Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) ships Firefox as a snap, but some people (like me) may prefer installing it from .deb packages to retain control over upgrades or to keep extensions working.
I have been using my raspberry pi 4 to monitor my network and my Synology NAS. So far, I’ve been using a SanDisk MicroSD card for storing all the data which died (remember: MicroSD cards have a limited number of writes)
After doing some research I learned that the Raspberry Pi 4 gained direct boot capabilities from USB Mass Storage (aka SSDs) with a bootloader (eeprom) update in 2020.
I struggled for about 2 nights to make it work despite following various how-tos/tutorials. The method outlined here is what worked for me as of 2021-10-23. It could change in the future. With new updates to the ubuntu image those steps might not be necessary anymore.
Preparation – Upgrade bootloader
The easiest way to upgrade the bootloader on the raspberry pi is to use the raspi-config tool built into the raspian os image. Therefore first write the Raspian OS image to an MicroSD Card to make use of raspi-config. Afterwards, write the Ubuntu Image to the MicroSD card You can use the raspberry image writer. Flash the image to a MicroSD card
Raspberry Image Writer: Choose Raspberry PI OS Lite (32-bit)
Boot the raspberry pi with raspian os, login with the default credentials and run
sudo raspi-config
raspi-config
Choose Advanced Options –> Bootloader Version –> Latest
Select No when asked to restore Default Settings
Exit and Select Yes when asked to reboot
On Reboot the bootloader should be upgraded.
Check in the Terminal that the upgrade was applied
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo rpi-eeprom-update
BOOTLOADER: up to date
CURRENT: Tue Jul 6 10:44:53 UTC 2021 (1625568293)
LATEST: Tue Jul 6 10:44:53 UTC 2021 (1625568293)
RELEASE: stable (/lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader/stable)
Use raspi-config to change the release.
VL805_FW: Dedicated VL805 EEPROM
VL805: up to date
CURRENT: 000138a1
LATEST: 000138a1
Use raspi-config to set the boot-order to USB-Boot by default
Choose: 6 Advanced Options
raspi-config, go to Advanced Options
Next choose: A6: Boot Order
Choose A6 Boot Order to set boot priority
Choose B2 USB Boot
B2 USB Boot
Check in the in the terminal that bootloader order has been modified. Confirm BOOT_ORDER statement is there.
Shutdown the Raspberry PI, unplug the MicroSD Card and plug-in the power again to boot from USB SSD.
If it can’t find the bootloader the raspberry pi will default to PXE boot. In case the raspberry pi is unable to boot from the USB SSD try another USB – Port (e.g. USB 2 instead of 3 etc.)
A list of compatible / tested SSDs can be found here.
Debian 9 Stretch was released as the latest stable version of the Linux Distribution: Debian. While it’s always possible to install Debian 9 fresh from scratch, it’s also possible to perform an in-place upgrade from Debian 8. The following post describes the necessary steps to do so.
For a incredibly thorough documentation of the process, I suggest you also read through the official release notes.
Notes:
Upgrading to Debian 9 Stretch is only supported from Debian 8 Jessie. If you are running a version older than 8, you must first upgrade to 8 before working through this process.
The upgrade involves a kernel update, so a reboot will be required toward the end of the process.
It is strongly recommended that you have a full system backup or backup of any important data before proceeding with the upgrade, ensure that you have a plan to roll back. In the case of a virtual machine, take a snapshot before starting.
It is recommended that you have your Debian 8 Jessie installation completely up to date before starting, to do this run “apt-get update” followed by “apt-get upgrade” and install available updates.
root@debian8:~# apt-get update
root@debian8:~# apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
In this case all updates have been applied already, so it’s fine to proceed.
Edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file, my file is shown below. As you can see all of the lines are currently specifying “jessie”. Note that your mirror sources will likely be different which is fine.
deb http://ftp.ch.debian.org/debian/ jessie main
deb-src http://ftp.ch.debian.org/debian/ jessie main
deb http://security.debian.org/ jessie/updates main contrib
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ jessie/updates main contrib
# jessie-updates, previously known as 'volatile'
deb http://ftp.ch.debian.org/debian/ jessie-updates main contrib
deb-src http://ftp.ch.debian.org/debian/ jessie-updates main contrib
Change the instances of “jessie” to “stretch”, you can either do this manually, or automatically with the below sed command.
sed -i 's/jessie/stretch/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
You can either use “stretch” or “stable”, as Debian 9 Stretch is now the current stable version as of writing. However note that if you use stable instead of the specific release name, in future when Debian 10 is released that will be the stable version so you may upgrade to that unintentionally.
