Linux Security Summit North America 2018: Full Schedule

August 27 - 28 - Vancouver, BC, Canada
Click for Information & Registration

8:30am PDT

Opening Remarks - James Morris, Microsoft

Speakers

James Morris

Linux Kernel & Security Manager, Microsoft

James is the maintainer of the Linux security subsystem, and engineering manager at Microsoft.

Monday August 27, 2018 8:30am - 8:35am PDT
Room 301

8:35am PDT

Security in Zephyr and Fuchsia - Stephen Smalley & James Carter, National Security Agency

Zephyr and Fuchsia are two emerging open source operating systems with very different architectures and approaches to security compared to each other and to Linux. Zephyr is a real-time operating system (RTOS) targeting Internet of Things (IoT) devices that are too resource-constrained to run Linux. Fuchsia is a capability-based microkernel operating system targeting more capable devices and computers. In this talk, we present the architecture and security mechanisms of these two operating systems, discuss ongoing work by ourselves and others to further advance their security, and compare their security features to those of Linux and Linux-based systems such as Android.

Speakers

James Carter

Researcher, NSA

James Carter is a computer security researcher in the Information Assurance Research group of the National Security Agency (NSA). He presently is working to improve Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) policy development through tools and policy language improvements and serves as one... Read More →

Stephen Smalley

Computer Systems Researcher, National Security Agency

Stephen Smalley is a computer systems researcher in the Laboratory for Advanced Cybersecurity Research organization of the National Security Agency. He presently leads the NSA's Security Enhancements (SE) for the Internet of Things (IoT) project, which is investigating and advancing... Read More →

Monday August 27, 2018 8:35am - 9:15am PDT
Room 301

Refereed Presentations

Experience Level Advanced

9:15am PDT

Making C Less Dangerous - Kees Cook, Google

With the kernel written in C, it comes with some worrisome baggage, "undefined" behaviors, and other weaknesses that lead to security flaws and vulnerable infrastructure. Some of these weaknesses related to the design of chipsets and how close C is to machine code, but others are less specific.

This presentation will explore the areas where the kernel is changing the C standard, defining undefined behaviors, or otherwise reorganizing things to make C itself less of a hazard.

Specifically this will cover removing (and enforcing the lack of) Variable Length Arrays in kernel code, forcing all stack variables to be initialized with a GCC plugin, performing implicit bounds checking with overloaded builtins, handling arithmetic overflows safely, and protecting forward (call) and reverse (return) indirect function calls with CFI under Clang.

Speakers

Kees Cook

Kernel Security Software Engineer, Google

Kees Cook has been working with Free Software since 1994, has been a Debian Developer since 2007, and has been a member of the Linux Kernel Technical Advisory Board since 2019. He is currently employed as a Linux kernel security engineer by Google, focusing on upstream kernel security... Read More →

Making C Less Dangerous pdf

Monday August 27, 2018 9:15am - 9:55am PDT
Room 301

Refereed Presentations

Experience Level Advanced

9:55am PDT

Azure Sphere: Fitting Linux Security in 4 MiB of RAM - Ryan Fairfax, Microsoft

Azure Sphere is a new solution for building highly secured, connected microcontroller-powered devices. It includes a customized version of the Linux kernel and work to fit the OS within a highly constrained memory footprint. In this talk we will cover the security components of the system, including a custom Linux Security Module, modifications and extensions to existing kernel components, and user space components that form the security backbone of the OS. Along the way we’ll discuss false starts, failed attempts, and the challenges of taking modern security techniques and fitting them in resource constrained devices.

Speakers

Ryan Fairfax

Principal Software Engineering Lead, Microsoft

Ryan leads OS development for Azure Sphere at Microsoft. Azure Sphere is a new solution for creating highly-secured, Internet-connected microcontroller devices.

