Now that buster was released we are pleased to announce the availability of buster-backports and stretch-backports-sloppy.

What to upload where

As a reminder, uploads to a release-backports pocket are to be taken from release + 1, uploads to a release-backports-sloppy pocket are to be taken from release + 2. Which means:

Backports and LTS

Please keep in mind that backports doesn't follow LTS. Which means that we will drop support for oldstable (stretch) around one year after the release of buster. Thats in sync with the - official - security support for oldstable

BSA Security Advisories

We plan to switch the security-announce mailinglist to keyring based authentication, which means that every DD and DM is able to publish its own BSA advisories. We will send out a seperate announcement after the switch happened - and of course update the documentation

Statistics

For packages backported from buster, so far we have 1624 different source packages in stretch-backports. Those 1624 source packages took 2821 uploads from 252 uploaders to become reality.

Thanks

Thanks have to go out to all people making backports possible, and that includes up front the backporters themself who do upload the packages, track and update them on a regular basis, but also the buildd team making the autobuilding possible and the ftp masters for creating the suites in the first place.

Happy Backporting!

Alex and Rhonda - backports.debian.org ftpmasters

Bernhard Schmidt uploaded new packages for openvpn which fixed the
following security problems:

CVE-2017-7479

    It was discovered that openvpn did not properly handle the
    rollover of packet identifiers. This would allow an authenticated
    remote attacker to cause a denial-of-service via application
    crash.

CVE-2017-7508

    Guido Vranken discovered that openvpn did not properly handle
    specific malformed IPv6 packets. This would allow a remote
    attacker to cause a denial-of-service via application crash.

CVE-2017-7520

    Guido Vranken discovered that openvpn did not properly handle
    clients connecting to an HTTP proxy with NTLMv2
    authentication. This would allow a remote attacker to cause a
    denial-of-service via application crash, or potentially leak
    sensitive information like the user's proxy password.

CVE-2017-7521

    Guido Vranken discovered that openvpn did not properly handle
    some x509 extensions. This would allow a remote attacker to cause
    a denial-of-service via application crash.

For the jessie-backports distribution the problems have been fixed in
version 2.4.0-6+deb9u1~bpo8+1.

Al Nikolov uploaded new package for salt which fixed the
following security problem:

CVE-2017-8109
    The salt-ssh minion code in SaltStack Salt 2016.11 before 2016.11.4
    copied over configuration from the Salt Master without adjusting
    permissions, which might leak credentials to local attackers on
    configured minions (clients).

For the jessie-backports distribution the problems have been fixed in
version 2016.11.2+ds-1~bpo8+2.

With the release of stretch we are pleased to open the doors for stretch-backports and jessie-backports-sloppy. \o/

As usual with a new release we will change a few things for the backports service.

What to upload where

As a reminder, uploads to a release-backports pocket are to be taken from release + 1, uploads to a release-backports-sloppy pocket are to be taken from release + 2. Which means:

Deprecation of LTS support for backports

We started supporting backports as long as there is LTS support as an experiment. Unfortunately it didn't worked, most maintainers didn't wanted to support oldoldstable-backports (squeeze) for the lifetime of LTS. So things started to rot in squeeze and most packages didn't received updates. After long discussions we decided to deprecate LTS support for backports. From now on squeeze-backports(-sloppy) is closed and will not receive any updates. Expect it to get removed from the mirrors and moved to archive in the near future.

BSA handling

We - the backports team - didn't scale well in processing BSA requests. To get things better in the future we decided to change the process a little bit. If you upload a package which fixes security problems please fill out the BSA template and create a ticket in the rt tracker (see https://backports.debian.org/Contribute/#index3h2 for details).

Stretching the rules

From time to time its necessary to not follow the backports rules, like a package needs to be in testing or a version needs to be in Debian. If you think you have one of those cases, please talk to us on the list before upload the package.

Thanks

Thanks have to go out to all people making backports possible, and that includes up front the backporters themself who do upload the packages, track and update them on a regular basis, but also the buildd team making the autobuilding possible and the ftp masters for creating the suites in the first place.

We wish you a happy stretch Alex, on behalf of the Backports Team

Thomas Goirand uploaded new packages for horizon which fixed the
following security problem:

CVE-2015-3988:
  Sunil Yadav from IBM Security Services reported a persistent XSS in
  Horizon. An authenticated user may conduct a persistent XSS attack by
  setting a malicious metadata to a Glance image, a Nova flavor or a
  Host Aggregate and tricking an administrator to load the update
  metadata page. Once executed in a legitimate context this attack may
  result in a privilege escalation.

For the jessie-backports distribution the problems have been fixed in
2015.1.0-2~bpo8+1.

Wouter Verhelst uploaded new packages for nbd which fixed the following
security problems:

CVE-2015-0847
  Tuomas Räsänen discovered that nbd-server unsafe signal handling in
  nbd-server, the server for the Network Block Device protocol, could
  allow remote attackers to cause a deadlock in the server process and
  thus a denial of service.

