Security
Since the Yocto Project is intended to be flexible and meet the needs of many applications, we leave policy-making decisions around security to our end users. Our goal instead is to ship each release with metadata that follows best practices in that we do not release recipe versions which are known to have significant security vulnerabilities. Generally this is done by upgrading recipes to newer versions that are no longer vulnerable to these issues.
We are tracking security vulnerabilities in the Yocto Project against the National Vulnerability Database.
Branches that are maintained with security fixes
- 1.7 dizzy (maintainer: Armin Kuster)
- 1.6 daisy (maintainer: Saul Wold)
- 1.5 dora (maintainer: Robert Yang)
- 1.4 dylan (maintainer: Paul Eggleton)
- master (maintainer: Richard Purdie)
See here for the [Stable branch maintenance]
Kernel security patches
Kernel security patches are backported to Linux-yoco kernels regularly from https://www.kernel.org/
Linux-yocto
linux-yocto_3.10 & linux-yocto_3.14 (maintainer: Ross Burton)
Vendor kernels
Kernel security patches are also backported to Linux-vendor kernels from https://www.kernel.org/
- meta-fsl-ppc (maintainer: xxx)
- meta-fsl-arm (maintainer: xxx)
- meta-intel (meta-intel uses Linux-yocto)
- meta-xilinx (maintainer: xxx)
- meta-ti (maintainer: xxx)
How to test?
If there is any test case for the vulnerability by the upstream project or community; we normally run the test to reproduce the problem and after applying the correction to verify that the problem is solved.
If there isn’t any test case and it is complicated and time consuming to write a testcase, we only build the core image for at least two architectures and run the regressions test (ptest) for those branches which have ptest mechanism.
Patch name convention and commit comment
Security patches should have reference to the CVE identifier both in the patch file/s and the commit comment.
Please make sure to add the package name in the subject and the reference to the CVE. Example for the commit comment:
bash: CVE-2014-6278 <short description> References E.g. linke to CVE or other useful info/blog/advisory. Signed-off-by: <your email addres> Signed-off-by: xxxx
For additional guideline refer to: Commit Patch Message Guidelines