Monday August 27, 2018 9:55am - 10:35am PDT
Room 301

Refereed Presentations

Experience Level Any

10:35am PDT

Coffee Break

Monday August 27, 2018 10:35am - 10:45am PDT
Room 301

Breaks & Meals

10:45am PDT

fs-verity: Native File-based Authenticity - Michael Halcrow & Eric Biggers, Google

The Android platform uses dm-verity to protect its system image, but there are critical components in that image that require incremental updates. Michael Halcrow and Eric Biggers introduce fs-verity as a mechanism for file systems to validate the authenticity of individual files. They furthermore propose fs-verity as a capability that can integrate with the Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) to efficiently validate only the parts of a file that are accessed. They will also discuss potential applications of file-based authenticity in validating container image content.

Speakers

Eric Biggers

Software Engineer, Google

Michael Halcrow

Software Engineer, Google

Michael Halcrow is a software engineer at Google in Seattle. He was the original author of both eCryptfs and native file-based encryption in the upstream Linux kernel. He has previously spoken at the Ottawa Linux Symposium and at several Linux Security Summits.

fs verity slide deck pdf

Monday August 27, 2018 10:45am - 11:25am PDT
Room 301

Refereed Presentations

Experience Level Advanced

11:25am PDT

Open System Firmware Projects - Elaine Palmer, IBM Research

Three industry groups are pursuing the goal of creating open source system firmware. They seek to improve the openness, portability, security, and maintainability of boot firmware, device firmware, and system management firmware. A panel of passionate trailblazers will describe their efforts and the groups and organizations supporting them.

Moderators

Elaine Palmer

Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM Research

Elaine Palmer is a Senior Technical Staff Member at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, and a member of the IBM Academy of Technology. Her current interests are in extending principles of secure boot, measured boot, and attestation to subsystems of high availability... Read More →

Speakers

Bryan Kelly

Principal Firmware Engineering Manager, Microsoft

Bryan Kelly is a Principle Firmware Engineering Manager for Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Server Infrastructure team. Bryan supports Microsoft’s cloud services by designing and developing firmware that enables hardware solutions in Microsoft’s next generation cloud platforms. During... Read More →

Nate Klein

OCP Security Project Lead, Google

Nate Klein is a hardware engineer on the Platforms Infrastructure team that designs and deploys all of the hardware that powers Google's internal and cloud services. In 6 years at Google his work includes NIC drivers and firmware, server and PCIe card design, and hardware security... Read More →

Monday August 27, 2018 11:25am - 12:05pm PDT
Room 301

Panel Discussion

Experience Level Intermediate

1:30pm PDT

Year in Review: Android Kernel Security - Jeff Vander Stoep & Sami Tolvanen, Google

The Linux kernel provides Android’s trusted computing base and is the primary enforcer of Android’s security model. Increasingly, it’s also the primary target for privilege escalation attacks. Let’s dive into the details and discuss:
- Data data data! Where/how the kernel is being attacked. An analysis of the kernel security bugs reported to Google.
- Discussion on the effectiveness of recently introduced mitigations.
- New kernel mitigations introduced in the Android Open Source Project.
- Kernel security wishlist.

Speakers

Jeff Vander Stoep

Software Engineer - Android Security, Google

Jeff Vander Stoep is a software engineer on the Android security team at Google where he is working on security improvements to the Android platform.

Sami Tolvanen

Software Engineer - Android Security, Google

Sami Tolvanen is a software engineer on the Android Platform Security team, currently focusing on kernel hardening.

Monday August 27, 2018 1:30pm - 2:10pm PDT
Room 301

Refereed Presentations

Experience Level Intermediate

2:10pm PDT

Linux Audit: Moving Beyond Kernel Namespaces to Audit Container IDs - Richard Guy Briggs, Red Hat

Audit will need to run in containers, possibly for distributions, but more likely for docker micro-services to meet new certification requirements. Since the kernel has no concept of containers,
identifying the container involved in audit messages will equip tracking tools to follow process events in containers.

Namespaces were the primary focus of my container audit presentation two years ago in Toronto. Feedback and further work made it clear that no one namespace or subset could be depended on to be part of a container, so another approach was needed to track container activity.

