I can't believe it's already October. I've been so busy following up on different events where we've brought some of the Kairos love that I forgot about Hacktoberfest. Thankfully, the month isn't over so let's get our hands dirty!

Kairos is versatile, supporting various Linux distributions such as openSUSE Leap, Ubuntu 24.04, and more. Our primary objective is to empower users to continue working with their preferred Linux distribution seamlessly. However, our previous documentation fell short of this goal. The scripts were tied to a default image, which often led to issues for users who preferred a different flavor.

Last week was a special week. We had our first hackweek! With everyone in the team connecting from their own corners of the world, Belgium, Greece, Italy and Spain, we came together not in person, but through a shared passion for hacking. Unlike typical team-building events, this hackweek was all about individual exploration — each team member diving into their own projects, driven by personal curiosity and the opportunity to experiment.

Over the course of the week, we set aside our usual tasks to focus entirely on these self-driven projects, tackling challenges we rarely have time to address or exploring new avenues. In this post, I’ll share a glimpse of some of the projects we worked on.

During the first day we got together to brainstorm. Many good ideas came from each of us on what to work on. It lifts my spirit to see that our project while very stable, still has lots of avenues to explore and that everyone in our team is keen on making Kairos a better project.

We recently added analytics to our website. We were hesitant about this before because we are committed to your privacy and didn't like the idea of setting up Google Analytics. Thankfully, we've found a good open-source solution that is designed for privacy. You can find more about them on their website https://plausible.io/about

The recent CrowdStrike update fiasco that wreaked havoc across industries, causing BSODs and crippling critical systems, starkly highlights the need for resilient and immutable infrastructure. If affected organizations had adopted an immutable OS like Kairos, their systems would have shown greater resilience against such widespread disruptions.

TL;DR​

CrowdStrike's faulty update led to massive system crashes. Kairos's immutable and decentralized architecture offers a robust alternative, ensuring system integrity and swift recovery in such scenarios.

We are thrilled to announce the release of Kairos v3.1.1! This patch release is a bugfix and security release.

We are thrilled to announce the release of Kairos v3.1.0! This update brings a host of significant enhancements to further secure and streamline your edge computing environment.

In the evolving landscape of cybersecurity, protecting the integrity of computing systems from the moment they power on has become very important. As threats become more sophisticated, understanding and implementing advanced boot security mechanisms like Trusted Boot, Full Disk Encryption (FDE), Secure Boot, and Measured Boot are critical for safeguarding data and ensuring system integrity. This article demystifies these concepts, explores their significance, and examines their implementation in modern computing environments, particularly focusing on the Linux ecosystem and the approaches within the Kairos project.

It's all over the tech news. Someone managed to put a backdoor on xz Utils, a very common package on Linux systems. In this post I want to share with you about what happened, how it impacted Kairos images, and what you should do in case you were affected.

TL;DR​

A backdoor that can be used to exploit systemd based Linux via ssh was introduced in xz Utils. Only Kairos Tumbleweed v3.0.1 and v3.0.2 were affected. We deleted all related OCI images from our repos and artifacts from our releases. If you installed it and the system was exposed to the internet, you should do a complete re-install. If you hosted security keys in given system, you should rotate them.

I recently had the opportunity to attend KubeCon 2024. You can find my recap at the Spectro Cloud Blog, but I'd like to add some additional information about the Special Purpose Operating System Panel in which we participated.