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Does Making the Kernel Harder Make Making the Kernel Harder? - Casey Schaufler, The Smack Project

680 views · Published 31 October 2018 · 35:26 · Indexed 8 October 2026

Channel: The Linux Foundation · 2018 · Science & Technology

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Does Making the Kernel Harder Make Making the Kernel Harder? - Casey Schaufler, The Smack Project 

 The Linux Kernel Hardening Project is making significant strides in reducing vulnerabilities and in increasing the effort required to exploit vulnerabilities that remain. Much of what has been implemented is obviously valuable, but sometimes the benefit is more subtle. How does the introduction of refcount_t make the kernel more secure, and by how much? What value is there in removing variable length arrays? Casey Schaufler, a (really) long time kernel developer will explain why some of these changes provide significantly greater value than might be apparent to the casual observer. He will discuss the cost of kernel hardening in terms of development overhead, code churn and performance. 

About Casey Schaufler
Casey Schaufler worked on Unix kernels in the 1970s-90s. He has implemented access control lists, mandatory access control, extended filesystem attributes, X11 access controls, network protocols and more audit systems than is really healthy. His involvement in Linux began with the Linux Security Module work at the turn of the century, introducing the Smack LSM in 2007. Casey is reworking the LSM infrastructure to support multiple concurrent modules. He has spoken at Linux Conference Australia, OLS, LinuxCon, Linux Plumbers and many other venues.

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