Several Linux security events are planned in association with LinuxCon this year in Portland, Oregon.
- 2009 SELinux Developer Summit
The CFP for this event has just been published. The developer summit will be held on the 20th of September as an ancillary event of LinuxCon. This is a one-day event, and developers are encouraged to submit proposals around the primary topics of extensibility and usability. We’re hoping to have a flexible format this year, perhaps with half a day of talks and then half a day of hack sessions. Note that all attendees need to be registered for LinuxCon, and that earlybird registration ends this Monday, June 1st. Also, please subscribe to the event mailing list if you’re planning to attend, so we can estimate numbers. More details are available at the summit web page. - Security Microconf
A security microconf will be held at the co-located Plumbers Conference. The Call for Topics ends on June 15th, and anyone doing interesting work in Linux security should consider submitting a proposal. Also see the LWN topic discussion and Paul McKenney’s recent blog entry on the event. - LinuxCon Talks
There are several security-related talks at LinuxCon itself:- Paul Moore on NetLabel and a tutorial
- Dave Quigley on Labeled NFS
- Gary Smith on disk wiping a supercomputer and a new IDS
- Dan Walsh on sVirt
I’ll be giving a LinuxCon talk on adding extended attributes support to NFSv3, presenting a prototype implementation (based on the GPL IRIX code) for discussion. xattrs are a very common feature in Unix and Linux filesystems, but there is no standard for them, nor for conveying them over NFS. NFSv4 supports “named attributes”, although this is based on the Solaris extended attribute scheme (subfiles), and somewhat incompatible the simple name/value string-based xattrs supported by Linux, BSD, IRIX etc. It would be nice to have Linux-style xattrs supported in NFSv3, with the current work then potentially forming the basis for a future NFSv4 protocol extension. If you’re interested in this stuff, please consider attending and helping with the discussion.