The recommended way to upgrade Debian is with the ‘apt-get’ command. First update the list of available packages with the below command, as we’ve just updated the sources.list file.
apt-get update
Use “apt list –upgradable” command to quickly see what will be installed, updated, and removed during the upgrade process without affecting the system.
Now that the list of available packages has been updated from the mirror, run the below command to perform a minimal upgrade.
apt-get upgrade
This is known as a minimal system upgrade as it only upgrades packages that can be upgraded without needing any other packages to be removed or installed, so it’s a safe place to start. This upgraded 932 packages requiring 412MB on my system.
Now you’re ready to do the complete system upgrade, this will upgrade to the latest available version for all packages installed.
apt-get dist-upgrade
Ensure that you have enough free disk space to complete the operation, in my case it notes that afterwards 1,048MB of additional disk space will be used with 639 package upgrades and 479 newly installed packages.
During the distribution upgrade, services installed on your system needs to be restarted after up gradation of each service packages (ex. Apache, NTP) which may cause you the service interruptions. You can choose to restart automatically during upgrade or manually after the upgrade. Here, I opted to do “an automatic restart of services during the OS upgrade“.
Verify upgrade:
Reboot your machine after the distribution upgrade.
reboot
Verify the current version of Debian operating system.
A large number of companies use “security” products to inspect HTTPS traffic for detecting malware and prevent other types of attacks. However, they might inadvertently make their user’s more susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks by decrypting and re-encrypting HTTPS connections.
HTTPS inspection is deployed in companies for checking the encrypted traffic coming from an HTTPS website to make sure it does not contain any malware or any other type of attacks. It basically performs a decryption and re-encryption of the client’s connection to an HTTPS server. The “security” products (proxy, web-gateway, firewall etc.) establish the connection on the client’s behalf by first decrypting the client’s HTTPS connection and re-encrypting the traffic sent to the HTTPS server. The client is served with a different, locally generated certificate by the security product which essentially perform a man-in-the-middle attack.
In some enterprise environments, an HTTPS connection may even be intercepted and re-encrypted multiple times. For example, at the network perimeter by a security gateway product and later, on the endpoint by a client’s antivirus program which needs to inspect the traffic for malware.
The problem revolves around the fact that the client’s browser no longer validates the real certificate issued by the server because its replaced with a locally generated certificate from the security product. In return, the task of validating the certificate now falls to the intercepting proxy.
According to the published advisory, those security products are evidently pretty bad at validating server certificates. An investigation conducted by researches from Google, Mozilla, Cloudfare, and multiple Universities states that the intercepted connections use weaker cryptographic algorithms (Source: interception-ndss17). The security products even advertise support for known-broken encryption ciphers that would allow an active man-in-the-middle attack by intercepting and downgrading a connection in order to decrypt it.
The analysis by the researches found that at least 32 percent of connections to e-comerce sites and 54 percent of Cloudflare HTTPS connections, which were intercepted, became less secure than they would have been if the user had connected directly to the server.
Browser makers had a long time to properly unterstand the quirks of TLS connections and certificate validation. Therefore, there is no better client-side implementation of TLS, the protocol used for encrypting HTTPS connection, than the one found in modern browsers.
In comparison, security product vendors use outdated, customised TLS libraries where they even back-port new protocol features. Re-implementing those features found in newer libraries makes them susceptible to serious vulnerabilities.
Furthermore, the US-CERT points out another widespread problem that many products intercepting HTTPS don’t properly validate the certificate chain presented by servers. Certificate-chain verification errors are infrequently forwarded to the client, leading the client to believe that operations were performed with the correct server.
The BadSSL website allows organisations and even employees to check if their HTTPS inspection products improperly validate certificates or allow for insecure ciphers. The client test from Qualys SSL Labs also provides checks for some known TLS vulnerabitiles and weakenesses.