SAN FRANCISCO, January 13, 2022 – The Zephyr Project announces a major milestone today with Baumer joining as a Platinum member and Infineon Technologies, Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc., Percepio and Silicon Labs joining as Silver members. These new members have selected Zephyr RTOS as one of the key technologies to build their next generation of connected products and solutions.

Zephyr, an open source project at the Linux Foundation that builds a safe, secure and flexible real-time operating system (RTOS) for resource-constrained devices, is

easy to deploy, secure, connect and manage. It has a growing set of software libraries that can be used across various applications and industry sectors such as Industrial IoT, wearables, machine learning and more. Zephyr is built with an emphasis on broad chipset support, security, dependability, longterm support releases and a growing open source ecosystem.

“Zephyr fits where Linux can’t,” said Kate Stewart, Vice President of Dependable Embedded Systems at the Linux Foundation. “It will help these new members with development, delivery, and maintenance across a wide variety of products and models. We look forward to working with our new members to improve the technology their products and solutions are based on.”

Zephyr LongTerm Support (LTS) Release

In October 2021, the Zephyr community of almost 500 contributors made the LTS v2 release available that offers vendors a customizable operating system that supports product longevity, security and interoperability. Product developers aren’t locked into a particular architecture, back-end platform or cloud provider and will have the freedom to choose from an ecosystem of hardware. Additionally, products based on the LTS release will benefit from a maintained code base throughout their development and deployment lifecycle. The LTS will serve as the baseline for the auditable version of Zephyr, which will benefit both the maintained LTS and development branches. Learn more about the LTS v2 here.

Commitment to Zephyr

Baumer, one of the international leading companies for smart sensors, encoders and digital cameras for industrial automation, joins other Platinum members Antmicro, Google, Intel, Meta, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP and Oticon. Roman Kellner, Embedded Software Team Lead at Baumer, will join the Governing Board and its commitment to ensure balanced collaboration and feedback that meets the needs of its community.

“The mission of the Governing Board is to cultivate an innovative relationship among stakeholders to advance the Zephyr Project’s support of new hardware, developer tools, sensors, and drivers, while maximizing the functionality of devices that run applications developed using the Zephyr RTOS,” said Barna Ibrahim, Zephyr Governing Board member and Marketing Committee Chair. “We are ecstatic to welcome Roman to the board and look forward to working more closely with Baumer.”

“Baumer as a sensor manufacturer relies on the capabilities of microcontrollers in a wide performance range for our product portfolio,” said Roman Kellner. “Zephyr was chosen as our next sensor platform for its MCU vendor openness, reliability, high configurability, its added value compared to a pure RTOS scheduler and the future ability to cover non-safe and safe products with the same code base. We are happy to contribute our expertise to attribute Zephyr RTOS as a high performance sensor platform.” 

The Zephyr Project also welcomes Silver members:

Infineon, a world leader in semiconductor solutions that make life easier, safer and greener;Qualcomm Innovation Center, a subsidiary of Qualcomm Technologies, that focuses on enabling and optimizing open source software that work with Qualcomm Technologies’ solutions;Percepio, a leader in visual trace diagnostics for embedded systems and IoT; andSilicon Labs, a leader in secure, intelligent wireless technology for a more connected world.

These members join AVSystem, BayLibre, Eclipse Foundation, Fiware, Foundries.io, Golioth, Laird Connectivity, Linaro, Memfault, Parasoft, Pat-Eta Electronics, RISC-V, SiFive, Synopsys and teenage engineering, and Wind River.

“The Zephyr Project is driving stability to developers which allows them to focus on product innovation and at Infineon, we are happy to be a part of helping customers drive differential value,” said Danny Watson, Principal Product Marketing Engineer at Infineon. “Infineon aims to be a key contributor to the underlying scalable goals of the Zephyr Project and to shape it into providing more performance and intelligent based Open Source Software for Infineon’s PSoC 6 Microcontrollers.”

