Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [TECH TOPIC] Kernel Hardening

From: "Luis R. Rodriguez" <mcgrof@suse.com>
To: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: "ksummit-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org"
	<ksummit-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org>,
	James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>,
	Emily Ratliff <eratliff@linuxfoundation.org>,
	Thomas Graf <tgraf@suug.ch>
Subject: Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [TECH TOPIC] Kernel Hardening
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2015 18:45:49 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20150825164549.GP8051@wotan.suse.de> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.11.1508242220570.15006@nanos>

On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 10:46:33PM +0200, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> While we certainly want to add mechanisms which prevent flaws to be
> exploited we surely want to do something about educating people how to
> avoid the flaws in the first place.

<-- snip -->

> I totally agree that we cannot prevent all flaws, but we certainly can
> do better in reducing the quantity. And that means that we need to
> educate people. And that education involve documentation and clever usage of
> tools.

What folks have been discussing mostly after this post are reactive security
solutions, that's fine but I think we need to also be a bit more proactive
about what we let folks design in terms of *new* userspace APIs. For instance
although it would not solve all userspace facing issues, I certainly think
things like struct nla_policy helps move away from loose userspace APIs.
The next evolutionary step was generic netlink but that may be too tied down
to networking.

  Luis