Category Archives: foss

Linux Security Summit North America 2018 CFP Announced

lss logo

The CFP for the 2018 Linux Security Summit North America (LSS-NA) is announced.

LSS will be held this year as two separate events, one in North America
(LSS-NA), and one in Europe (LSS-EU), to facilitate broader participation in
Linux Security development. Note that this CFP is for LSS-NA; a separate CFP
will be announced for LSS-EU in May. We encourage everyone to attend both
events.

LSS-NA 2018 will be held in Vancouver, Canada, co-located with the Open Source Summit.

The CFP closes on June 3rd and the event runs from 27th-28th August.

To make a CFP submission, click here.

Linux Security Summit 2015 Update: Free Registration

In previous years, attending the Linux Security Summit (LSS) has required full registration as a LinuxCon attendee.  This year, LSS has been upgraded to a hosted event.  I didn’t realize that this meant that LSS registration was available entirely standalone.  To quote an email thread:

If you are only planning on attending the The Linux Security Summit, there is no need to register for LinuxCon North America. That being said you will not have access to any of the booths, keynotes, breakout sessions, or breaks that come with the LinuxCon North America registration.  You will only have access to The Linux Security Summit.

Thus, if you wish to attend only LSS, then you may register for that alone, at no cost.

There may be a number of people who registered for LinuxCon but who only wanted to attend LSS.   In that case, please contact the program committee at lss-pc_AT_lists.linuxfoundation.org.

Apologies for any confusion.

Save the Date: 2014 Linux Security Summit in Chicago

The 2014 Linux Security Summit will be held on the 18th and 19th of August, co-located with LinuxCon in Chicago, IL, USA.  The Kernel Summit and several other events will also be co-located there this year.

The Call for Participation will be announced later via the LSM mailing list.

Linux Security Summit 2012 – Schedule Published

The schedule for LSS 2012 is now published. See also the email announcement.

As previously mentioned, LSS this year will be a two-day event, co-located with LinuxCon.

On Day 1, we’re privileged to have a keynote by Matthew Garrett. He’s one of the best speakers in the community, and I believe he’ll be discussing secure boot.

Following the keynote, we have eight refereed presentations on new and interesting Linux security development topics.

On Day 2, we’ll have kernel security subsystem updates from maintainers, followed by an afternoon of breakout sessions. The breakout sessions are for deeper dives into specific areas, and may include development discussions and hack sessions. An BoF is planned to discuss an LF Security Workgroup, and attendees may propose more sessions in the leadup to the conference by emailing the program committee.

Thanks to all of the committee members for reviewing the proposals and helping to organize the summit — it’s shaping up as an interesting and productive event!

Linux Security Summit 2011 – Presentation Slides

Just over a week ago, the 2011 Linux Security Summit was held in Santa Rosa CA, co-located with Linux Plumbers. It ran for a day, starting with refereed presentations, and then round-table discussions.

The home page for the summit is on the kernel.org wiki, and is currently unavailable, so I’m posting links to the slides here:

* Smack is Alive and Well
Casey Schaufler, Intel

* An Overview of the Linux Integrity Subsystem: Use Cases and Demonstration
David Safford and Mimi Zohar, IBM

* Digital Signature support for IMA/EVM
Dmitry Kasatkin and Ryan Ware, Intel  (presented by Casey)

* Protecting the Filesystem Integrity of a Fedora 15 Virtual Machine from Offline Attacks using IMA/EVM
Peter Kruus, The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

* Efficient, TPM-free system integrity checking with device mapper: dm-verity
Will Drewry and Mandeep Baines, Google

* The Case for SE Android
Stephen Smalley, NSA

Roundtable discussions:

* Kernel Hardening [no slides]
Lead by Kees Cook, Canonical and Will Drewry, Google

* LSM Architecture
Lead by Kees Cook, Canonical and Casey Schaufler

The SE Android talk was a last minute replacement for Ryan Ware’s talk on MeeGo (Ryan was unfortunately not able to make it).

