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At the 2015 Kernel Summit, Kees Cook said, he talked mostly about the things that the community could be doing to improve the security of the kernel. In 2016, instead, he was there to talk about what had actually been done. Kernel hardening, he reminded the group, is not about access control or fixing bugs. Instead, it is about the kernel protecting itself, eliminating classes of exploits, and reducing its attack surface. There is still a lot to be done in this area, but the picture is better than it was one year ago.
One area of progress is in the integration of GCC plugins into the build system. The plugins in the kernel now are mostly examples, but there will be more interesting ones coming in the future. Plugins are currently supported for the x86, arm, and arm64 architectures; he would like to see that list grow, but he needs help from the architecture maintainers to validate the changes. Plugins are also not yet used for routine kernel compile testing, since it is hard to get the relevant sites to install the needed dependencies.
Linus asked how much plugins would slow the kernel build process; linux-next maintainer Stephen Rothwell also expressed interest in that question, noting that "some of us do compiles all day." Kees responded that there hadn't been a lot of benchmarking done, but that the cost was "not negligible." It is, though, an important part of protecting the kernel.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ticho on Saturday November 12 2016, @09:36AM
Wow, this is one discussion thread where Soylent has completely failed to be useful, and did a full Slashdot, with nothing but primitive flamebait posts. With threads like these, I sometimes feel that five mod points just aren't enough, it's like trying to hold an ocean back with a broom.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 12 2016, @09:42AM
Trolls be so proud.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday November 12 2016, @11:53AM
Yes, and it's especally sad because there aren't that many articles that fall under the OS category that Soylentils can geek out about. This is the first one for linux in about a year i have seen since the systemd furor died down.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday November 12 2016, @08:22PM
I think the problem is it's less an OS category than a privacy vs security category.
How much do you value your users privacy vs how well do you want to secure your system. Actually, a pretty contentious issue, depending on who you are: user or manager.
Kind of like citizen vs NSA/FBI etc.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---