CVE-2013-7441
  Tuomas Räsänen discovered that the modern-style negotiation was
  carried out in the main process before forking the actual client
  handler. This could allow a remote attacker to cause a denial of
  service (crash) by querying a non-existent export.

For the squeeze-backports distribution,the problems have been fixed in
version 1:3.2-4~deb7u5~bpo60+1.

The wheezy-backports and jessie-backports suites do not contain nbd
packages, and therefore are not vulnerable (but see DSA-3271-1).

Rene Engelhard uploaded new packages for libreoffice which fixed the
following security problem:

CVE-2015-1774:
   It was discovered that missing input sanitising in Libreoffice's filter
   for HWP documents may result in the execution of arbitrary code if a
   malformed document is opened.

For the squeeze-backports distribution the problem has been fixed in
version 1:3.5.4+dfsg2-0deb7u4~bpo60+1.

For the wheezy-backports distribution the problem has been fixed in
version 1:4.3.3-2+deb8u1~bpo70+1.

      Dear users of the backports service!

 With the release of Jessie (coming up) we are pleased to open the doors
for jessie-backports and wheezy-backports-sloppy (mostly all
architectures are already buildable there, too).  Whee!

 But, PLEASE DO READ ON, there are some changes in the process that we
would like to do for the new upload pockets.


== What to upload where ==

 As a reminder, uploads to a release-backports pocket are to be taken
from release + 1, uploads to a release-backports-sloppy pocket are to be
taken from release + 2.  Which means:

 Source Distribution | Backports Distribution | Sloppy Distribution
---------------------|------------------------|--------------------------
 stretch             | jessie-backports       | wheezy-backports-sloppy
 jessie              | wheezy-backports       | squeeze-backports-sloppy


== We drop -v switch hard requirement ==

 We required uploads to contain the changelog entries since the former
version in stable in the changes file.  This was quite convenient for
people reading the changes through the changes mailinglist but
especially also for the backports team when processing packages.

 Given that the changelogs of former backports and the packages
backported are available through the packages.debian.org website
(amongst other sources) and that it was annoying to both backporters and
also us as backports team we are dropping it as hard requirement.  It
would still be pretty awesome for the above mentioned reasons if you
could keep it as part of your workflow, especially for uploads that end
in the policy queue, but we won't reject packages based solely on that
nymore.


== Versioning ==

 Previous we used ~bpo70+1 as suffix for the versions of uploads.  We
were asked whether we might want to align that with the other suffixes
used and drop the zero from within there, and yes, we will drop it.
This means that uploads to jessie-backports should use ~bpo8+1 as
suffix, and also wheezy-backports-sloppy uses ~bpo7+1 as suffix.

 For wheezy-backports please still use ~bpo70+1 version suffixes
because of sorting reasoning, especially if there are also
squeeze-backports-sloppy packages around.  Which brings us to ...


== squeeze-backports* ==

 As you are probably aware, squeeze is still a supported release through
LTS.  The same goes for the squeeze-backports* suites, you can consider
them to be around for the same timeframe that LTS is going to be around.


== Statistics ==

 For packages backported from jessie, so far we have 995 different
source packages in wheezy-backports, and 27 different source packages in
squeeze-backports-sloppy.  Those 995 source packages took 1729 uploads
to become reality.


== Thanks ==

 Thanks have to go out to all people making backports possible, and that
includes up front the backporters themself who do upload the packages,
track and update them on a regular basis, but also the buildd team
making the autobuilding possible and the ftp masters for creating the
suites in the first place.

 Enjoy, and continue being awesome!
Rhonda, on behalf of the Backports Team

Matthew Vernon uploaded new packages for shibboleth-sp which fixed the
following security problems:

CVE-2015-2684
  A denial of service vulnerability was found in the Shibboleth (a
  federated identity framework) Service Provider. When processing
  certain malformed SAML messages generated by an authenticated
  attacker, the daemon could crash.

For the wheezy-backports distribution the problems have been fixed in
version 2.5.3+dfsg-2~bpo70+1.

Dominic Hargreaves uploaded new packages for request-tracker4 which fixed the
following security problems:

CVE-2014-9472
  Remote DoS via email gateway

CVE-2015-1165
  Information discloure revealing RSS feed URLs

CVE-2015-1464
  Privilege escalation via RSS feed URLs

For the wheezy-backports distribution the problems have been fixed in
version 4.0.19-1~bpo70+2.

The problems have been fixed in other distributions as follows:

* sid/jessie: 4.2.8-3
* wheezy: 4.0.7-5+deb7u3.
* squeeze-backports: 4.0.7-5+deb7u3~bpo60+1
* squeeze-lts: 3.8.8-7+squeeze9 (of request-tracker3.8)