See the write-ups by by Paul Moore and LWN.

Feedback so far has been positive.  I think it’s valuable for the security developers to get together like this, after spending the rest of the year working remotely with each other.  Next year, we’ll likely be looking at co-locating with LPC/KS/LinuxCon in San Diego.  It may be worth thinking about expanding to a two-day event, with the first day following the same format, but then splitting into project groups on day two for BoFs/hack sessions.

Contact the program committee if you have any suggestions.

I’d like to thank the LPC folk, and especially Jesse Barnes, for allowing us to co-locate and taking care of all of the logistics — all we had to do was organize the talks and turn up.  Also thanks to the speakers, discussion leaders and attendees.  See you next year!

Linux Security Summit 2010 (Boston) – Schedule Published

For those who missed the mailing list announcements and tweets, the schedule for the upcoming Linux Security Summit has now been published: click here for the timetable and links to talk abstracts.

The summit is to be held on Monday, 9th of August in conjunction with LinuxCon.   Remember that you need to be registered for LinuxCon to attend the Security Summit (see my last post for details on a registration discount code).  You do not need to pay anything further for the Security Summit.

We had a very strong field of proposals for the summit, and the voting process was reasonably tough.  Proposals required a minimum average score of 4/5 from the program committee to be accepted as a main talk.  We had to reject several good proposals which did not make this grade, and they now have priority as lighting talks.  (Lightning talks will otherwise to be allocated on a first-come first-served basis on the day).

Here’s a summary of the accepted main talks:

  • Recent Advances in the SELinux Sandbox – Dan Walsh, Red Hat
  • in ur webserver, writin ur logs – Joshua Brindle, Tresys
  • Integrating Security into Vyatta – Stephen Hemminger, Vyatta
  • MSF Security Framework Overview – Elena Reshetova, Nokia
  • Access Control in the MSF Security Framework – Janne Karhunen, Nokia
  • Linux Security in 10 Years – Brad Spengler, grsecurity
  • Using EVM to protect security extended attributes – Mimi Zohar, IBM
  • Secstate: Integrating SCAP and Puppet for System Lockdown – Karl MacMillan, Tresys
  • Widely Used But Out-Of-Tree, Kees Cook – Canonical
  • Linux Security Usability, Z. Cliffe Schreuders – Murdoch University
  • System Security Services Daemon (SSSD) – Stephen Gallagher, Red Hat

These talk sessions are intended to be as collaborative and interactive as possible.  They’re thirty minutes each, with at least ten minutes of discussion included. The pace will be fairly brisk, and hopefully leave people wanting more and generating subsequent discussions.  Many people will be there for the week, and it’s been my experience over the years that much of the best discussion ends up happening after the talks in the various hallway and dinner tracks.

We’ll also have a panel session and, as mentioned, lightning talks.  See the schedule page for more details, and for any updates.

I hoped we’d see more proposals from folk on the operational side of things — we probably need to reach out in that direction better next time.  A significant aim of the summit is to foster collaboration between the development community and those running real systems, so if you’re in the latter group, definitely consider attending.  This will be a great opportunity to catch up on current developments in Linux security, and to provide your input and feedback.

Also, please join the event mailing list if you’re planning on attending in any capacity, so we can get any updates out to you, as well as better estimate attendance.  There’s also a Facebook page (which I don’t seem to be able to make public, ironically).

See you there!

Heads up for the Linux Security Summit 2010

This is just a quick pre-announcement for a new event, the Linux Security Summit (LSS), to be held in conjunction with LinuxCon North America 2010 in Boston (9-12 August).

The LSS program committee are currently finalizing details of the format, CfP etc., however, early registration for LinuxCon (which is a prerequisite for attending LSS) is about to end, on May 6th, which is probably “today” when you first see this.

Registering early will save you $100. Follow the links at the LinuxCon site to register.

We’ll be issuing an official announcement soon, along with a CfP — stay tuned.

FOSS.IN/2009 – great conference, or greatest conference?

