatment Policy page.

Installing a secure Gentoo system

The Gentoo Security Handbook gives information and tips for building a secure system and hardening existing systems.

Keeping your Gentoo system secure

To stay up-to-date with the security fixes you should subscribe to receive GLSAs and apply GLSA instructions whenever you have an affected package installed. Alternatively, syncing your portage tree and upgrading every package should also keep you up-to-date security-wise.

Integration of security-only updates in Portage tools is underway. In the mean time, you can try our experimental glsa-check tool (part of the gentoolkit package) to check if a specific GLSA applies to your system (-p option), list all GLSAs with applied/affected/unaffected status (-l option) or apply a given GLSA to your system (-f option).

2. Gentoo Linux Security Announcements (GLSAs)

Gentoo Linux Security Announcements are notifications that we send out to the community to inform them of security vulnerabilities related to Gentoo Linux or the packages contained in our portage repository.

Recent Advisories

GLSA Severity Package Description Bug
200606-19 Normal mail-mta/sendmail Sendmail: Denial of Service 135141
200606-18 Normal sys-auth/pam_mysql PAM-MySQL: Multiple vulnerabilities 120842
200606-17 Normal net-nsd/openldap OpenLDAP: Buffer overflow 134010
200606-16 High www-apps/dokuwiki DokuWiki: PHP code injection 135623
200606-15 High net-misc/asterisk Asterisk: IAX2 video frame buffer overflow 135680
200606-14 High gnome-base/gdm GDM: Privilege escalation 135027
200606-13 Normal dev-db/mysql MySQL: SQL Injection 135076
200606-12 Normal www-client/mozilla-firefox (and 1 more) Mozilla Firefox: Multiple vulnerabilities 135254
200606-11 Normal media-libs/jpeg JPEG library: Denial of Service 130889

For a full list of all published GLSAs, please see our GLSA index page.

How to receive GLSAs

GLSA announcements are sent to the gentoo-announce@gentoo.org mailing-list, and as a RDF feed available at http://www.gentoo.org/rdf/en/glsa-index.rdf.

3. Security Team contact information

Gentoo Linux takes security vulnerability reports very seriously. Please file new vulnerability reports on Gentoo Bugzilla and assign them to the Gentoo Security product and Vulnerabilities component. Click here to directly submit a new security vulnerability. The Gentoo Linux Security Team will ensure all security-related bug reports are responded to in a timely fashion.

If you find errors or omissions in published GLSAs, you should also file a bug in Gentoo Bugzilla in the Gentoo Security product, but with GLSA Errors component. Click here to directly submit a new GLSA bug.

Confidential contacts

You have two options to submit non-public vulnerabilities to the Gentoo Linux Security Team. You may submit a bug in Gentoo Bugzilla using the New-Expert action and check the Gentoo Security checkbox in the Only users in all of the selected groups can view this bug section. You may also contact directly using encrypted mail one of the following security contacts:

Name Responsability Email GPG keyID (click to retrieve public key)
Sune Kloppenborg Jeppesen Operational co-manager jaervosz@gentoo.org 0xC1CEEAB9
Stefan Cornelius Operational co-manager dercorny@gentoo.org 0x05726DC4

Note: You can see a full list of Gentoo developers, including their GPG key ID on our list of active developers

4. Resources

Security pages

Links



Print

Updated May 18, 2006

Summary: This page is the entry point for all Gentoo Linux security concerns.

Ned Ludd
Author

Kurt Lieber
Author

Thierry Carrez
Author

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Copyright 2001-2006 Gentoo Foundation, Inc. Questions, Comments? Email www@gentoo.org.