Several design proposals and several patchsets have been posted aimed at providing a method of tracking container activity by audit. Allowing multiple audit daemons, each with its own rule space and queue along with a system-wide audit message routing configuration is the current plan.

Speakers

Richard Guy Briggs

Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat

Richard was an early adopter of Linux, having used it since 1992. He was also a founding board member of Ottawa Canada Linux Users Group and a speaker at the inaugural Ottawa Linux Symposium. Richard has written UNIX and Linux device drivers for telecom, video and network applications... Read More →

Monday August 27, 2018 2:10pm - 2:50pm PDT
Room 301

Refereed Presentations

Experience Level Advanced

2:50pm PDT

Syzbot and the Tale of Thousand Kernel Bugs - Dmitry Vyukov, Google

The root cause of most software exploits is bugs. Hardening, mitigations and containers are important, but they can't protect a system with thousands of bugs. In this presentation, Dmitry Vyukov will review the current [sad] situation with Linux kernel bugs and security implications based on their experience testing kernel for the past 3 years; overview a set of bug finding tools they are developing (syzbot, syzkaller, KASAN, KMSAN, KTSAN); and discuss problems and areas that require community help to improve the situation.

Speakers

Dmitry Vyukov

Senior Staff Bug Slaughterer, Google

Dmitry Vyukov, Google, Senior Kernel Bug SlaughtererDmitry works on dynamic testing tools at Google. His projects includea variety of bug detection tools for user-space and kernel, C/C++ andGo/Java; fuzzing tools (LibFuzzer, go-fuzz, syzkaller) and automationsystems like syzbot. Dmitry... Read More →

Monday August 27, 2018 2:50pm - 3:30pm PDT
Room 301

Refereed Presentations

Experience Level Intermediate

3:30pm PDT

Coffee Break

Monday August 27, 2018 3:30pm - 3:40pm PDT
Room 301

Breaks & Meals

3:40pm PDT

STACKLEAK: A Long Way to the Linux Kernel Mainline - Alexander Popov, Positive Technologies

STACKLEAK is a Linux kernel security feature initially created by Grsecurity/PaX developers. In May of 2017 Alexander Popov took on the task of introducing STACKLEAK into the Linux kernel mainline. The way to the mainline turned out to be long and complicated.

In this talk Alexander will describe the inner workings of this security feature and why the vanilla kernel needs it. In fact, STACKLEAK mitigates several types of attacks against the Linux kernel due to:
- reducing the information that can be revealed through kernel stack leak bugs;
- blocking some uninitialized stack variable attacks;
- blocking kernel stack depth overflow caused by alloca (aka Stack Clash attack).

Alexander will also show the timeline of his work and share some lessons he learned from it.

Speakers

Alexander Popov

Linux kernel developer, Positive Technologies

Alexander Popov is a security researcher at Positive Technologies where he is having a lot of fun with the Linux kernel vulnerabilities, exploitation techniques and defensive technologies. Alexander is a Linux kernel developer since 2012.

stackleak LSS NA 2018 pdf

Monday August 27, 2018 3:40pm - 4:20pm PDT
Room 301

Refereed Presentations

Experience Level Intermediate

4:20pm PDT

How to Safely Restrict Access to Files in a Programmatic Way with Landlock? - Mickaël Salaün, ANSSI

Mandatory Access Control is implemented in four major LSMs. They either identify a file with its inode attribute (SELinux and Smack) or with its path (AppArmor and Tomoyo). This techniques share a common drawback: they cannot safely be used from an unprivileged context. One of Landlock's goal is to tackle this problem with a new hybrid way to identify a file from a user-defined security policy.

After a brief recap of the main mechanisms used by Landlock (covered in LSS 2017), this talk highlight the constraints of applying an unprivileged access-control on files, what was the previous Landlock attempts, and how works the new way to programmatically describe a file access (cf. the eighth patch series of Landlock). We illustrate this with a demo of a dynamic access-control for end user. Finally, we discuss some drawbacks and how much it depends on the internal kernel implementation.

