This was my fifth month working on Debian LTS. I was assigned 16 hours by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative. I worked on several packages but haven't uploaded updates yet.

linux-2.6

There is a steady stream of security issues in all Linux kernel versions. As we don't want to prompt reboots too often, these won't necessarily result in an update every month; it depends on the severity of the issue(s). However, I triaged the current issues and committed the available fixes to version control.

dpkg

The PGP signature validation in dpkg-source has a number of bugs, including CVE-2015-0840 which allows the validation to be completely subverted. I backported fixes for these from the 1.16 (wheezy) branch to the 1.15 (squeeze) branch. dpkg has a test suite and the fixes all came with new regression tests, so this was easy to verify.

As dpkg is a native package (i.e. there is little separation between the 'upstream' and Debian packaging), I preferred that the dpkg maintainers would turn this into an 'upstream' release that I could upload. Guillem Jover has now reviewed and (semi-)released my changes, so I will complete this update soon.

tiff

A large number of bugs have been found in the venerable tiff library and tools, mostly by 'fuzzing' them with afl. The bugs have been unhelpfully grouped into a smaller number of CVE IDs, although it's not clear that these groups were introduced at the same time and they certainly weren't fixed at the same time.

Most of the upstream bug reports come with samples to reproduce the bug (crash or memory corruption detectable with valgrind), but many of these did not turn out to be reproducible (either upstream or with the version in 'squeeze'). Where they were reproducible, I've verified that the patches fix the issue.

Unfortunately tiff does not have a test suite, so I made a call for testing on the debian-lts list. If I don't get any responses soon, I'll run my own basic tests with programs that use libtiff before uploading.