Linux Security Summit North America 2019
2019-08-19..2019-08-21
San Diego, United States
[Linux Security Summit North America 2018, Linux Security Summit North America 2019, Linux Security Summit North America 2020, Linux Security Summit North America 2022, Linux Security Summit North America 2023, Linux Security Summit North America 2024, Linux Security Summit North America 2025, Linux Security Summit North America 2026]
as the organisers put it
The Linux Security Summit (LSS) is a technical forum for collaboration between Linux developers, researchers, and end users. Its primary aim is to foster community efforts in analyzing and solving Linux security challenges. 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.
who it's for
kernel developers, linux security module maintainers, system integrators, tpm and firmware engineers, container and runtime security engineers, distribution maintainers, embedded and device security engineers, security researchers
topics
Infoflow LSM; LSM stacking infrastructure; libseccomp syscall filters; TPM2 software and tools; remote attestation with IMA; IMA and EVM appraisal; AppArmor container FD API; SELinux runtime and namespaces; seccomp user notification feature; kernel self-protection project; writing Linux kernel modules in Rust; Intel TXT and AMD SVM measured boot
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Infoflow LSM | Roberto Sassu | 44m |
A new LSM called Infoflow enforces a concrete integrity policy by mapping SELinux source labels to an explicit TCB and setting a TCB bit in xattr on created… | ||
| Tutorial: The Why and How of libseccomp | Tom Hromatka, Paul Moore | 01h 21m |
Explains how libseccomp turns BPF syscall filters into a portable C/Python API, shows live C code that builds a whitelist vs blacklist filter, loads it into… | ||
| Securing TPM Secrets with TXT and Kernel Signatures | Paul Moore | 33m |
Goal is to let only kernels signed by an authorized CA unwrap TPM2 NVRAM secrets by combining Intel TXT measured launch with signature-based PCRs instead of… | ||
| Breaking and Protecting Linux Kernel Stack | Elena Reshetova | 45m |
Kernel stacks move to vmalloc stacks with guard pages, remove thread_info and VLAs, and upstream the STACKLEAK cleanup, yet deterministic layout still enables… | ||
| Kernel Runtime Security Instrumentation | KP Singh | 33m |
Proposes an extensible LSM that attaches eBPF programs to LSM hooks so userspace agents can both signal and mitigate without rebuilding the kernel; prototype… | ||
| Making Containers Safer | Stephane Graber, Christian Brauner | 45m |
Describes concrete defenses and recent kernel work: running 18 distros across six architectures and building ~300 images daily, users count in the hundreds of… | ||
| TrenchBoot - How to Nicely Boot System with Intel TXT and AMD SVM | Daniel Kiper, Daniel Smith | 37m |
TrenchBoot adds a SecureLaunch path so Linux can be dynamically launched on Intel TXT and AMD SVM: GRUB loads an ACM or open AMD DCE, CPU obtains TPM locality… | ||
| Enarx - Attested, Secured Execution with AMD’s SEV | Nathaniel McCallum, David Kaplan | 46m |
Enarx targets running customer code inside an encrypted VM using AMD SEV/SEV-ES with attestation, platform Diffie‑Hellman, launch measurements (HMAC) and… | ||
| Welcome & Opening Remarks | James Morris | 02m |
Ninth annual summit reports 250 attendees and expands from two days to three days, adding a more relaxed schedule with five-minute gaps between talks… | ||
| Tutorial: Complete Platform Attestation: Remotely Verifying the Authenticity and Integrity of your Platform’s Hardware, Firmware, and Software | Monty Wiseman, Avani Dave | 01h 13m |
A working proof‑of‑concept shows remote attestation end to end: hardware EK-to-platform binding via the HIRS provisioning flow, firmware and IMA event logs… | ||
| Integrity Measurements and the Cruel World | Janne Karhunen | 35m |
Implements IMA on production embedded Android devices by building an IMA initializer that detects device state, generates and stores device keys, loads policy… | ||
| Writing Linux Kernel Modules in Safe Rust | Geoffrey Thomas, Alex Gaynor | 48m |
