Jon Seager, vice president of Canonical Engineering and technical leader of the Ubuntu project, announced plans to integrate the NTP server ntpd-rs, written in Rust, into the fall release of Ubuntu 26.10. This server is already used in the infrastructure of the Letâs Encrypt certificate authority. The ntpd-rs project will be the third component, after Rust Coreutils and sudo-rs, integrated into Ubuntu as part of the initiative to improve the system environment through the delivery of software initially developed with a focus on security, reliability, and correctness.
The possibility of replacing the zlib library with zlib-rs and using the Sequoia package instead of GnuPG in the APT package manager is also under discussion. The ntpd-rs package is planned to be used by default as servern a precise time synchronization client, which will eventually replace the currently used packages chrony, linuxptp, and possibly gpsd. The proposed implementation plan involves delivering the latest version of the ntpd-rs package in the Ubuntu 26.10 repository as an option for testing. In Ubuntu 27.04, they plan to use ntpd-rs by default as a unified server and client with support for the NTP, NTS, and PTP protocols.
The ntpd-rs project is being developed by the Trifecta Tech Foundation, which is also responsible for the already integrated sudo-rs utility in Ubuntu. Canonical will fund the development of new features and security enhancements in ntpd-rs. Among other things, they plan to integrate developments from the Statime project, which is working on the implementation of the PTP (Precision Time Protocol) protocol in Rust, to unify support for current time synchronization protocols in a single package and use ntpd-rs not only as a replacement for chrony but also for linuxptp.
Additional features that are to be implemented in ntpd-rs before deployment include the implementation of gPTP and CSPTP protocols, support for the IP socket gpsd, multithreaded operation of NTP servers, the possibility of use in a multi-homed mode, creating isolation profiles based on AppArmor and seccomp, providing testing and performance evaluation tools, improvements related to logging and configuration, and enhancements to the ntp-cli utility.
Förutom gemensamma projekt med Trifecta Tech Foundation har Canonical ocksĂ„ blivit en "guldmedlem" i Rust Foundation, som arbetar med att utveckla och stödja programmeringssprĂ„ket Rust och dess ekosystem. Förutom Canonical, som Ă€r den enda guldmedlemmen, bidrar sex platinamedlemmar â Google, Microsoft, Amazon, ARM, Meta och Huawei â med nyckelfinansiering till utvecklingen av Rust. Guldmedlemmens bidrag uppgĂ„r till 150 000 dollar per Ă„r, medan en platinamedlems avgift Ă€r 325 000 dollar.
Det Àr ocksÄ vÀrt att nÀmna Julian Andres Klode frÄn Canonical, som ansvarar för projektet APT, och hans avsikt att minska antalet parsers i GRUB-bootloadern för att minska attackytan. I Ubuntu 26.10 föreslÄs det att stöd för jpeg- och png-bildformat, part_apple partitionstabeller och anvÀndning av filsystem som btrfs, hfsplus, xfs och zfs för partitionen /boot tas bort frÄn signerade digitala byggsatser. Dessutom planeras det att ta bort stöd för anvÀndning av LVM, md-raid (förutom raid1) och krypterade LUKS-partitioner i /boot.
Det noteras att installeraren för Ubuntu alltid anvĂ€nder filsystemet ext4 för /boot, medan andra system inte testas och utgör en risk för att kringgĂ„ verifierad start med tanke pĂ„ de Ă„terkommande sĂ„rbarheterna som upptĂ€ckts i GRUB (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). NĂ€r det gĂ€ller att ta bort stöd för krypteringen av /boot-partitionen betraktas det som meningslöst (security by obscurity) â i detta sammanhang Ă€r det viktigt att sĂ€kerstĂ€lla integritetskontroll pĂ„ /boot-partitionen, vilket görs via TPM FDE, snarare Ă€n att dölja data. I partitioner som skiljer sig frĂ„n /boot kan man som tidigare anvĂ€nda LUKS, LVM och MD-RAID. BegrĂ€nsningar kommer ocksĂ„ inte att tillĂ€mpas vid uppstart utanför UEFI Secure Boot-lĂ€get.
KĂ€lla: opennet.ru