Last week, I attended FOSS.IN, which had its origins as a community event ten years ago, and has evolved to become one of the world’s leading Free and Open Source developer gatherings.   Even in the years I’ve attended since 2005, it’s been remarkable to see the progress of the event, from a somewhat traditional presentation-based conference with most attendees being end users, to a developer-oriented week where the main track talks are secondary, and where a lot of real work is done.

This year, the program included Project of the Day sessions, where major FOSS projects held a mini-conferences.    I attended some of the Fedora PoTD sessions, including Joerg Simon’s talk on creating a Fedora Security Spin.  An expo area was also assigned for major projects throughout the conference, where you’d often find Fedora, KDE etc. folk hanging out — hacking, chatting, and helping people who passed by (including myself, when my Macbook decided to have EFI issues with F12).

FOSS.IN/2009

Fedora table at the FOSS expo area.

There were also workshops (tutorials), and workout sessions, where groups of people would gather and work on a project for a period of hours or days (up to the full length of the conference).   Notable here were Harald Welte’s GSM workout, and a well-attended hardware hacking workout, run by Milosch and Brita Meriac of CCC and Blinkenlights fame.  I think these ran all week.  There were also workouts for GNOME performance, the SAHANA disaster management system, KStars, and web identity, to name a few that I can recall off-hand.  There really was an incredible amount of stuff going on.

I participated in the Linux Kernel workout, which filled the final afternoon of the conference, as well as all the remaining room in the workout area.

FOSS.IN/2009 Kernel Workout Session

Linux Kernel Workout Session

The kernel workout, which was organized by Kamalesh Babulal, included work on specific development tasks, and mentoring of new kernel developers.  It was a little chaotic at first, but ended up being a very productive session, and seemed to be over too soon.  I’d suggest holding this over perhaps 2-3 entire days next year.

I also gave a talk on SELinux Sandboxing internals, to demonstrate how to utilize various Linux OS features such as namespaces and Mandatory Accees Control (MAC) security, and also how useable and effective security can be implemented via high-level abstractions and encapsulation.  This was similar to the talk I gave at FOSS.MY (and will also give at LCA), the slides of which may be found here.  I think it’s very important for people to understand that there are no silver bullets for security, especially as we’re working with an OS which was not designed with security primarily in mind.   At the lowest levels, security on a general purpose OS is inherently complicated, and like most other problems in computing, we solve this with layers of abstraction.  You don’t need to understand the inner working of your CPU to play Scrabulous, for example.  I think we’re gradually getting the message across, and I really hope to see more people engaged in helping to solve the always increasingly difficult problems in computer security.  We’ve made a lot of progress overall, but still have a long way to go.

FOSS.IN/2009

Preparing for the closing session.

I’d like to give a special thanks to the FOSS.IN team, who are all volunteers, and who manage each year to organize a very complex event and provide truly great hospitality.  I missed the closing talk (and rock concert) to make a flight, although read that Atul Chitnis will be stepping back as leader of the event next year.   The conference as it is today reflects his personal vision for fostering core FOSS development activity in India, and it has been inspirational to witness the progress of this.  It will be interesting to see who steps up to lead the conference next, and where they will take it.

Videos from the LPC security track

Several videos from the 2009 Linux Plumbers Conference security track have been published at the Linux Foundation video site.   Here’s a listing with the relevant slides:

Many thanks to the folk at LF and the LPC organizers, especially Niv (also for the HTML listing above).

If you attended LPC, or make use of the videos or slide, please drop by this thread at LWN to say thanks.   If you have any suggestions for improvements, feel very free to volunteer your time at the next event.

Portland Roundup

Last week was a busy one in Portland, starting with the SELinux Developer Summit on Sunday the 20th, followed by LinuxCon proper, and the Linux Plumbers Conference.

The SELinux event went very smoothly, with around twenty-five attendees from the core SELinux developer community.  Given tight travel budgets all-round, this level of attendance was very good to see.  I’d like to thank Angela Brown, Craig Ross and the rest of the Linux Foundation team for making everything work perfectly for us (this was a co-located event ahead of LinuxCon).