65% of kernel CVEs are memory‑unsafety bugs, so a Rust-based module framework is built that uses bindgen and cargo‑xbuild with clang/LLVM interoperability… | ||
| Rich Authorization in a Resource Constrained Device | Kenneth Goldman | 38m |
TPM 2.0 implements rich authorization on very small devices (hundreds of bytes of RAM) by keeping one fixed-size policy digest per entity (typically 32-byte… | ||
| Application Whitelisting | Steven Grubb | 47m |
An open‑source daemon uses the kernel’s file access notifications API to intercept execs, looks up paths in an RPM‑derived trust DB (LMDB cache with LRU)… | ||
| NFS Support for the Linux Integrity Measurement Architecture | Chuck Lever | 19m |
Adds a new NFSv4 attribute FATTR for IMA so servers can store opaque IMA metadata blobs, provides a prototype client and server implementation for Linux NFS… | ||
| Keynote: Retrospective: 26 Years of Flexible MAC | Stephen Smalley | 59m |
Work documents 26 years of building a flexible MAC architecture, producing Flask and a SELinux reference implementation (released 2000, merged 2003) and… | ||
| Subsystem Update: The 2019 Smack Update | Casey Schaufler | 06m |
Smack gains a rule km cache that cuts rule-list lookup cost, a removed global label list that lowers memory use on small systems, and fixes to IPv6 ICMP… | ||
| Subsystem Update: LSM Stacking - What You Can Do Now and What's Next | Casey Schaufler | 15m |
Linux 5.1 ships infrastructure-managed blobs so a limited set of extended security labels can be shared across LSMs, letting Tomayo and others run alongside… | ||
| Subsystem Update: Linux Integrity Status Update | Mimi Zohar | 19m |
Summary of upstream changes and work in progress: appended signature support is queued for the next kernel and firmware platform keyring now loads pre‑boot… | ||
| Subsystem Update: Seccomp, Yama, and LoadPin | Kees Cook | 08m |
Update surveys three small kernel defenses and their concrete changes: LoadPin pins modules and any kernel-read files to the first block device, extended to… | ||
| Subsystem Update: tpm2-Software Update and Highlights | Philip Tricca | 11m |
Project reaches a stable release cadence with three minor TSS2 releases this year and average 80% code coverage across CI, plus a new docs site and CII… | ||
| Subsystem Update: AppArmor Update 2019 | John Johansen | 07m |
AppArmor reports concrete engineering work: moved to unit tests with KUnit and added a primer E2E project that found kernel bugs, refactored the matching… | ||
| Subsystem Update: State of SELinux, 2019 | Paul Moore | 11m |
Kernel prints invalid file labels in audit records and cgroup v2 labeling via cgroupfs is implemented and working, plus SELinux now permits filesystem… | ||
| Binary Policy with IMA and AppArmor | Eric Chiang | 33m |
Google signs binaries from its central repos and enforces them with IMA/EVM signatures applied via a dpkg hook, uses AppArmor profiles that match security… | ||
| Using and Implementing Keyring Restrictions for Userspace | Mat Martineau | 28m |
Kernel keyrings gain a userspace-configurable restriction API (added around 4.12 with helpers in keyutils v1.5.11) that enforces which keys can be linked into… | ||
| It's Coming From Inside the House: Kernelspace Fault Injection with KRF | William Woodruff | 26m |
KRF is a kernelspace fault injector that literally replaces syscall table entries to return faults based on targeting (UID/GID/PID/personality) and a seeded… | ||
| Making Remote Attestation Useful on Linux | Brandon Weeks, Matthew Garrett | 27m |
Goal is cryptographic identity and state attestation for Google’s ~200,000 Linux and Windows machines, supporting TPM 1.2 and 2.0 and implemented in Go. Work… | ||
| Kernel Self-Protection Project | Kees Cook | 25m |
Year-in-review of defenses landed across kernels 4.19–5.3: removal of VLA usage, conversions to overflow-checking refcounts, implicit-fallthrough annotations… | ||
| Tutorial: How to Write a Linux Security Module | Casey Schaufler | 01h 35m |
Covers how to implement an LSM end to end: which kernel hooks to use (inode/file/socket vs packet), how to store labels in per-object infrastructure-managed… | ||
| nothing matches | ||