Speakers

Mickaël Salaün

Senior Software Engineer, Microsoft

Mickaël Salaün is a security researcher and open source enthusiast. He is mostly interested in Linux-based operating systems, especially from a security point of view. He has built security sandboxes before hacking into the kernel on a new LSM called Landlock, of which he is now... Read More →

Monday August 27, 2018 4:20pm - 4:50pm PDT
Room 301

Discussion Topics

Experience Level Intermediate

4:50pm PDT

Sub-system Update: AppArmor Update 2018 - John Johansen, Canonical

This talk provides an update of the current state of the AppArmor project. It will look at new features, and miscellaneous changes developed over the last year, as well as a look at the current work in progress.

Speakers

John Johansen

Software Engineer, Canonical

John Johansen began working with open source software in the late 80s and began playing with Linux in 93. He completed a masters in mathematics at the University of Waterloo and the began working for Immunix doing compiler hardening, and then AppArmor. After Immunix was acquired by... Read More →

Monday August 27, 2018 4:50pm - 5:00pm PDT
Room 301

Sub-system Update

Experience Level Any

5:00pm PDT

Sub-system Update: State of SELinux - Paul Moore, Red Hat

This is the annual "State of SELinux" presentation where the past year of SELinux related development is presented as well as current and expected future work.

Speakers

Paul Moore

Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft Corporation

Paul Moore has been involved in various Linux platform security efforts since 2004 at Hewlett-Packard, Red Hat, Cisco, and Microsoft. He currently maintains the Linux Security Module (LSM) layer as well as the SELinux, audit, and labeled networking subsystems in the Linux Kernel... Read More →

lss state of selinux pmoore 082018 r2 pdf

Monday August 27, 2018 5:00pm - 5:10pm PDT
Room 301

Sub-system Update

Experience Level Intermediate

5:10pm PDT

Sub-system Update: Smack Update 2018 - Casey Schaufler, Intel

This talk will provide an update on the current state and activity in the Smack Linux Security Module.

Speakers

Casey Schaufler

Engineer, Intel

Casey Schaufler worked on Unix kernels in the 1970s-90s. He has implemented access control lists, mandatory access control, extended filesystem attributes, X11 access controls, network protocols and audit systems. His involvement in Linux began with the Linux Security Module work... Read More →

Monday August 27, 2018 5:10pm - 5:20pm PDT
Room 301

Sub-system Update

Experience Level Any

5:20pm PDT

Sub-system Update: Linux Integrity Status Update - Mimi Zohar, IBM

The integrity subsystem status update will provide an overview of the new features and other changes upstreamed this past year, as well as discuss current and future development.

Speakers

Mimi Zohar

IBM

Mimi Zohar is a researcher at the IBM T.J. Research Center. Her current interests are in the areas of system security and integrity She is the linux-integrity subsystem maintainer.

Monday August 27, 2018 5:20pm - 5:30pm PDT
Room 301

Sub-system Update

Experience Level Any

5:30pm PDT

Sub-system Update: Kernel Self-Protection Project - Kees Cook, Google

This presentation will cover the year-in-review of the Kernel Self-Protection Project since the last Linux Security Summit NA, including an overview of all the security defenses landed in kernels 4.14 through 4.18. Some highlights are vmapped stacks, structure randomization, SLUB freelist obfuscation, set_fs() checking, fast refcount_t protection, Page Table Isolation, usercopy whitelisting, VLA removals, and the stackleak plugin.

We'll also take a quick look at the evolution of kernel CVE lifetimes, find out what defenses are still under development, and note some areas where help is still needed.

Speakers

Kees Cook

Kernel Security Software Engineer, Google

Kernel Self Protection Project pdf

Monday August 27, 2018 5:30pm - 5:40pm PDT
Room 301

Sub-system Update

Experience Level Intermediate

8:30am PDT

Life Behind the Tinfoil: A Look at Qubes and Copperhead - Konstantin Ryabitsev, The Linux Foundation

Konstantin Ryabitsev shares his day-to-day experience using QubesOS on his primary workstation and CopperheadOS on his smartphone. What are the impacts of using products promising higher security and higher privacy? How well do Qubes and Copperhead measure up to those promises? What kind of trade-offs are expected from someone coming from run-of-the-mill Linux and Android platforms? Are these trade-offs worth it?