The day was divided into two sessions: standard presentations in the morning, followed by a more open general session in the afternoon.  It was good to catch up on the latest development work and directions in the project, and also to bring the otherwise globally distributed team together in the same place.

SELinux Developer Summit Lunch Track

SELinux Developer Summit Lunch Track

The inaugural LinuxCon then ran for three days, with an expansive programme.  I gave a talk on adding extended attribute support to Linux NFSv3 — the slides for which may be downloaded as PDF or viewed on slideshare.  I completed the initial code on the flight to the US and posted it from the hotel.  Feedback so far has been positive, although I haven’t heard from the NFS maintainers yet (who are likely busy with the merge window).  The rationale and technical approach is similar the NFSv3 ACL support which was merged some time ago; and the implementation is based on a fielded IRIX version (released under the GPL) — both factors which I hope will help with upstream acceptance.

Also at LinuxCon: Dan Walsh gave a talk on sVirt, which I introduced earlier this year at LCA (and previewed of during a lightning talk last year at FOSS.MY).  It seems to have been well-received (see LWN coverage), and it’s a good example of the high-level security abstractions which we can build once we have the underlying mechanisms in place.  In the case of sVirt, where we apply strong mandatory isolation to process-based virtualization (e.g. SELinux+KVM), there is zero configuration — it configures itself automatically depending on which security model you have enabled.  It should work with any label security scheme, such as Smack, and I’ve also heard that the AppArmor folk have it working (even though sVirt was not explicitly designed for pathname security).

Only in Oregon - Voodoo Donuts

Only in Oregon - Voodoo Donuts

Dan gave a LinuxCon lightning talk at Linux on yet another high-level security feature: Sandbox X, which extends the SELinux sandbox mechanism to the desktop by running applications in isolated X servers via Xephyr.  He gave a full talk on this the Linux Plumbers Conference, slides of which may be found here.

Dan Walsh - SELinux Sandbox

Dan Walsh - SELinux Sandbox

I don’t have the time to cover everything at LinuxCon — check the web site for videos and slides.  Also see my flickr photo set.  It was a very impressive first conference, with LCA-quality social events and catering (Angela Brown has been quietly studying LCA, in fact) and certainly sets a new standard for such events in North America.  LinuxCon will be held in Boston next year — I wonder what they’ll come up with to beat bacon-maple donuts for breakfast.

Following LinuxCon, the second Linux Plumbers Conference was held, and we were fortunate to get a double session for the security microconf (a special thanks to Nivedita Singhvi and team for making this possible).  We had talks on several Linux security projects, including Herbert Xu with an update on the kernel crypto API, Caleb Case on SELinux in Ubuntu, David Safford on IMA, and Casey Schaufler on the Smack application ecosystem (some high-end televisions will soon be shipping with Smack, to isolate the applications of competing content providers).

The XACE talk was very interesting, as we’re getting close to having workable support for MAC security inside X, which will allow the desktop to be locked down with fine-grained and comprehensive controls.  While typically envisaged for MLS use (e.g. having “secret” and “unclassified” desktop applications running on the same system), there are also many general purpose scenarios, such as separating your online banking session from your IRC chats.  It will be interesting to see what’s possible when combining XACE window labeling with Sandbox X — stay tuned.

XACE and AVC Cow - The future of the secure desktop

XACE and AVC Cow - The future of the secure desktop

Slides from the LPC microconf will be at the event web site soon, and I’ve also made all them available for download here.

It was a fairly intense week — three conferences plus the travel to and from Sydney, as well as the merge window opening a few days before.  I’ve got a few weeks to recover and then it’s Japan for the Kernel Summit and Japan Linux Symposium, stopping in Kuala Lumpur on the way back for FOSS.MY (where I’ll be covering the latest in SELinux Sandboxing).

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Note that you can now follow my micro-updates on twitter, which is bridged from my identi.ca account.