Tag Archives: foss

2012 Linux Security Summit (San Diego) – Call for Particpation

The 2012 Linux Security Summit (LSS) has been announced. The CFP is open from now until the 23rd of May.

This year, the summit will be a two-day event, co-located with LinuxCon, Linux Plumbers, and the Kernel Summit. We’re planning on holding developer break-out sessions for much of the second day, and extending the length of the main talks to the more traditional 45 minute + 15 minute break format. There will still be shorter 30 minute talks, and roundtable discussions.

Check out the programs from previous years to see what kind of proposals have been previously accepted:

Send your proposals to the program committee per the announcement.

Save the date: 2012 Linux Security Summit, 30-31 August, San Diego

This is a pre-announcement so people can start planning travel for the year.

The Linux Security Summit for 2012 will be held on the 30th and 31st of August in San Diego, CA, USA.  It will be co-located with LinuxCon North America, plumbers and the kernel summit.

More details to follow.

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 2011 – Schedule Published

For those that didn’t catch the email announcement, the schedule for the 2011 Linux Security Summit is now published.

The format of the conference is refereed talk sessions, followed by in-depth roundtable discussions.

Here’s a summary of the programme:

Refereed talks:

  • “Smack is Alive and Well”
    Casey Schaufler

  • “MeeGo Security Update”
    Ryan Ware, 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

  • “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

Roundtable discussions:

  • Kernel Hardening
    Lead by Kees Cook, Canonical and Will Drewry, Google

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

See the full schedule for more detail.

Attendance is open to all registered attendees of the Linux Plumbers Conference.  Early-bird registration is available for LPC until the end of today (US time).

Linux Security Summit 2011 – CFP reminder: 2 weeks!

Calling all Linux security folk!
 

the CFP closes in two weeks...

 

Just a reminder that the CFP for the 2011 Linux Security Summit closes on the 27th of May — two weeks away. Please get your submissions in soon.

Note again that we are co-located with the Linux Plumbers Conference in Santa Rosa, and that all Security Summit attendees, including speakers, will need to register for Plumbers. Earlybird registration is available until 31st May.

Trivia question: which Alfred Hitchcock film was shot on location in Santa Rosa in 1943?

(Hint: click on the image)

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!

Linux Security Summit 2010 – CFP closing this week

Just a reminder that the CFP for the Linux Security Summit ends this Friday, 4th of June.

If you have something interesting to discuss, send your proposal to the program committee via plain text email per the CFP announcement.

We have some very interesting proposals so far — if you have any interest in Linux security, you should probably try and be there.

Note that you need to be registered for LinuxCon to attend. As a speaker at the main conference, I’ve been given a discount code to hand out to people “in my network”. If you’re reading this, you’re in :-) Using the code, you can save 20%, which is currently $80 USD.

That’s enough to buy a Red Sox ticket and a hot dog.

Boston v. NY, 1912
Boston vs. NY, 1912 World Series (LOC).

Email me directly for the code at jmorris@namei.org.

Linux Security Summit 2010 (Boston) – CFP Open

The Call for Participation (CFP) for the 2010 Linux Security Summit has been announced and is open until the 4th of June.

The aim of the Linux Security Summit is to bring developers, researchers and end users together to analyze and solve Linux security challenges.

This is not just for “security people” — it’s intended to be a forum for collaboration between the wider community (sysadmins, operations, architects, developers etc.) and Linux security developers.

Aerial view of Boston

Boston

The format of the event is expected to be a mix of brief technical talks, panel discussions, and lightning talks. It will be held on Monday 9th August, 2010 in Boston, co-located with LinuxCon.

The program committee is currently seeking proposals for talks and panel discussion topics: see the CFP for details.

In particular, we’d like to encourage folks with significant real-world deployments to attend and discuss what they’re doing and what they need in terms of security from the OS.

From a security developer point of view, much effort over the last decade has gone into adding security features to Linux and integrating them into distributions. End users have now been through a few product release cycles with these features, so it seems like a good opportunity now to get together and discuss what’s working, what’s not, and how we can work together to continue improving Linux security.

Attendance is open to all registered LinuxCon delegates.

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.