This month’s LUV meeting will consist of presentations on Linux News, LCA Round Up, Microsoft and Open Source, and OpenSSH.

When: February 5 2007 from 19:00 until approximately 21:30, followed by dinner.

Where: The Buzzard Lecture Theatre. Evan Burge Building, Trinity College, Melbourne University Main Campus, Parkville.

Back to our regular scheduled first Tuesday of the month. This is our first official meeting of 2008.

* LUV News including an LCA round up by “Mr President”, Andrew Chalmers.
Or … hey, we got up in the morning …

* What’s new in the Linux community with nice guy Lev

* Should include more LCA round up.

THE MAIN EVENTS:

*** Guess who’s coming to diner? ***

* Microsoft and Open Source? Oxymoron you say? by Sarah Bond

Actually, no it isn’t.
It’s been about a year since the Microsoft-Novell alliance was
announced, and the company is working on a number of fronts to improve
interoperability and cooperation between the two camps.

Things like Linux package management; User Interface Automation (UIA)
specifications for assistive technology products; the ability to run
SuSE Linux server natively on Windows Server 2008; using Linux to
recover data from crashed Windows servers; and the highly extensible,
comprehensive OpenXML standard that will be a bedrock of
interoperability, are all things the company is engaged in that we
think you will be interested in hearing about.

* OpenSSH by Damien Miller

OpenSSH’s popularity, and the necessity for the server to wield root
privileges, have made it a high-value target for attack. Despite
initial and ongoing code audits, OpenSSH has suffered from a number
of security vulnerabilities over its 7.5 year life. This has prompted
the developers to implement several defencive measures, intended to
reduce both the likelihood of exploitable errors and the consequences
of exploitation should they occur. This presentation examines these
defencive measures; each measure is described and assessed for
implementation effort, attack surface reduction, effectiveness in
preventing or mitigating attacks, applicability to other network
software and possible improvements.

Damien Miller is a developer on the OpenSSH and OpenBSD projects and
Information Security Engineer at Google.

For more information visit http://www.luv.asn.au/2008/02.