Speakers

Konstantin Ryabitsev

Director, IT, The Linux Foundation

Konstantin has worked at the Linux Foundation over the past decade, providing both IT and security support to kernel.org and many other software projects. He lives in Montreal, Canada, with his wife, two children and several cats.

Tuesday August 28, 2018 8:30am - 9:10am PDT
Room 301

Discussion Topics

Experience Level Any

9:10am PDT

Using the TPM NVRAM to Protect Secure Boot Keys in POWER9 OpenPOWER Systems - Claudio Siqueira de Carvalho, IBM

In OpenPOWER systems, most firmware code used to boot the platform OS is stored in the processor flash memory (PNOR). Although PNOR is non-volatile memory, it is unprotected. In order to secure boot the platform OS, it is well known that only platform OSs signed with authorized keys should booted. However, saving the authorized keys in a secure non-volatile memory is as important as using them to verify the platform OS. In this presentation, Claudio Carvalho will show how the shielded non-volatile memory (NVRAM) of the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) has become essential in OpenPOWER systems to protect the secure boot keys stored in PNOR. This discussion includes design and implementation aspects that are both currently in progress for the OpenPOWER firmware and the Linux Kernel layers.

Speakers

Claudio Siqueira de Carvalho

Secure and Trusted Boot Developer, LTC, IBM

Claudio Carvalho is a brazilian Linux enthusiastic with over 15 years of experience in the Linux field. He started his career as a package builder during his Master's degree at the University of Campinas, building packages for Linux distributions based on Arch and Debian. In 2011... Read More →

protecting secure boot keys v3 pdf

Tuesday August 28, 2018 9:10am - 9:50am PDT
Room 301

Refereed Presentations

Experience Level Any

9:50am PDT

Updating Linux with TUX: Trust Update for Linux Kernel - Suhho Lee & Hyunik Kim, Dankook University

As lethal security attacks, such as Spectre and Meltdown, arise, Linux has conducted a vast number of software updates to mitigate security threats. However, less attention was given to the dynamically changing integrity of the system after updates. To maintain the trust of the platform, system updates should accompany integrity information updates as well.
We propose TUX, Trust Update for Linux kernel, to guarantee the up-to-date integrity of the pre-boot environment. TUX consolidates kernel repository into Intel's Open CIT to manage up-to-date integrity. Also, TUX deploys kernel which holds up-to-date integrity value as a signature. Finally, TUX secure bootloader mandates integrity verification at the booting using the TUX kernel, leveraging the UEFI secure boot and TPM. Thus, with TUX, Linux system can maintain trust even with the frequent updates.

Speakers

Hyunik Kim

Research Assistant, Dankook University

Hyunik Kim is an enthusiastic undergraduate student in Department of Mobile Systems Engineering, Dankook University, Korea. He is currently interested in Many-core architecture, Operating systems, and System security.

Suhho lee

Research Assistant, Dankook University

Suhho Lee is a master's student in Department of Computer Science at Dankook University, Korea. His research interests include Operating systems, Computer architecture, System Security, and Human-Computer Interaction. His current focus is TUX, Trust update for Linux kernel, which... Read More →

TUX linux sec summit pdf

Tuesday August 28, 2018 9:50am - 10:30am PDT
Room 301

Refereed Presentations

Experience Level Intermediate

10:30am PDT

Coffee Break

Tuesday August 28, 2018 10:30am - 10:40am PDT
Room 301

Breaks & Meals

10:40am PDT

The Future of Security is in Open Silicon - Joel Wittenauer, Rambus Security, Cryptography Research

In this talk we describe how we used an open operating system (Zephyr) to create a root of trust running on RISC-V based security CPU to secure a high-level operating system (Linux). Security features of the RISC-V processor and the assisting hardware security cores are utilized to implement three internal privilege levels within the root of trust in order to create a freely-programmable application sandbox providing services for Linux.

