The LSS North America 2019 CFP is currently open, and you have until May 31st to submit your proposal. (That’s the end of next week!)
If you’re planning on attending LSS NA in San Diego, note that the Early Bird registration for Open Source Summit (which we’re co-located with) ends today.
You can of course just register for LSS on its own, here.
There will be two Linux Security Summit (LSS) events again this year:
Stay tuned for CFP announcements!
The inaugural Linux Security Summit Europe (LSS-EU) was held in October, in Edinburgh, UK.
For 2018, the LSS program committee decided to add a new event in Europe, with the aim of fostering Linux security community engagement beyond North America. There are many Linux security developers and users in Europe who may not be able to obtain funding to travel to North America for the conference each year. The lead organizer and MC for LSS EU is Elena Reshetova, of Intel Finland.
This was my first LSS as a speaker, as I’ve always been the MC for the North American events. I provided a brief overview of the Linux kernel security subsystem.
Sub-maintainers of kernel security projects presented updates on their respective areas, and there were also several referred presentations.
Slides may be found here, while videos of all talks are available via this youtube playlist.
There are photos, too!
The event overall seemed very successful, with around 150 attendees. We expect to continue now to have both NA and EU LSS events each year, although there are some scheduling challenges for 2019, with several LF events happening closely together. From 2020 on, it seems we will have 4-5 months separation between the EU and NA events, which will work much better for all involved.
The 2018 Linux Security Summit North America (LSS-NA) was held last month in Vancouver, BC.
Attendance continued to grow this year, with a record of 220+ attendees. Our room was upgraded as a result, with spectacular views.
Linux Security Summit NA 2018, Vancouver,BC
We also had many great proposals and the schedule ended up being a very tight fit. We’ve asked for an extra day for LSS-NA next year — here’s hoping.
Slides of all presentations are available here: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linux-security-summit-north-america-2018/program/slides/
Videos may be found in this youtube playlist.
Once again, as is typical, the conference was focused around development, somewhat uniquely in the world of security conferences. It’s interesting to see more attention seemingly being paid to the lower parts of the stack: secure booting, firmware, and hardware roots of trust, as well as the continued efforts in hardening the kernel.
LWN provided some excellent coverage of LSS-NA:
Paul Moore has a brief writeup here.
Thanks to everyone involved in the event for 2018: the speakers, attendees, the program committee, the sponsors, and the organizing team at the Linux Foundation. LSS-NA would not be possible without all of you!
The schedule for the Linux Security Summit North America (LSS-NA) 2018 is now published.
Highlights include:
and much more!
LSS-NA 2018 will be co-located with the Open Source Summit, and held over 27th-28th August, in Vancouver, Canada. The attendance fee is $100 USD. Register here.
See you there!
This is a reminder for folks attending OSS Japan this week that I’ll be leading a Linux Security BoF session on Wednesday at 6pm.
If you’ve been working on a Linux security project, feel welcome to discuss it with the group. We will have a whiteboard and projector. This is also a good opportunity to raise topics for discussion, and to ask questions about Linux security.
See you then!
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.
I gave a short talk on SELinux namespacing today at the Linux.conf.au Kernel Miniconf in Sydney — the slides from the talk are here: http://namei.org/presentations/selinux_namespacing_lca2018.pdf
This is a work in progress to which I’ve been contributing, following on from initial discussions at Linux Plumbers 2017.
In brief, there’s a growing need to be able to provide SELinux confinement within containers: typically, SELinux appears disabled within a container on Fedora-based systems, as a workaround for a lack of container support. Underlying this is a requirement to provide per-namespace SELinux instances, where each container has its own SELinux policy and private kernel SELinux APIs.
A prototype for SELinux namespacing was developed by Stephen Smalley, who released the code via https://github.com/stephensmalley/selinux-kernel/tree/selinuxns. There were and still are many TODO items. I’ve since been working on providing namespacing support to on-disk inode labels, which are represented by security xattrs. See the v0.2 patch post for more details.
Much of this work will be of interest to other LSMs such as Smack, and many architectural and technical issues remain to be solved. For those interested in this work, please see the slides, which include a couple of overflow pages detailing some known but as yet unsolved issues (supplied by Stephen Smalley).
I anticipate discussions on this and related topics (LSM stacking, core namespaces) later in the year at Plumbers and the Linux Security Summit(s), at least.
The session was live streamed — I gather a standalone video will be available soon!
ETA: the video is up! See:
There will be a new European version of the Linux Security Summit for 2018, in addition to the established North American event.
The dates and locations are as follows:
Stay tuned for CFP announcements!
For folks attending Open Source Summit Europe next week in Prague, note that there is a security session planned as part of the co-located Kernel Summit technical track.
This year, the Kernel Summit is divided into two components:
The security session is part of the latter. The preliminary agenda for the kernel summit technical track was announced by Ted Ts’o here:
There is also a preliminary agenda for the security session, here:
Currently, the agenda includes an update from Kees Cook on the Kernel Self Protection Project, and an update from Jarkko Sakkinen on TPM support. I’ll provide a summary of the recent Linux Security Summit, depending on available time, perhaps focusing on security namespacing issues.
This agenda is subject to change and if you have any topics to propose, please send an email to the ksummit-discuss list.