A New Release Of GRUB 2.0 Fixes Security Issue

Written by Michael Larabel in GNU on 9 November 2009 at 06:21 PM EST. 3 Comments
GNU
It was just about two weeks ago that GRUB 2.0 moved closer to release with version 1.97 finally making it out the door after being just shy of two years without a new release. GRUB 1.97 brought Mac OS X kernel support, EXT4 file-system support, support for RAID 4/6/10, high-resolution timer support, support for loading FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD kernels, and many other changes. However, today another new release of GRUB 2.0 is available: GRUB 1.97.1.

This new release of GRUB is coming so soon as a rather important bug was discovered in GRUB 2.0. As is documented in the bug report, with GRUB 1.97 the password-based security for this free software boot-loader is rather compromised. With GRUB 1.97, if your password was "phoronix", any individual could log-in just entering "p" or "nix" or any other part of the string -- even just one character. With the just-out GRUB 1.97.1, this issue has been addressed.

Besides this important fix, GRUB 1.97.1 also has support for GNU/Hurd, fixes for a build problem on Mac OS X, and various documentation / error message improvements.

GRUB 1.97.1 is available for download from this directory.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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