The talk quickly describes the way Zephyr OS is used as the base, internal architecture of the root of trust, the functionality of its three internal privilege levels and the hardware security cores, the programming interfaces and the current integration state with the Linux host. We would also like to establish a dialogue with the Linux security community in order to understand how to better serve Linux security.

Speakers

Joel Wittenauer

Embedded Software Product Architect, Rambus Cryptography Research

Tuesday August 28, 2018 10:40am - 11:20am PDT
Room 301

Refereed Presentations

Experience Level Intermediate

11:20am PDT

Project Cerberus - Bryan Kelly, Microsoft

Project Cerberus is a hardware root of trust. The cryptographic microcontroller interposes between processors and their firmware load store to provide hardware enforced secure boot with digital signature enforcement, and measured boot.

Speakers

Bryan Kelly

Principal Firmware Engineering Manager, Microsoft

Tuesday August 28, 2018 11:20am - 12:00pm PDT
Room 301

Refereed Presentations

Experience Level Any

12:00pm PDT

Proactive Software Defense against Side Channel Attacks - Kristen Accardi, Intel

Side channel attacks are here to stay. What can we do inside the operating system to proactively defend against them? This talk will walk through a few of the ideas that Intel’s Open Source Technology Center are developing to improve our resistance to side channel attacks as part of our new side channel defense project. We would also like to gather ideas from the rest of the community on what our top priorities for side channel defense for the Linux kernel should be.

Speakers

Kristen Accardi

Security Architect, Intel

Kristen is a Security Architect for Intel’s Open Source Technology Center (OTC), focusing on the Linux kernel. Kristen has contributed to the Linux kernel for over 15 years in various different subsystems including PCI, SATA, ACPI, and Power Management. Kristen is currently leading... Read More →

Tuesday August 28, 2018 12:00pm - 12:30pm PDT
Room 301

Discussion Topics

Experience Level Any

1:50pm PDT

Protected Execution Facility - Guerney D. H. Hunt, IBM Research

(Guerney Hunt, IBM Research): Security remains a key concern for both traditional and cloud computing workloads. One objective is keeping applications (or containers) secure in the presence of attacks or compromised components. This talk addresses these challenges on the Power Architecture by presenting the Protected Execution Facility ― an architecture modification for IBM Linux and OpenPower Linux servers ― along with the associated firmware, the Protected Execution Ultravisor which provides additional security to virtual machines ― called secure virtual machines (SVMs). Protected Execution Facility concurrently supports both normal VMs and SVMs. The protections provided to SVMs and some restrictions for SVMs are covered. The differences and similarities between vendor approaches to providing security in the presence of a potentially compromised hypervisor or OS will be reviewed.

Speakers

Guerney Hunt

Research Staff Member, IBM

Dr. Guerney D. H. Hunt has been a Research Staff Member at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center since 1995. He is currently working on transferring security technology into IBM products, and developing additional security technology. He participated in a team funded by the Department... Read More →

Tuesday August 28, 2018 1:50pm - 2:30pm PDT
Room 301

Refereed Presentations

Experience Level Any

2:30pm PDT

Security Module Stacks that Don't Fall Over - Casey Schaufler, Intel

Security module stacking will provide a new level of flexibility in configuring system security. But there's a real risk that combining security models will result in a system that may be secure, but isn't useful. This may also be true when the same security module is used with multiple policy definitions. Casey Schaufler, the module stacking developer, will discuss the pitfalls of security module stacking and how they can be avoided. He will be talking about the configuration of existing modules and where they have known conflicts. There will also be discussion about how new modules should use the infrastructure in a way that reduces the potential for conflicts. A special emphasis will be placed on networking, where dragons of various colors lurk behind every acronym.