“The Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC) is proud to become a new member of the Zephyr Project community,” said Anthony Scarpino, Senior Director of Engineering at Qualcomm Canada ULC. “QuIC looks forward to contributing to the Zephyr Project to collaborate in building the best-in-class RTOS for secure, connected, resource-constrained devices. QuIC supports the building of micro-controller-based devices as part of the hardware and software ecosystems in upcoming products and sees participation in Zephyr as a path to world- leading innovative solutions.”

“At Percepio, we’ve long recognized the potential of Zephyr RTOS as the leading independent platform for small IoT devices where Linux isn’t an option, yet capable enough for complex embedded IoT/Edge applications,” said Mike Skrtic, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Percepio. “The latest Zephyr release brings expanded support for software tracing, which facilitates debugging and allows for improved reliability, security, and performance of embedded systems. We’re pleased to have made significant contributions to the new tracing subsystem, to provide full kernel tracing support, enabling the high-end visual trace diagnostics Tracealyzer is known for.”

“We’ve had our eye on Zephyr for some time and are excited to officially be a member of this RTOS project,” said Benny Chang, Vice President, Platform and Chief of Staff at Silicon Labs. “We appreciate the measures the Zephyr community is taking to build a reliable, well-tested RTOS for the IoT and look forward to ​connecting Zephyr users with ​our industry-leading hardware and connectivity solutions.”

To learn more about Zephyr RTOS, visit the Zephyr website and blog.

About the Zephyr Project

The Zephyr Project is an open source, scalable real-time operating system (RTOS) supporting multiple hardware architectures. To learn more, please visit www.zephyrproject.org.

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

###

The post Baumer, Infineon, Qualcomm Innovation Center, Percepio and Silicon Labs Select Zephyr RTOS for their Next Generation of Products and Solutions appeared first on Linux Foundation.

This is a classic article written by Jack Wallen from the Linux.com archives. For more great SysAdmin tips and techniques check out our free intro to Linux course.

Although there are already a lot of good security features built into Linux-based systems, one very important potential vulnerability can exist when local access is granted – – that is file permission-based issues resulting from a user not assigning the correct permissions to files and directories. So based upon the need for proper permissions, I will go over the ways to assign permissions and show you some examples where modification may be necessary.

Permission Groups

Each file and directory has three user based permission groups:

owner – The Owner permissions apply only to the owner of the file or directory, they will not impact the actions of other users.group – The Group permissions apply only to the group that has been assigned to the file or directory, they will not affect the actions of other users.all users – The All Users permissions apply to all other users on the system, this is the permission group that you want to watch the most.

Permission Types

Each file or directory has three basic permission types:

read – The Read permission refers to a user’s capability to read the contents of the file.write – The Write permissions refer to a user’s capability to write or modify a file or directory.execute – The Execute permission affects a user’s capability to execute a file or view the contents of a directory.

Viewing the Permissions

You can view the permissions by checking the file or directory permissions in your favorite GUI File Manager (which I will not cover here) or by reviewing the output of the “ls -l” command while in the terminal and while working in the directory which contains the file or folder.

The permission in the command line is displayed as: _rwxrwxrwx 1 owner:group

User rights/PermissionsThe first character that I marked with an underscore is the special permission flag that can vary.The following set of three characters (rwx) is for the owner permissions.The second set of three characters (rwx) is for the Group permissions.The third set of three characters (rwx) is for the All Users permissions.Following that grouping since the integer/number displays the number of hardlinks to the file.The last piece is the Owner and Group assignment formatted as Owner:Group.

Modifying the Permissions

When in the command line, the permissions are edited by using the command chmod. You can assign the permissions explicitly or by using a binary reference as described below.

Explicitly Defining Permissions

To explicitly define permissions you will need to reference the Permission Group and Permission Types.

The Permission Groups used are:

u – Ownerg – Groupo – Othersa – All users

The potential Assignment Operators are + (plus) and – (minus); these are used to tell the system whether to add or remove the specific permissions.

The Permission Types that are used are:

r – Readw – Writex – Execute

So for example, let’s say I have a file named file1 that currently has the permissions set to _rw_rw_rw, which means that the owner, group, and all users have read and write permission. Now we want to remove the read and write permissions from the all users group.

