"An abridged history of Linux kernel hardening" - Russell Currey, BSides Canberra 2023

The Linux kernel is everywhere. It's running on billions of devices here on Earth, and quite a few in space, too. Linux is big and complex: it does a lot of stuff, it runs on a lot of things, it's deployed in a lot of ways, and it has many distributions with many versions, each with their own modifications.
Linux is the dream target for attackers. It's everywhere. If there's low-hanging fruit in the kernel, your system is compromised.
Thankfully, the kernel has come a very long way in terms of defending itself against attacks. From the early days of accidental security features intended as debugging aids to modern fuzzers, sanitisers and hardware-assisted memory protections, Linux is a much tougher target than it used to be.
In this session, we'll recount the journey of an operating system and its community as they fail, learn and grow together. We'll explore the details of how many of the kernel's key hardening features work and how they came to be, the key moments in history that led to big changes in the community, and take a look at the state of Linux security in the modern era.
Russell Currey
Russell is a vulnerability researcher at InfoSect, and a former Linux kernel developer focused on memory protections and microarchitectural security.