Speakers

Casey Schaufler

Engineer, Intel

Tuesday August 28, 2018 2:30pm - 3:10pm PDT
Room 301

Refereed Presentations

Experience Level Advanced

3:10pm PDT

Coffee Break

Tuesday August 28, 2018 3:10pm - 3:20pm PDT
Room 301

Breaks & Meals

3:20pm PDT

Getting Started with the TPM2 Software Stack (TSS2) - Philip Tricca, Intel

For the last ~2 years Intel and our collaborators in Trusted Computing Group (TCG) and OSS community have been working to standardize and implement APIs and infrastructure to drive interactions with TPM2 devices. This work has produced TCG standards describing the APIs, an OSS implementation of the APIs and a small community that has organized around the implementation on the web / Github at https://github.com/tpm2-software. In this talk Phil will give an overview of the project before breaking down the various components and APIs in detail. He'll discuss major accomplishments in the year since our last update at the Linux Pliumbers Conference as well as future project direction and use cases.

Speakers

Philip Tricca

Software Engineer, Intel

Philip is a software engineer in Intel’s platform security division working to enable use of the Trusted Platform Module (TPM2) and a number of other security technologies. Phil has worked for the last 3 years to standardize the TCGs TPM2 software stack (TSS2), to develop an open... Read More →

Tuesday August 28, 2018 3:20pm - 4:00pm PDT
Room 301

Refereed Presentations

Experience Level Intermediate

4:00pm PDT

A Canonical Event Log Structure for IMA - David Safford & Monty Wiseman, GE

IMA (Integrity Measurement Architecture) provides Linux systems with attestation of runtime components. This presentation will review work in progress to convey attestation information to a verifier in the form of a Canonical Event Log structure. This format will provide cryptographic algorithm agility and sequence numbers. Sequence numbering will enable Event Log list truncation and de-duplication which will optimize storage and transmission. This will allow IMA to bound the size of its internal data structures, including the measurement list and the hash table. This new format will support existing IMA templates while enabling extensible features such as attestation of file metadata. It will also support existing firmware Event Log such as those from UEFI systems. This presentation will demonstrate the current prototype, and discuss integration with an open source verifier.

Speakers

David Safford

Senior Principal Engineer, GE

David Safford is a Senior Principal Engineer at GE's Global Research Center, where he leads research on industrial control system security, across power generation, power distribution, aviation, and health care devices. His current focus is in delivering hardware rooted measurement... Read More →

Monty Wiseman

Principal Engineer, GE Research

Monty Wiseman's professional focus is in Platform Identity and Integrity. During the last 18+ years Monty was a leading contributor to various TCG specifications for platform key management, hardware and software identity. Monty is currently a Principle Engineer at General Electric... Read More →

lss 2018 slides V4 pdf

Tuesday August 28, 2018 4:00pm - 4:40pm PDT
Room 301

Refereed Presentations

Experience Level Advanced

4:40pm PDT

Extending OpenPOWER Boot Security to Guests - George Wilson, IBM

The KVM and PowerVM guest environments are significantly different from the OpenPOWER host environment: the boot sequence is shorter, the firmware components are simpler, and the bootloader is entirely replaced. A secure boot design must accommodate the dissimilarities and, consequently, the solution for the OpenPOWER host is not directly applicable to guests. Yet, much as for the host case, existing open source elements can help solve the problem of booting guest OSs securely. This talk follows last year's OpenPOWER host secure boot talk and discusses possible design alternatives that reuse open source code to bring OS boot security improvements to KVM on OpenPOWER and PowerVM guests.

Speakers

George Wilson

Security Architect and Development Team Lead, IBM's Linux Technology Center

George Wilson is a security architect and development team lead in IBM's Linux Technology Center. Since joining the LTC in 2004, he has led IBM's Linux security certification activities and development of open source security technology including key management, Trusted Computing... Read More →

lss 2018 power secboot v1.2 pdf

Tuesday August 28, 2018 4:40pm - 5:10pm PDT
Room 301

Discussion Topics

Experience Level Intermediate