To make this modification you would invoke the command: chmod a-rw file1
To add the permissions above you would invoke the command: chmod a+rw file1

As you can see, if you want to grant those permissions you would change the minus character to a plus to add those permissions.

Using Binary References to Set permissions

Now that you understand the permissions groups and types this one should feel natural. To set the permission using binary references you must first understand that the input is done by entering three integers/numbers.

A sample permission string would be chmod 640 file1, which means that the owner has read and write permissions, the group has read permissions, and all other user have no rights to the file.

The first number represents the Owner permission; the second represents the Group permissions; and the last number represents the permissions for all other users. The numbers are a binary representation of the rwx string.

r = 4w = 2x = 1

You add the numbers to get the integer/number representing the permissions you wish to set. You will need to include the binary permissions for each of the three permission groups.

So to set a file to permissions on file1 to read _rwxr_____, you would enter chmod 740 file1.

Owners and Groups

I have made several references to Owners and Groups above, but have not yet told you how to assign or change the Owner and Group assigned to a file or directory.

You use the chown command to change owner and group assignments, the syntax is simple

chown owner:group filename,

so to change the owner of file1 to user1 and the group to family you would enter chown user1:family file1.

Advanced Permissions

The special permissions flag can be marked with any of the following:

_ – no special permissionsd – directoryl– The file or directory is a symbolic links – This indicated the setuid/setgid permissions. This is not set displayed in the special permission part of the permissions display, but is represented as a s in the read portion of the owner or group permissions.t – This indicates the sticky bit permissions. This is not set displayed in the special permission part of the permissions display, but is represented as a t in the executable portion of the all users permissions

Setuid/Setgid Special Permissions

The setuid/setguid permissions are used to tell the system to run an executable as the owner with the owner’s permissions.

Be careful using setuid/setgid bits in permissions. If you incorrectly assign permissions to a file owned by root with the setuid/setgid bit set, then you can open your system to intrusion.

You can only assign the setuid/setgid bit by explicitly defining permissions. The character for the setuid/setguid bit is s.

So do set the setuid/setguid bit on file2.sh you would issue the command chmod g+s file2.sh.

Sticky Bit Special Permissions

The sticky bit can be very useful in shared environment because when it has been assigned to the permissions on a directory it sets it so only file owner can rename or delete the said file.

You can only assign the sticky bit by explicitly defining permissions. The character for the sticky bit is t.

To set the sticky bit on a directory named dir1 you would issue the command chmod +t dir1.

When Permissions Are Important

To some users of Mac- or Windows-based computers, you don’t think about permissions, but those environments don’t focus so aggressively on user-based rights on files unless you are in a corporate environment. But now you are running a Linux-based system and permission-based security is simplified and can be easily used to restrict access as you please.

So I will show you some documents and folders that you want to focus on and show you how the optimal permissions should be set.

home directories– The users’ home directories are important because you do not want other users to be able to view and modify the files in another user’s documents of desktop. To remedy this you will want the directory to have the drwx______ (700) permissions, so lets say we want to enforce the correct permissions on the user user1’s home directory that can be done by issuing the command chmod 700 /home/user1.bootloader configuration files– If you decide to implement password to boot specific operating systems then you will want to remove read and write permissions from the configuration file from all users but root. To do you can change the permissions of the file to 700.system and daemon configuration files– It is very important to restrict rights to system and daemon configuration files to restrict users from editing the contents, it may not be advisable to restrict read permissions, but restricting write permissions is a must. In these cases it may be best to modify the rights to 644.firewall scripts – It may not always be necessary to block all users from reading the firewall file, but it is advisable to restrict the users from writing to the file. In this case the firewall script is run by the root user automatically on boot, so all other users need no rights, so you can assign the 700 permissions.

Other examples can be given, but this article is already very lengthy, so if you want to share other examples of needed restrictions please do so in the comments.

The post Classic SysAdmin: Understanding Linux File Permissions appeared first on Linux Foundation.