Hackfest: Bring your hardware or software project to get help with it or just to show it off. A mix of free tech support, show-and-tell, and idle chat.

Lightning Talks: Have something you would like to present, but don’t have enough material for a full talk? Here’s your chance. Talk about anything Linux related.

Having a trustworthy boot process is the foundation of the rest of your system’s security. If your BIOS, kernel, or initrd have been tampered with, an attacker can hide their backdoor from the rest of the system. This talk will discuss the security threats against the boot process and briefly cover some other approaches to protect against boot-time attacks but the talk will primarily focus on Heads, an open source project that provides tamper-evident boot. I will discuss how Heads works, how it differs from other secure boot approaches, and demonstrate how it protects against tampering.

Unless there are security concerns Allan Cecil will stream the talk at https://twitch.tv/dwangoAC — see you there either in person or virtually!

Are you frustrated with the model/router/switch your ISP provides? Curious what your options are to improve performance or regain control? NBLUG will be holding a panel discussion about home networking, focusing on the humble router. We have representatives of several options:

• Improving existing hardware by flashing OpenWRT or similar
• Building your own router from an old PC or single-board computer
• Commercial products aimed at IT professionals

We expect a wide-ranging discussion of the pros and cons of each of these approaches, touching on the effort required, security implications, and flexibility of each option. Questions from the audience are welcome.

It’s time for another GPG key signing. We had one in May 2003 & August 2014.

The point of this is to create a web of trust. By signing someone’s public key, you state that you have checked that the person that uses a certain keypair, is who he says he is and really is in control of the private key. This way a complete network of people who trust each other can be created. This network is called the strongly connected set. Information about it can be found at http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/

Before the meeting:

1. Generate a public/private keypair with the gpg --gen-key command (accept the defaults), see man gpg for more info.

2. Upload your key to a keyserver:

   gpg --send-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com
   

3. Print out the key fingerprint with gpg --fingerprint Also include your full name, email address, and Key ID#. Bring this to the meeting, and optionally make extra copies to hand out.

4. Email me at frank@nblug.org with the fingerprint, email address, full name, and Key ID. I’ll have a list of everyone’s info to hand out.

During the meeting:

Verify your GPG key fingerprint on the list I hand out and verify your identity (with photo ID).

After the meeting:

1. Download the all of the keys for the fingerprints verified at the meeting

2. Add them to your keyring

3. Sign them

4. Upload your key again.

More info:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GnuPrivacyGuardHowto

http://cryptnet.net/fdp/crypto/keysigning_party/en/keysigning_party.html

With more and more information coming out about how insecure nearly every computer is, come find out how to make your computer use just a bit more secure…

In this presentation, Robert will go over how to setup and use a Yubikey to store PGP keys and PKI certs such that without physical access theft of the keys is just about impossible, and even difficult with physical access.

Other security enhancements like hardware password stores (Mooltipass) and air-gapped machines will be covered. Further, I’m sure there will be discussion of the recently disclosed Meltdown and Specter attacks.

Chromebooks and Chromeboxes are cheap, easy to use, and pretty secure; but after a while the shortcomings of Chrome OS get annoying and I want my Linux. Crouton is a script which installs Debian, Kali, or Ubuntu Linux into a chroot container that runs under Chrome OS. It’s easy to install, and it works great.

Update: Frank’s slides are now available.

In light of the Sonoma County fires today we won’t be holding an October general meeting. Stay safe everyone.

You’ve probably heard of the mythical “Year of the Linux Desktop” for quite some time by now with the year seemingly always just around the corner. With Linux just now crossing the 3% install base threshold we may not be “there” yet but that’s not to say there aren’t some great companies out there making Linux-specific hardware. Case in point is the topic of this talk - System76 (http://system76.com) ships laptops in a range of sizes and configurations with Linux preloaded.

In this talk, I’ll demonstrate a new System76 Oryx Pro laptop and show off the current Out-Of-Box experience as well as their plans for their own distribution named Pop!_OS which is now in development. I’ll talk about what works well with their current software loadout and areas that still need improvement. I’ll also give an overview of the current state of driver support and touch on how that support dictated the hardware build of the laptop. I’ll leave plenty of time at the end for everyone to get some hands-on time as some things (such as what the keyboard and button layout feels like) can’t be demonstrated well from a projector.

Lightning Talks: Have something you would like to present, but don’t have enough material for a full talk? Here’s your chance. Talk about anything Linux related.

Hackfest: Bring your hardware to get help with it or just to show it off.

Have you ever wondered what is clogging your Internet connection? Or if you ever use (or get) the bandwidth you pay for? The best way to know is to measure.

This presentation will discuss how to retrieve data from sources ranging from Linux hosts to network and IoT devices using collectd, then storing and graphing the data using InfluxDB and Grafana. The intended audience is technically-inclined home users and system administrators.

Lightning Talks: Have something you would like to present, but don’t have enough material for a full talk? Here’s your chance. Talk about anything Linux related.

Hackfest: Bring your hardware to get help with it or just to show it off.

Most of what we’ve been told over the years about what makes a good password has been wrong, so it’s no surprise most people pick bad passwords. This talk will cover the history of password policy and password cracking starting from the days when Richard Stallman hacked the passwords forced on his MIT computer lab because he considered passwords an authoritarian method of control. Next I’ll discuss the golden days of password guessing featured prominently in movies like Hackers and WarGames.

Then I’ll move to the tech boom and the introduction of draconian IT policies like password rotation and password complexity and the dirty little leet-speak password secrets they led to. As we get closer to the modern day I’ll discuss the “correct horse battery staple” password renaissance and more modern approaches to password cracking spawned by tools like oclhashcat and giant password databases dumps like the RockYou hack.

I’ll finish up with modern attempts to fix the password auth problem such as new approaches to secure password generation in password managers or schemes such as diceware as well as cover password auth reinforcements like the different forms of 2FA (including U2F) and Facebook’s new approach to “I forgot my password” workflows. By the end everyone should have plenty of ammunition to take back to their IT department and get rid of those horrible password policies.